2008 Reports

Newspeak: A Secure Approach for Designing Web Applications

Dent, Kyle; Bellovin, Steven Michael

Internet applications are being used for more and more important business and personal purposes. Despite efforts to lock down web servers and isolate databases, there is an inherent problem in the web application architecture that leaves databases necessarily exposed to possible attack from the Internet. We propose a new design that removes the web server as a trusted component of the architecture and provides an extra layer of protection against database attacks. We have created a prototype system that demonstrates the feasibility of the new design.