TR-02-8.pdf

Detective browsers: a software technique to improve Web access performance
abd security

Songqing Chen and Xiaodong Zhang

Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Web Content Caching
and Distribution, (WCW'02), Boulder, Colorado, August 14-16, 2002.


                               Abstract

The amount of dynamic Web contents and secured e-commerce transactions
has been dramatically increasing in Internet where proxy servers between
clients and Web servers are commonly used for the purpose of sharing
commonly accessed data and reducing Internet traffic.  A significant and
unnecessary Web access delay is caused by the overhead in proxy servers
to process two types of accesses, namely dynamic Web contents and secured
transactions, not only increasing response time, but also raising some
security concerns.  Conducting experiments on Squid proxy 2.3STABLE4,
we have quantified the unnecessary processing overhead to show their
significant impact on increased client access response times.  We have
also analyzed the technical difficulties in eliminating or reducing the
processing overhead and the security loopholes based on the existing
proxy structure.  In order to address these performance and security
concerns, we propose a simple but effective technique from the client side
that adds a detector interfacing with a browser. With this detector,
a standard browser, such as the Netscape/Mozilla, will have simple
detective and scheduling functions, called a detective browser.  Upon an
Internet request from a user, the detective browser can immediately
determine whether the requested content is dynamic or secured.  If so,
the browser will bypass the proxy and forward the request directly to the
Web server; otherwise, the request will be processed through the proxy.
We implemented a detective browser prototype in Mozilla version 0.9.7,
and tested its functionality and effectiveness.  Since we simply move
the necessary detective functions from a proxy server to a browser,
the detective browser introduces little overhead to Internet accessing,
and our idea can be implemented by patching existing browsers easily.

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