Thank you Jacques,

Other opinions on this approach?

Can we work above?

Pierre

Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Hi Pierre,

From: "pierre" <pierre.gau...@nereide.biz>
Hi all,

Here is a proposition on how to implement such XSS control:

First we consider that all HHTP request should be filtering. So we could add a filter into web.xml for each webapp that replaces a set of dangerous characters by there HTML code. By this way we can block all XSS attacks for entire application.

Yes it makes sens indeed, that's what Michele also suggested in this thread, (with less details) : http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Security-Issues-p21628377.html

After filtering all requests, we should add a way to parameterise this. So we could add 2 properties : - the first one to specifie a regex pattern that is used by filter engine
   - the second one to disable filtering

And to be very flexible we can set those properties (or attributes) on 3 levels :
    - request (from request-map)
    - webapp (for a complete webbapp)
    - application (main level)

The more flexible the better.

And finaly we could consider that if there are no paramateres on request level, then we look for webapp parameters. If there are no parameters on webapp we look for application parameters.

By this way we could filter all request and set exeption or regex for a particular request or webb-app or entire application.

What do you think about this.

Yes this will cover this security aspect, and sounds good to me.

Thanks

Jacques

Pierre

David E Jones wrote:

Hello all.

I'm actually a little surprised we're still where we are on this, so I'm putting some time into this... understanding that it will annoy as many people as it pleases (at first anyway...).

In order to address various XSS and XSS-like security threats, I'd like to get some real and comprehensive stuff in place. Right now there are super-easy attacks that can be done, like putting JavaScript in a field during checkout that gets executed when a CSR (or anyone using the Order Manager) looks at the order, or someone looks at it in the Party Manager or wherever. That script can grab the session id and send it to a URL for session hijacking, or it can directly perform some action like marking the order as paid offline or creating a new admin account or changing the users password or whatever. The script could do anything the poor back-end user has access to do, and that's just an example.

The best issues on this are:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1959 (newer one, good review of OFBiz security and applicable comments, good tips to resolve) https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-260 (the old/original one, including my silly comment on it)

We have some simple code that does escaping for HTML chars, but it's not really used anywhere. Anyway, I think we need something more robust and comprehensive, especially given the fun ways of getting around filters and other things presented here:

http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html

What I'd like to do is add the OWASP ESAPI library, which is BSD licensed. There is a nice presentation about it as well here:

http://code.google.com/p/owasp-esapi-java/

and JavaDocs here:

http://owasp-esapi-java.googlecode.com/svn/trunk_doc/index.html

======================================

So, there's a tool, now how/where to use it in OFBiz...

I think this will require a fair bit of work, and I know I'll miss things that are important in this first pass, but we can do some things to take care of the more obvious problems:

1. validate input: consider not allowing HTML in any field by default, and require an attribute set on service attributes or possibly even entity fields to say that restricted/safe HTML is allowed, or any HTML is allowed; this will break some things that actually need HTML initially, but fixing the broken things once found will be really easy

2. encode output: just in case HTML chars do get in somehow, we want to encode them so they are displayed literally and not interpreted as HTML by the browser; this will help avoid problems with messing up formatting when HTML is present, as well as helping with this security problem; this is easy to do in the various widgets (Screen, Form, Tree, Menu), and is tougher in FTL files if we want it encoded by default instead of manually using ?html on every field we want encoded, and I'd rather use the ESAPI encoder than the FTL one too; since much of this data is displayed right out of GenericValue objects, one possible solution is to change the GenericValue.get methods to do this encoding, and add a new get method that will not do encoding; this would handle the situations where the GenericValue is treated like a Map; this may also cause some crazy stuff to happen in places where gets are used in services and such and not in the UI... but I'm still thinking that through and am not sure if it will be a problem... it is kind of using bomb to swat a fly so collateral damage is likely

3. consider adding a token that is required for all requests in a session except the first one, use a constantly changing token, and have it added by the URL writing stuff based on a value in the session; this would change on every request, which is a pain because it means that any page in someone's browser other than the most recently rendered one would not work (a problem we have with the externalLoginKey stuff) unless we keep a certain number of the most recent tokens in the session and allow any of the last 10 or 20 or something to be used

4. related to #3, and relevant whether or not we do #3, add a unique token to all rendered forms and require that when processing the form input; if we only allow the tokens to be used once this also fits the common pattern used for eliminating accidental multiple submissions of the same form; this could be done easily with the Form Widget and the ServiceEventHandler (or perhaps all of the event handlers...), and more manually supported in other places like FTL forms; this would require some configuration, and again the annoying part is to cover as much as possible we would want this on by default which may cause problems for some things which would then need to changed to support it or disable it for that particular form and/or event

====================================

I'm really interested in hearing what others have to say about these. Personally I've avoided most of these types of things because they always tend to cause a dozen problems for every problem they solve. I've mentioned some concerns, but there are many more. Some issues may just make the application less usable because of restrictions on being able to do things like use the back button (IMO supporting that is a critical part of any web app that is worth anything) or having a bunch of false positives for security errors because of some funny scenario that was not anticipated (and this isn't an if thing, it's a when and how often thing).

-David





--
Pierre Gaudin,
Consultant Fonctionnel Neogia, Apache-OFBiz
ERP en logiciel Libre

Société Néréide
mobile : +33 (0)6 08 40 25 70
bureau : +33 (0)2 47 50 30 54
http://www.nereide.biz





--
Pierre Gaudin,
Consultant Fonctionnel Neogia, Apache-OFBiz
ERP en logiciel Libre

Société Néréide
mobile : +33 (0)6 08 40 25 70
bureau : +33 (0)2 47 50 30 54
http://www.nereide.biz

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