CSE 482/ ETE 334

Internet and Web Technologies

 The Internet

Technical origin: ARPANET (late 1960’s)

 Advance Research Project Agency Network
 One of earliest attempts to network heterogeneous,
geographically dispersed computers
 Email first available on ARPANET in 1972 (and quickly
very popular!)
ARPANET access was limited to select
DoD-funded organizations

2
 The Internet

Open-access networks
 Regional university networks (e.g., SURAnet)
 CSNET for CS departments not on ARPANET
NSFNET (1985-1995)
 Full form: National Science Foundation Network
 Primary purpose: connect supercomputer centers
 Secondary purpose: provide backbone to connect
regional networks

3
 The Internet

The 6 supercomputer centers connected by the early NSFNET backbone

4
 The Internet

Original NSFNET backbone speed: 56 kbit/s

Upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s (T1) in 1988
Upgraded to 45 Mbit/s (T3) in 1991

In 1988, networks in Canada and France

connected to NSFNET
In 1990, ARPANET is decommissioned, NSFNET
the center of the internet

5
 The Internet

Internet: the network of networks

connected via the public backbone and
communicating using TCP/IP communication
protocol
 Backbone initially supplied by NSFNET,
privately funded (ISP fees) beginning in 1995

6
 Internet Protocols

Communication protocol: how computers talk

 Cf. telephone “protocol”: how you answer and end
call, what language you speak, etc.
Internet protocols developed as part of
ARPANET research
 ARPANET began using TCP/IP in 1982
Designed for use both within local area
networks (LAN’s) and between networks

7
 Internet Protocol (IP)

IP is the fundamental protocol defining the

Internet (as the name implies!)
IP address:
 32-bit number (in IPv4)
 Associated with at most one device at a time
(although device may have more than one)
 Written as four dot-separated bytes, e.g.
192.0.34.166

8
 IP

IP function: transfer data from source device to

destination device
IP source software creates a packet representing the
data
 Header: source and destination IP addresses, length of data,
etc.
 Data itself
If destination is on another LAN, packet is sent to a
gateway that connects to more than one network

9
 IP

Source

Network 1

Gateway Destination

Gateway

Network 2 Network 3

10
 IP

Source

LAN 1

Gateway Destination

Gateway

Internet Backbone LAN 2

11
 Transmission Control Protocol
(TCP)
Limitations of IP:
 No guarantee of packet delivery (packets can be
dropped)
 Communication is one-way (source to destination)
TCP adds concept of a connection on top of
IP
 Provides guarantee that packets delivered
 Provide two-way (full duplex) communication

12
 TCP
Establish
connection.
{ Can I talk to you?

OK. Can I talk to you?

OK.

{
Here’s a packet.
Send packet
Source Destination
with Got it.
acknowledgment.

Here’s a packet.

{
Resend packet if
no (or delayed) Here’s a resent packet.
acknowledgment.
Got it.

13
 TCP

TCP also adds concept of a port

 TCP header contains port number representing an
application program on the destination computer
 Some port numbers have standard meanings
 Example: port 25 is normally used for email transmitted
using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
 Other port numbers are available first-come-first
served to any application

14
TCP

15
 User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

Like TCP in that:

 Builds on IP
 Provides port concept
Unlike TCP in that:
 No connection concept
 No transmission guarantee
Advantage of UDP vs. TCP:
 Lightweight, so faster for one-time messages

16
 Domain Name Service (DNS)
DNS is the “phone book” for the Internet
 Map between host names and IP addresses
 DNS often uses UDP for communication
Host names
 Labels separated by dots, e.g., www.example.org
 Final label is top-level domain
 Generic: .com, .org, etc.
 Country-code: .us, .il, etc.

17
 DNS
Domains are divided into second-level domains,
which can be further divided into subdomains, etc.
 E.g., in www.example.com, example is a
second-level domain
A host name plus domain name information is
called the fully qualified domain name of the
computer
 Above, www is the host name, www.example.com
is the FQDN

18
 DNS

nslookup (Name Server lookup) program provides

command-line access to DNS (on most systems)
looking up a host name given an IP address is known
as a reverse lookup
 Recall that single host may have multiple IP

addresses.
 Address returned is the canonical IP address

specified in the DNS system.

