Ajax and the Security Challenges Posed

Filed in archive AJAX on October 23, 2006

Ajax is being considered as one of the hottest thing on the web scene. With it there is no requirement for reloading after you make the necessary changes to the web page and has certainly made things a bit faster and convenient.

Along with the convenience being offered there are also a number of challenges being posed by Ajax. We cannot ignore these security challenges posed. The problems range from performance problems to exposure of applications to web services vulnerabilities.

One might witness system wide performance degradation due to increasing XML network traffic. Server performance disruptions may be experienced due to steady parsing and exception handling caused due to malformed messages. Due to asynchronous nature of Ajax DoS attacks might be a possibility and web browsers could be misused by hackers for sending corrupted data. This is just one of the instances.

In order to escape web vulnerabilities, Ajax application developers can counter the risks posed by implementation of server side validation, checking for possible attacks, keeping business logic on the server and authenticating and authorizing every request.

Security is one of the important aspects which cannot be ignored if the popularity of Ajax has to be increased manifold.

Read more