Hiding Files Concepts

Anon

Our organization has an eye to start Hosting as we are already a speciality development shop. Been looking around in various industries and found a few interesting concepts in hiding files on a web server. I am aware of concepts of moving sensitive files off to a network server and using SQL but my interest is to understand how to hide them on a webserver first.

IE has an Address window on top for the user to use and an address reporting window on the bottom left which reports where things are coming from. Is it possible to manipulate the reported information sent back to the browser to where certain files are coming from? Hence when you go to a website the location is reported to the user browser (on top). Can the webserver manipulate that information to report what the webmaster wants to be reported?

What concepts currently exist that defeat reporting to the user as to where things reside? Certainly the more advanced users will be able to have a sort of sniffer running to log each step of what is happening. Any comments?

Anon

First, why do you want to do this? Why try hiding file names of things you are making publicly available in the first place by placing on the web?

Anon

Thanks for your reply.

From a concept point of view I didn't know to what limit the server was able to secure certain files.

As I understand, requests from browsers come in to servers which they in turn respond to. I didn't know if software existed that could isolate an inner server from an outside server world. Hence, a user's browser wouldn't have anyidea where something resided as the outer server would send it down without giving it's path or any trace of it. In a way, the webserver would be a server within a server which the inner server had total security. Isn't the path to files on a server through the server system in the first place? So as a concept why not isolate one from the other thus rendering the inner server most secure from the outer one?

We've built systems with data on network servers for data generated webpages. It just made more sense to take heavy traffic files and put them back into the webserver but security becomes a problem. So I've been wondering if someone has already been able to accomplish this OR are there other ways to handle it within the server? Some people in the Adult industry seem to play allot of interesting games, so what about data files? Frankly, if the operating system can separate the outside from inside why not? Isn't the operating system the overall manager of dealing with files anyway? The other part is percentage of risk. I don't feel anything is safe, so how safe is the answer because some concepts are better than others even if it resides on the webserver.