Client-Side – The Security Blindspot of your Website

Developing and managing a web application to scale has evolved in many different ways over the past two decades. In the following post, we’ll describe how a few of the more notable changes have led web application operators into a challenging situation.

The Evolution of Web Applications

With the growth in global internet bandwidth, stronger computers and extremely powerful modern browsers, web application architecture has changed significantly in two aspects:

• An explosion of web and mobile applications – There were 1.9 billion websites in early 2022 — more than 2x the number at the start of 2016. Modern websites typically contain a set of transactional logic, such as financial transactions, online identity, shopping, booking, banking and media consumption. Many are operated by Javascript code from third-party vendors. Over time, small monolith websites have grown into multicomponent systems where each component is nearly autonomous.
• Web applications code moved to the client-side – Core logic in modern web applications has shifted from server-side processing to front-end JavaScript libraries. This reduces the load from server-side processing, resulting in better performance and user experience. According to httparchive.org, front-end javascript code has grown over 256% for desktop and over 479% for mobile in the last decade — and it keeps growing.

The Evolution of the Development Teams

With the increasing complexity of web development processes and the multiple functions that are needed within the web development team, website teams keep growing. As a result of the shift to client-side development, web developers are moving to front-end or full-stack development. Web developer job growth is expected to increase by 27% by 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and full stack engineer ranked second in Glassdoor’s list of 50 Best Jobs in 2022. It all boils down to the (Read more...)