Self-Protection of Web Content

In most Internet applications, there is little control on how to protect the data content once it reaches the client. Implementing centralized control for data content delivered to the client at the server side is complicated and requires frequent server and client interaction which may influence user experience negatively. This suggests that data contents embedded with self-protecting functions which run independently on the client side may be desirable. In this paper, we propose an approach utilizing existing browser and agent technology to enable content protection function by using agent embedded in the delivered content. We illustrate this approach by using a web mail application, in which the content of the display page is locked up automatically using embedded functionalities in the html page when no activities are detected for a period of time even when server connection is not available.