19
 DNS

ipconfig (on windows) can be used to

find the IP address (addresses) of your
machine
ipconfig /displaydns displays the
contents of the DNS Resolver Cache
(ipconfig /flushdns to flush it)

20
 Higher-level Protocols
Many protocols build on TCP
 Telephone analogy: TCP specifies how we initiate
and terminate the phone call, but some other protocol
specifies how we carry on the actual conversation
Some examples:
 SMTP (email) (25)
 FTP (file transfer) (21)
 HTTP (transfer of Web documents) (80)

22
 World Wide Web

Originally, one of several systems for

organizing Internet-based information
 Competitors: WAIS, Gopher, ARCHIE
Distinctive feature of Web: support for
hypertext (text containing links)
 Communication via Hypertext Transport Protocol
(HTTP)
 Document representation using Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML)

23
 World Wide Web

The Web is the collection of machines (Web

servers) on the Internet that provide
information, particularly HTML documents, via
HTTP.
Machines that access information on the Web
are known as Web clients. A Web browser is
software used by an end user to access the Web.

24
 Hypertext Transport Protocol
(HTTP)

HTTP is based on the request-response

communication model:
 Client sends a request
 Server sends a response
HTTP is a stateless protocol:
 The protocol does not require the server to
remember anything about the client between
requests.

25
 HTTP

Normally implemented over a TCP connection (80 is

standard port number for HTTP)
Typical browser-server interaction:
 User enters Web address in browser
 Browser uses DNS to locate IP address
 Browser opens TCP connection to server
 Browser sends HTTP request over connection
 Server sends HTTP response to browser over connection
 Browser displays body of response in the client area of the
browser window

26
 HTTP

The information transmitted using HTTP is

often entirely text
Can use the Internet’s Telnet protocol to
simulate browser request and view server
response

27
 HTTP
Connect { $ telnet www.example.org 80
Trying 192.0.34.166...
Connected to www.example.com
(192.0.34.166).
Escape character is ’ ^]’ .

{
Send GET / HTTP/1.1
Request Host: www.example.org

{
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Receive
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 20:30:49 GMT
Response
…

28
 HTTP Request

Structure of the request:

 start line
 header field(s)
 blank line
 optional body

29
 HTTP Request

Structure of the request:

 start line
 header field(s)
 blank line
 optional body

30
 HTTP Request

Start line
 Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
Three space-separated parts:
 HTTP request method
 Request-URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)
 HTTP version

31
 HTTP Request

Start line
 Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
Three space-separated parts:
 HTTP request method
 Request-URI
 HTTP version
 We will cover 1.1, in which version part of start line
must be exactly as shown

32
 HTTP Request

Start line
 Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
Three space-separated parts:
 HTTP request method
 Request-URI
 HTTP version

33
 HTTP Request

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

 Syntax: scheme : scheme-depend-part
 Ex: In http://www.example.com/
the scheme is http
 Request-URI is the portion of the requested URI
that follows the host name (which is supplied by the
required Host header field)
 Ex: / is Request-URI portion of
http://www.example.com/

34
 URI

URI’s are of two types:

 Uniform Resource Name (URN)
 Can be used to identify resources with unique names, such
as books (which have unique ISBN’s)
 Scheme is urn

 Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

 Specifies location at which a resource can be found
 In addition to http, some other URL schemes are

https, ftp, mailto, and file

35
 HTTP Request

Start line
 Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
Three space-separated parts:
 HTTP request method
 Request-URI
 HTTP version

36
 HTTP Request

Common request methods:

 GET
 Used if link is clicked or address typed in browser
 No body in request with GET method

 POST
 Used when submit button is clicked on a form
 Form information contained in body of request

 HEAD
 Requests that only header fields (no body) be returned in the
response

37
 HTTP Request

Structure of the request:

 start line
 header field(s)
 blank line
 optional body

38
 HTTP Request

Header field structure:

 field name : field value
Syntax
 Field name is not case sensitive
 Field value may continue on multiple lines by
starting continuation lines with white space
 Field values may contain MIME types, quality
values, and wildcard characters (*’s)

39
 Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME)

Convention for specifying content type of a

message
 In HTTP, typically used to specify content type
of the body of the response
MIME content type syntax:
 top-level type / subtype
Examples: text/html, image/jpeg

40
 HTTP Quality Values and
Wildcards
Example header field with quality values:
accept:
text/xml,text/html;q=0.9,
text/plain;q=0.8, image/jpeg,
image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1
Quality value applies to all preceding items
Higher the value, higher the preference
Note use of wildcards to specify quality 0.1 for
any MIME type not specified earlier

41
 HTTP Request

Common header fields:

 Host: host name from URL (required)
 User-Agent: type of browser sending request
 Accept: MIME types of acceptable documents
 Connection: value close tells server to close connection after
single request/response
 Content-Type: MIME type of (POST) body, normally
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
 Content-Length: bytes in body
 Referer: URL of document containing link that supplied URI for
this HTTP request

