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Http Headers - A Great Shield For Your Websites & Applications

In a relentless world, lots of cybercrime is happening every day by the hackers. Even though the security is improved there might be some loopholes for breaking the network. Some people are doing this type of crime to break the challenges in internet security. To kick out the hackers, security level is improved by leveraging the HTTP headers. Obviously, it has become mandatory for the web developers to know about the cyber security. If your client data has been attacked on the application then they may get desperate about your service. Safeguarding the web applications also relies on the developer's hand hence they should know about the accent of HTTP headers.

In this article, I would like to give a short idea about “what is HTTP headers and how it works for the data security?” Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol used all over the applications to transfer files between the interconnected networks. Huge volume of data has been transferred through this protocol and stored on the server. Even the original architects can't able to figure out the data volume that is stored in World Wide Web. Indeed, HTTP headers include request and response that engage the client and server to send and receive data constantly. There are so many HTTP headers are used by app developers. Nearly hundreds are used and also recognized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Usually, http headers work to avoid the caching of the confidential data to prevent the data leak.  The web development company should handle these challenges smartly by up surging the security level through Http headers. When a file is caught is cache it can be viewed easily by the shared PC or just by clicking the back button on the same window. Browsers use the cache to avoid the data congestion but it is restricted for the confidential resource using some of the active Http headers. We can also prevent the cache using cache-control, pragma: no-cache, expires -1.

Following are the major types that include different headers for the various security levels

HTTP headers:

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         1. <!--[endif]-->Active security

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·        2. <!--[endif]-->Passive security

Active security

Active security intends to give high security feature for the web applications and also earns you could credibility in data protection. Active security has different types of headers that are used based on the security level and purpose. Some of the header files used in active security is x-frame options, strict-transport-security, x-xss-protection, x-content-type-options, public-key-pins and content-security-policy.

Passive security

The headers files comes under passive security does not enable any security options but it support in data protection. It gives more information for the hacker but not the needed one so he may think that overall info is enough and skips to find the valuable one. Adding cookie attributes, server/X-powered-by, catching directives, X-Robots-Tag and adding custom headers are some of the HTTP headers used to prevent data leakage.