Hiawatha (web Server) - History

History

Hiawatha started in January 2002 as a very small web server, suitable for servers with old hardware. It was written originally for Internet servers in student houses in Delft of South Holland, the Netherlands. Because the author was a computer science student with special interest in IT security, all sorts of experimental security features were included. This resulted in a web server with many interesting security features which have proven useful. The author has said "I know for a long time that vulnerabilities . that bothers me: the runtime of a CGI. A CGI process can run forever. A single CGI script can DoS a webserver. A system administrator is needed to kill the script. And what about a client that keeps on guessing passwords for HTTP authentication? These kind of issues inspired me to create Hiawatha, with settings for maximum request sending time, maximum CGI run time, client banning, etc. Features that, in my opinion, every daemon should have."

The January 2009 edition of Linux Magazine contained an article about the Hiawatha web server.

Important releases
  • 1.0: September 2002. A basic but functional web server.
  • 2.0: March 2004. Use of multithreading instead of forking.
  • 3.0: September 2004. SSL support.
  • 4.0: December 2005. A CGI-wrapper for improved security was included.
  • 5.0: October 2006. FastCGI support for improved CGI speed.
  • 5.2: November 2006. First-time integration to the FreeBSD Ports system at version 5.2 in December 2006, to the OpenBSD ports tree at version 5.7 in March 2007.
  • 5.12: August 2007. URL rewriting support.
  • 6.0: October 2007. IPv6 support.
  • 6.6: April 2008. XSLT support.
  • 6.10 : October 2008. Prevent cross-site request forgery added.
  • 7.0: February 2010. Remote monitoring support.
  • 8.0: January 2012. Autoconf replaced with CMake, OpenSSL replaced with PolarSSL.

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