Jeff,
Are you asking if book marking a URL that contains query parameters might be
a security risk?
Anthony
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Trent [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 8:37 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Potential Security Flaw in Struts MVC
I may be wrong about this (only been working w/ Struts for a week now). But
I do see a potential security flaw in struts that I would like to hear from
others regarding.
Consider a simple set of struts classes that represent a user in a system.
You would probably have classes that look something like this:
User (the model representing the user)
UserForm (an enrollment form for a new user)
UserAction (Saves the UserForm information to db, etc)
The User class would have accessors and modifiers like getFirstName(),
setFirstName(), getAdministrativeUserFlag(), setAdministrativeUserFlag(),
etc. The basic implementation of the UserForm is to take the UI form data,
introspect the beans, and call the correct modifier of the UserForm bean
based on the fields contained within the UI submission/form. A developer of
course would not expose the "Administrative User Flag" option on the UI for
enrollment (that would be found possibly in some other administrative-level
module). However, if someone is familiar with the db schema and the naming
convention the developer used, that user could subvert the application by
writing his own version of the UI which contains an "Administrative User
Flag" field (or any other field for that matter) and the basic form
processing in Struts will kindly honor the request and set the
"Administrative Flag" on the user. Unless, of course, the developer makes
special provisions to prevent this behavior. However, its not entirely
obvious to the struts user (in my opinion) that this is even a concern. Am
I making sense here?
- jeff
