A dynamic web agent for verifying the security and integrity of a web site's contents

To harness safe operation of Web-based systems in Web environments, we propose a Server-based SHA-1 Page-digest Algorithm (SSPA) to verify the integrity of Web contents before the server issues an HTTP-Response to a user request. In addition to standard security measures, our Java implementation of SSPA, which is called Dynamic Security Surveillance Agent (DSSA), provides further security in terms of content integrity to Web-based systems. Its function is to prevent display of altered Web contents, through malicious acts of attackers and intruders, on client machines. This is to protect the reputation of organisations from cyber attacks and to ensure safe operation of Web systems by dynamically monitoring the integrity of sites content on demand. We will discuss our findings in terms of applicability and practicality of the proposed system. We also discuss its time metrics specifically in relation to its computational overhead at the Web server as well as the overall latency from the clients' point of view, using different Internet access methods. SSPA, DSSA, experimental results and related work are discussed.