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Online media consumption is the main driving force for the recent growth of the Web. As especially realtime media is becoming more and more accessible from a wide range of devices, with contrasting screen resolutions, processing resources and network connectivity, a necessary requirement is providing users with a seamless multimedia experience at the best possible quality, henceforth being able to adapt to the specific device and network conditions. This paper introduces a novel approach for adaptive media streaming in the Web. Despite the pervasive pullbased designs based on HTTP, this paper builds upon a Web-native push-based approach by which both the communication and processing overheads are reduced significantly in comparison to the pull-based counterparts. In order to maintain these properties when enhancing the scheme by adaptation features, a server-side monitoring and control needs to be developed as a consequence. Such an adaptive push-based media streaming approach is intr oduced as main contribution of this work. Moreover, the obtained evaluation results provide the evidence that with an adaptive push-based media delivery, on the one hand, an equivalent quality of experience can be provided at lower costs than by adopting pull-based media streaming. On the other hand, an improved responsiveness in switching between quality levels can be obtained at no extra costs.
The Web has become an indispensable prerequisite of everyday live and the Web browser is the most used application on a variety of distinct devices. The content delivered by the Web has changed drastically from static pages to media-rich and interactive Web applications offering nearly the same functionality as native applications, a trend which is further pushed by the Cloud and more specifically the Cloud’s SaaS layer. In the light of this development, security and performance of Web browsing has become a crucial issue.
Less is Often More: Header Whitelisting as Semantic Gap Mitigation in HTTP-Based Software Systems
(2021)
The web is the most wide-spread digital system in the world and is used for many crucial applications. This makes web application security extremely important and, although there are already many security measures, new vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered. One reason for some of the recent discoveries lies in the presence of intermediate systems—e.g. caches, message routers, and load balancers—on the way between a client and a web application server. The implementations of such intermediaries may interpret HTTP messages differently, which leads to a semantically different understanding of the same message. This so-called semantic gap can cause weaknesses in the entire HTTP message processing chain.
In this paper we introduce the header whitelisting (HWL) approach to address the semantic gap in HTTP message processing pipelines. The basic idea is to normalize and reduce an HTTP request header to the minimum required fields using a whitelist before processing it in an intermediary or on the server, and then restore the original request for the next hop. Our results show that HWL can avoid misinterpretations of HTTP messages in the different components and thus prevent many attacks rooted in a semantic gap including request smuggling, cache poisoning, and authentication bypass.