Are WebSockets reinventing the wheel?

Correct me if I'm wrong...

1. We introduced firewalls in order to restrict internet access to their Corporate employees (and indirectly "protect" home users)
2. Now WebSockets allows applications to tunnel any communication开发者_高级运维 over port 80.

What's the point? Should firewalls have never been invented in the first place? If, as I expect, firewalls begin blocking all Websockets communication, what is the point of introducing them in the first place?

UPDATE: My mistake. I was under the false impression that WebSockets allowed arbitrary port-forwarding tunneling over port 80. It does not. WebSockets deal exclusively with opening a full-duplex communication over port 80.

WebSockets aren't designed to be convenient for corporate security admins, they're designed to provide fast browser <-> server communication; the perspective you're taking in asking this question is thus invalid; WebSockets are great for their intended purpose, and most of the web is not behind a corporate firewall.

Many corporations now allow encrypted tunneling of arbitrary data to the internet anyway, so this is nothing new. The risk of data exfiltration via WebSockets and the necessary countermeasures will still fall on the judgment of individual security admins based on the level of trust they have in their employees and the sensitivity of the corporate data they have access to.

We introduced firewalls in order to restrict internet access to their Corporate employees (and indirectly "protect" home users)

Firewalls were not introduced to restrict the activities of the internal side of the network (although they can be used that way). Firewalls were created to prevent intrusion from outside a network.

Now WebSockets allows applications to tunnel any communication over port 80.

Applications (non-web) have always been able to tunnel anything they want over port 80, all that WebSockets allow is for Javascript to be used to intitiate a full-duplex connection between it and the server.

I guess I really don't understand why you would think that corporate networks would firewall WebSocket traffic. All WebSocket does is allows a efficient full-duplex connection between web browser and server.

First, in the title, you imply websockets might be just an inferior reimplementation of a previous idea (which they actually are). Then, in the body text you go on a tangent about firewalls, which can be bypassed by not just websockets.

So, yes. Firewalls should have never been invented and the inventors should have foreseen the invention of websockets, or anything that uses a trusted transport which in this example port 80.

Answering your actual question, websockets are just an another different type of abstraction layer on your network. They are most likely not a substitute for regular sockets depending on relevant software.

Reinventing the wheel is a favorite passtime of developers, especially non-developers turned web developers. I guess it eases the pain of unwarranted inferiority complex, caused by the realisation that basic computer literacy is not the same thing as programming ability.