Today, many leading industries and modern enterprises have switched from processing and acting on data stored in databases to data in flight. How? Through real-time applications. One way to enable this is WebSocket, but it comes with vulnerabilities as well.
What Is WebSocket?
Real-time applications operate within an immediate time frame; sensing, analyzing and acting on streaming data as it happens. With real-time applications, you need information from your servers as soon as it is available.
WebSocket is a network protocol built on the Transmission Control Protocol, designed to make use of a more modern connection to receive and send ongoing real-time messages as required.
More and more end-users and business leaders today call for real-time experiences to remain competitive.
Before WebSocket came along, the ‘real-time’ web existed, but it was difficult to achieve since the web is built on the HTTP protocol paradigm. HTTP is stateless: there is no link between two requests successively carried out on the same connection. A stateless protocol does not require the server to retain information or status about each user for the duration of multiple requests.
Let’s take a look at how it works, how attackers can exploit it and how to defend against those techniques.
How Does WebSocket Work?
Sockets connect two services formed by a mix of IP and a port. They act as a unique, programmatic way to receive and send data and are key to network applications everywhere.
WebSocket connections start over HTTP and are often long-lived. Messages can be sent in either direction at any time and are not transactional in nature.