42
 HTTP Response

Structure of the response:

 status line
 header field(s)
 blank line
 optional body

43
 HTTP Response

Structure of the response:

 status line
 header field(s)
 blank line
 optional body

44
 HTTP Response

Status line
 Example: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Three space-separated parts:
 HTTP version
 status code
 reason phrase (intended for human use)

45
 HTTP Response

Status code
 Three-digit number
 First digit is class of the status code:
 1=Informational
 2=Success
 3=Redirection (alternate URL is supplied)
 4=Client Error
 5=Server Error
 Other two digits provide additional information

See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

46
 HTTP Response

Structure of the response:

 status line
 header field(s)
 blank line
 optional body

47
 HTTP Response

Common header fields:

 Connection, Content-Type, Content-Length
 Date: date and time at which response was generated (required)
 Location: alternate URI if status is redirection
 Last-Modified: date and time the requested resource was last
modified on the server
 Expires: date and time after which the client’s copy of the
resource will be out-of-date
 ETag: a unique identifier for this version of the requested
resource (changes if resource changes)

48
 Client Caching

A cache is a local copy of information

obtained from some other source
Most web browsers use cache to store
requested resources so that subsequent
requests to the same resource will not
necessarily require an HTTP request/response
 Ex: icon appearing multiple times in a Web page

49
Client Client Caching Server

1. HTTP request for image

2. HTTP response containing image

Browser Web
Server

3. Store image

Cache

50
Client Client Caching Server

Browser Web
Server
I need that
image
again…

Cache

51
Client Client Caching Server

This…

HTTP request for image

Browser Web
HTTP response containing image Server
I need that
image
again…

Cache

52
 Client Client Caching Server

Browser Web
Server
I need that
image
again…

Get … or this
image

Cache

53
 Client Caching

Cache advantages
 (Much) faster than HTTP request/response
 Less network traffic
 Less load on server
Cache disadvantage
 Cached copy of resource may be invalid
(inconsistent with remote version)

54
 Client Caching

Validating cached resource:

 Send HTTP HEAD request and check Last-
Modified or ETag header in response
 Compare current date/time with Expires header
sent in response containing resource
 If no Expires header was sent, use heuristic
algorithm to estimate value for Expires
 Ex: Expires = 0.01 * (Date – Last-Modified) + Date

55
 Character Sets

Every document is represented by a string of integer

values (code points)
The mapping from code points to characters is defined by
a character set
Some header fields have character set values:
 Accept-Charset: request header listing character sets that the
client can recognize
 Ex: accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.5
 Content-Type: can include character set used to represent the
body of the HTTP message
 Ex: Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

56
 Character Sets

Technically, many “character sets” are

actually character encodings
 An encoding represents code points using variable-
length byte strings
 Most common examples are Unicode-based
encodings UTF-8 and UTF-16
IANA maintains complete list of Internet-
recognized character sets/encodings

57
 Character Sets
Typical US PC produces ASCII documents
US-ASCII character set can be used for such
documents, but is not recommended
UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 are supersets of US-ASCII and
provide international compatibility
 UTF-8 can represent all ASCII characters using a single byte
each and arbitrary Unicode characters using up to 4 bytes each
 ISO-8859-1 is 1-byte code that has many characters common in
Western European languages, such as é

58
 Web Clients

Many possible web clients:

 Text-only “browser” (lynx)
 Mobile phones
 Robots (software-only clients, e.g., search engine
“crawlers”)
 etc.
We will focus on traditional web browsers

59
 Web Browsers
First graphical browser running on general-
purpose platforms: Mosaic (1993)

60
Web Browsers

61
 Web Browsers

Primary tasks:
 Convert web addresses (URL’s) to HTTP
requests
 Communicate with web servers via HTTP
 Render (appropriately display) documents
returned by a server

62
 HTTP URL’s
http://www.example.org:56789/a/b/c.txt?t=win&s=chess#para5

host (FQDN) port path query fragment

authority Request-URI

Browser uses authority to connect via TCP

Request-URI included in start line (/ used for path
if none supplied)
Fragment identifier not sent to server (used to
scroll browser client area)

63
 Web Browsers

Standard features
 Save web page to disk
 Find string in page
 Fill forms automatically (passwords, CC numbers, …)
 Set preferences (language, character set, cache and HTTP
parameters)
 Modify display style (e.g., increase font sizes)
 Display raw HTML and HTTP header info (e.g., Last-Modified)
 Choose browser themes (skins)
 View history of web addresses visited
 Bookmark favorite pages for easy return

