Security, Anonymity, and Privacy

Relationship between security, anonymity, and privacy

Security is an essential aspect of every web application developed today. Software developers must always ensure that their systems are secure and not prone to breaches by adversaries. As users interact with different web applications, their activities on the internet might be tracked by other external web applications and security agencies. This raises questions of privacy and anonymity. Why do these external powers get to see more of our data than necessary, and how do we stop them? Why do these external entities keep tracking us across the web and undermining our anonymity?

As such, security, privacy, and anonymity come together and feed into each other to create a safe environment.

We can try to limit the tracking of our activities on the internet using the following four tools and methods:

• Onion network
• Proxy servers
• Virtual private network (VPN)
• Private encrypted mail

Hackers try as much as possible to use the methods above to keep their activities secret when browsing so that they can mask their illegal activities. This, in turn, can make the auditing of web applications and their security standards rather difficult.

How does the internet track our activities?

IP addresses are included in each packet sent over the internet, together with the source and destination data. Once a packet locates its destination server, it hops over various routers along its path. Depending on certain factors, these hops can be as many as 20 to 30, but usually, the hops tend to be less than 15. Because these different packets traverse the internet from the source to the ...