Comparing Apache and Oracle HTTP Server Capabilities and Security

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Presented at Security B-Sides Iowa 2012 by

Eric Mader

Bruce Younts

The front line of defense for any critical web infrastructure is the DMZ web tier. Without proper performance tuning, scalability, content caching, management, and security, mission-critical applications may become inaccessible and backend private and intranet network zones may become vulnerable. This presentation explores two similar and widely-used web servers: Apache HTTP Server and Oracle HTTP Server. Although both platforms have a common foundational architecture, each server has a different set of tools and libraries available for testing, analysis, and configuration. This presentation covers methods for performance tuning and scaling each platform, content caching with mod_apache and Oracle WebCache, and server management with Webmin for Apache and Oracle Enterprise Manager for Oracle HTTP Server. Various security considerations will also be covered, including support for authentication/authorization, SSL via mod_ssl and mod_ossl, and IPv6.