Safety of Web and Mobile Applications

The Internet's prehistory dates back to 1969, but it didn't really take off until 1984, with the adoption of TCP/IP protocols and the separation of the military (MILNET) and scientific (NSFNET) networks. The Internet enabled worldwide network communications, but it was the Web, its HTML language and HTTP transport protocol, publicly announced in 1991, and the first NCSA Mosaic browser (1993) that brought it to the general public, raising unprecedented security issues.

Since 1984, the Web, its HTML language and HTTP transport protocol have been transformed from a means of accessing and consulting static documents to a universal connector between humans, machines and data. The Web browser, for example, has become the standard interface for enterprise management software, eliminating the need to deploy "fat clients" on every workstation. As the control unit of this interface, it can now trigger actions on data, both on the server side and on the user's machine. All these programs can communicate with each other and exchange data, opening up possibilities unimaginable in the last century, but also unprecedented risks to be guarded against.

Since its birth in 1991 and the widespread use of the Web by hundreds of millions of Internet users at the turn of the century, the Web has undergone considerable transformations, radically changing the measures required to ensure its safe use, whether on the server and content management software side, or on the Internet user's browser side.

With the launch of the Symbian system in 1998 on Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia cell phones, these devices became true computers, but it wasn't until the launch of the iPhone by Apple in 2007 that phones gained full access to the Internet, opening up all Web uses to their owners, which was not without new risks and the need for security measures adapted to this new ecosystem.

These are the issues addressed in this article.