While applets solve many important problems in client/server and network centric computing, they also raise new concerns about security. In traditional environments, companies could protect themselves by building a firewall between the Internet and the company's intranet, obtaining software only from known and trusted sources, and using anti-virus programs to check all new software.
Use of applets(they are small pieces of executable code embedded in web pages and run inside the user's browser) adds a new security vulnerability. An employee searching an external Web site for information might inadvertently load and execute a malicious applet which could potentially steal or damage information stored in the user's machine on a network file server. Also, since this software is already behind the company's firewall, the applet could attack other unprotected machines on a corporate intranet. The cost of achieving security, some security problems and Java's security model are presented in the following sections.
Copyright © 1996 Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
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Vijay Sureshkumar
<vijay@csgrad.cs.vt.edu>
Last modified: Sun Oct 20 21:52:09 1996