64
 Web Browsers

Additional functionality:
 Execution of scripts (e.g., drop-down menus)
 Event handling (e.g., mouse clicks)
 GUI for controls (e.g., buttons)
 Secure communication with servers
 Display of non-HTML documents (e.g., PDF)
via plug-ins

65
 Web Servers

Basic functionality:
 Receive HTTP request via TCP
 Map Host header to specific virtual host (one of many host
names sharing an IP address)
 Map Request-URI to specific resource associated with the
virtual host
 File: Return file in HTTP response
 Program: Run program and return output in HTTP response
 Map type of resource to appropriate MIME type and use to
set Content-Type header in HTTP response
 Log information about the request and response

66
 Web Servers

httpd: UIUC, primary Web server c. 1995

Apache: “A patchy” version of httpd, now the most
popular server (esp. on Linux platforms)
IIS: Microsoft Internet Information Server
Tomcat:
 Java-based
 Provides container (Catalina) for running Java servlets
(HTML-generating programs) as back-end to Apache or IIS
 Can run stand-alone using Coyote HTTP front-end

67
 Web Servers

Some Coyote communication parameters:

 Allowed/blocked IP addresses
 Max. simultaneous active TCP connections
 Max. queued TCP connection requests
 “Keep-alive” time for inactive TCP connections
Modify parameters to tune server
performance

68
 Web Servers

Some Catalina container parameters:

 Virtual host names and associated ports
 Logging preferences
 Mapping from Request-URI’s to server
resources
 Password protection of resources
 Use of server-side caching

69
 Tomcat Web Server

HTML-based server administration

Browse to
http://localhost:8080
and click on Server Administration link
 localhost is a special host name that means
“this machine”

70
Tomcat Web Server

71
Tomcat Web Server

72
Tomcat Web Server

73
 Tomcat Web Server

Some Connector fields:

 Port Number: port “owned” by this connector
 Max Threads: max connections processed
simultaneously
 Connection Timeout: keep-alive time

74
Tomcat Web Server

75
 Tomcat Web Server

Each Host is a virtual host (can have

multiple per Connector)
Some fields:
 Host: localhost or a fully qualified domain name
 Application Base: directory (may be path relative
to JWSDP installation directory) containing
resources associated with this Host

76
Tomcat Web Server

77
 Tomcat Web Server

Context provides mapping from Request-URI path to

a web application
Document Base field is directory (possibly relative to
Application Base) that contains resources for this web
application
For this example, browsing to
http://localhost:8080/
returns resource from
c:\jwsdp-1.3\webapps\ROOT
 Returns index.html (standard welcome file)

78
 Tomcat Web Server

Access log records HTTP requests

Parameters set using AccessLogValve
Default location: logs/access_log.* under
JWSDP installation directory
Example “common” log format entry (one line):
www.example.org - admin
[20/Jul/2005:08:03:22 -0500]
"GET /admin/frameset.jsp HTTP/1.1"
200 920

79
 Tomcat Web Server

Other logs provided by default in JWSDP:

 Message log messages sent to log service by web
applications or Tomcat itself
 logs/jwsdp_log.*: default message log
 logs/localhost_admin_log.*: message log for

web apps within /admin context

 System.out and System.err output (exception traces
often found here):
 logs/launcher.server.log

80
 Tomcat Web Server

Access control:
 Password protection (e.g., admin pages)
 Users and roles defined in
conf/tomcat-users.xml
 Deny access to machines
 Useful for denying access to certain users by denying access
from the machines they use
 List of denied machines maintained in RemoteHostValve (deny

by host name) or RemoteAddressValve (deny by IP address)

81
 Secure Servers

Since HTTP messages typically travel over a

public network, private information (such as credit
card numbers) should be encrypted to prevent
eavesdropping
https URL scheme tells browser to use encryption
Common encryption standards:
 Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
 Transport Layer Security (TLS)

82
 Secure Servers
I’d like to talk securely to you (over port 443)

HTTP Here’s my certificate and encryption data HTTP

Requests Requests

Here’s an encrypted HTTP request

TLS/ Here’s an encrypted HTTP response TLS/ Web

Browser
SSL SSL Server

Here’s an encrypted HTTP request

HTTP HTTP
Responses Here’s an encrypted HTTP response Responses

83
 Secure Servers
Man-in-the-Middle Attack
Fake Fake
DNS www.example.org
Server 100.1.1.1
What’s IP
address for 100.1.1.1 My credit card number is…
www.example.org?

Real
Browser www.example.org

84
 Secure Servers
Preventing Man-in-the-Middle
Fake Fake
DNS www.example.org
Server 100.1.1.1
What’s IP
address for 100.1.1.1 Send me a certificate of identity
www.example.org?

Real
Browser www.example.org

85