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A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON WEB SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES USED IN BULGARIAN AND SERBIAN BANKS

Pavel Petrov

Abstract

In this publication, we summarize, systematize and analyse data collected for studying the use of HTTPS in the public sites of banks in Bulgaria and Serbia. The scope of the study is limited to the public site of the particular bank. We examined the web sites of all 20 banks licensed in the Republic of Bulgaria and 27 Serbian banks licensed by the Serbian National Bank at the time of the survey. The survey excludes the foreign bank branches operating in the respective countries. The main objective of the study is to outline the "good practices" used by Bulgarian and Serbian administrators of banking websites. As it is known, when using text protocols (such as HTTP/0.9/1.0/1.1) the so called "man in the middle" could be listening to all traffic and exchanged queries and responses between clients and servers. Network packets can easily be read, even without the use of complex technical means. In many cases some confidential information is exchanged, e.g. passwords, bankcard numbers for payment, personal information, etc. In this case the best option is to use the specially intended for this purposes protocol HTTPS, also known as "HTTP Secure", "Secure HTTP", "HTTP over SSL", "HTTP over TLS", etc. The use of a secure connection increases the processing load on the client and on the server in terms of busy CPU time and the amount of RAM, but in recent years, this is not considered a serious argument given the great benefits of communication security. In the recent years a trend is formed to use the HTTPS protocol as the default protocol for accessing hyperlinks in web pages and to be used by default by web applications.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2019/2.1/s07.001

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