The other day I was thumbing through a magazine called IEEE Spectrum. If you don’t know what the IEEE is, it’s the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; one of the largest technical organizations on the planet. The publication is filled with all sorts of articles on upcoming and current technological innovations. However,  as you may have guessed, one particular article caught my eye.

This Might Come as a Shock to You

The title of the article is “New-Breed Browsers Are Harder to Hack” by Elise Ackerman. In which, Ackerman explains that as the experience of web browsing has become more complex (email, widgets, making purchases, etc.).  This has made them more vulnerable to attacks by cyber criminals. However, computer scientists are looking to change the structure of web browsing.

Most likely you’ve heard of HTML;  part of  the lifeblood of the internet. The technology standard has officially been around since 1995 and received its share of updates. Still, the backbone of how the language works is pretty much the same. Despite society’s best security efforts, the hacks can still find ways to cause all sorts of mischief.

The evolution of our ability to communicate with each other has been mind boggling. Even within the past 5 years, things such as Twitter, social profiles, and web video have pushed the envelope of what it means to “browse the web”.  But web browsers were originally designed to view static pages. Applications were meant strictly to run on your local machine.

What do I mean by applications? A program that lets you view email, for example. It is highly unlikely that the originators of these standards could have predicted the explosive growth in application interfacing online. This is because 50 years ago, the concept of a machine that could do banking was barely even a dream. Now you can’t fall over without hitting an ATM. Being able to do banking on a computer? It was bound to eventually happen.  Right?

The security of the internet is much less than that of an operating system. Why is this? An operating system is actually a bunch of sub-systems working together in harmony; much like a digital ecosystem. There could be one part that handles the user interface. Another part to handle accessing hard drives and disk drives. A third part that handles the networking. This example is extremely simplified, but there is no need (at least not in this post) to understand the intimate workings. The point is that for someone to start causing problems, they have to work around all the different parts.

Web browsing is not treated like this. A browser has everything in one place. As a result, it is more vulnerable to attack. According to researchers at Sophos, a security company in England, they are discovering a sabotage site every 3.6 seconds.

The Solution isn’t Far Away

Computer scientists are looking to fix this problem by treating a browser more like an operating system. Different separate systems working together. This would make it much harder for an attack to occur; thus increasing the security of our browsing experience.

Google and Microsoft have projects that are looking to achieve these goals. There are also smaller groups of people trying to make browsing more secure. One new browser is called Opus Palladianum (OP) designed by assistant professor Samuel King and his team at the University of Illinois. They released a public version this September; however it’s only for Linux, currently. I’m hoping they will come out with a version for PCs and Macs shortly, so I can play with it! 

Closing Thoughts

I want you to smile right now because we are living in some of the most exciting times in the evolution of human technology. You are part of this process, if not for the simple fact that you are reading this on a computer. The need for us to communicate in different ways is shaping what describes web browsing. Even our different ways are evolving. Take email for example. We have moved from viewing email using software on your computer, to web-based email, to web video email.

If you have any particular feelings at this point, let me know.  I’d love to hear how you feel about this pending browser change: long awaited; keep me posted; I didn’t even realize there was such a problem; or, it’s a good job there are plenty of ATMs because I am not banking online until the overhauled browsers are realized.

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