Show Lecture.WWW as a slide show.

CT320 WWW

First web server, CERN

URL

• All web stuff is done with URLs (URLs, URIs, URNs—not going there).
• A URL is scheme:info. Examples:
  • https://www.colostate.edu/
  • http://example.com/foo/bar
  • magnet:?xt=urn:btih:c12fe1c06bba254a9dc9f519b335aa7c1367a88a&dn
  • ftp://ftp.cisco.com/pub/mibs/v1/
  • mailto:pinkie-pie@my-little-pony.example.net
  • tel:+1-970-555-1212
• There are scores of schemes registered: https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml

Web Browsing

• Web browsers use HTTP & HTTPS application-level protocols.
• These are TCP protocols on ports 80 & 443.
• Use HTTPS!
  • HTTP is unencrypted. Anybody can see what you’re doing.
  • HTTP is unsigned. Its contents can be replaced or modified anywhere en route, and you wouldn’t know.
    • Downloading software? I hope that nobody in the middle altered it!

How a Web Server Works

• A web browser sends a TCP request to a web server.
  • Apache is the most common Linux web server.
• The web server looks at the request and decides what to do with it.
  • It might be plain text:
    https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~ct320/alphabet.txt
    • This maps to the file ~ct320/public_html/alphabet.txt.
  • It might be dynamically-generated content, like: https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~ct320/man.php/date
    • This wiki is all dynamically-generated content, created by PHP scripts translating markup to HTML.

Fetching a web page

Let’s fetch this web page:

• Translate
  

Warning: Use of undefined constant HTTP_HOST - assumed 'HTTP_HOST' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /s/bach/a/class/cs000/public_html/pmwiki/cookbook/php.php(17) : eval()'d code on line 1
www.cs.colostate.edu to (:ip
Warning: Use of undefined constant HTTP_HOST - assumed 'HTTP_HOST' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /s/bach/a/class/cs000/public_html/pmwiki/cookbook/php.php(17) : eval()'d code on line 1
www.cs.colostate.edu:) via DNS.

• Make a TCP connection to (:ip
  

Warning: Use of undefined constant HTTP_HOST - assumed 'HTTP_HOST' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /s/bach/a/class/cs000/public_html/pmwiki/cookbook/php.php(17) : eval()'d code on line 1
www.cs.colostate.edu:) at port 443 (HTTPS).

• Send an HTTP request through the socket, which looks like …

Fetching a web page

Send an HTTP request:

Browsing Response

The response from the web server looks like this:

HTTP Response Codes

An HTTP response looks like this: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
or, in general: HTTP/version numeric-code human-readable-code

The numeric codes are for programs, the words are for people.

Some popular HTTP response codes:

• 200 OK
• 301 Moved Permanently
• 302 Moved Temporarily
• 404 Not Found

HTML

• The response can be in many different formats.
• A popular format is HTML, which has tags, e.g.,
       I <strong>love</strong> My Little Pony!
• It’s your browser’s job to translate that HTML to a good-looking display on the screen.
• The network doesn’t care about any of this. It just delivers the bits from the server to the browser.

Browsing Security Considerations

• The HTTPS payload (request & response) is encrypted, going both ways.
• However, IP source & destination numbers are in the IP packet, so everybody knows that I’m talking to
  

Warning: Use of undefined constant HTTP_HOST - assumed 'HTTP_HOST' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /s/bach/a/class/cs000/public_html/pmwiki/cookbook/php.php(17) : eval()'d code on line 1
www.cs.colostate.edu.

• However, nobody knows that I’m asking for the CT320 WWW lecture.
• What will be revealed if you fetch https://male.personal.health.com/hair/restoration ?

Private Browsing

Private Browsing

• Chrome: Incognito
• Firefox: Private
• Internet Explorer: InPrivate
• What does it actually do?
  • It doesn’t affect what you send or receive from the Internet at all.
  • It limit evidence is kept in your browser.
  • It saves you from your spouse, but not from the FBI, or whoever owns any router along the way.
  • Routers see all IP addresses, port numbers, and DNS requests.

www.

• There is nothing special about www.; it’s just a convention.
• Sometimes, only one of example.net and www.example.net exists, but not the other.
• Often, both versions exist.
  • They might both resolve to the same IP address.
  • One might be a DNS alias (CNAME).
  • One might forward to the other via the HTTP Location: header.
  • They could deliver wildly different content.
    • This would really confuse your users. A goal?

www. examples

example.net and www.example.net simply have separate DNS entries that resolve to the same IP address:

% host example.net
example.net has address 93.184.215.14
example.net has IPv6 address 2606:2800:21f:cb07:6820:80da:af6b:8b2c
example.net mail is handled by 0 .

% host www.example.net
www.example.net has address 93.184.215.14
www.example.net has IPv6 address 2606:2800:21f:cb07:6820:80da:af6b:8b2c

www. examples

The CS Department web server, www.cs.colostate.edu, is a DNS CNAME alias for another host:

% host www.cs.colostate.edu
www.cs.colostate.edu is an alias for beethoven.cs.colostate.edu.
beethoven.cs.colostate.edu has address 129.82.45.48

This way, our internal naming convention isn’t visible to the world.

www. examples

Fetching https://cs.colostate.edu/~ct320 with wget shows a lot of web server forwarding:

$ wget -S https://cs.colostate.edu/~ct320 |& egrep '^[-CR]|^  (Location|HTTP)'
--2024-04-18 22:34:30--  https://cs.colostate.edu/~ct320
Resolving cs.colostate.edu (cs.colostate.edu)... 129.82.45.48
Connecting to cs.colostate.edu (cs.colostate.edu)|129.82.45.48|:443... connected.
  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Location: https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~ct320/
--2024-04-18 22:34:30--  https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~ct320/
Resolving www.cs.colostate.edu (www.cs.colostate.edu)... 129.82.45.48
Connecting to www.cs.colostate.edu (www.cs.colostate.edu)|129.82.45.48|:443... connected.
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  Location: Fall19/
--2024-04-18 22:34:30--  https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~ct320/Fall19/
Reusing existing connection to www.cs.colostate.edu:443.
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK

What’s the story with 301 vs. 302?