All of my wrapper components have a conditional i.e. "$rootPage.isAuthorized"
around the WOComponentContent. Solves this issue and is handy in dozens of other ways.
On 4/10/12 7:14 AM, Patrick Robinson wrote:
I'm pretty sure this "feature" is the only mechanism by which a user can
request a specific page (or component) by name. I would want to block arbitrary access
to pages as well as prevent spurious session creation.
But yes, there are ways to mitigate the effects. If an authenticated "user" is
stored in the Session, then you can check for that before performing an action in
invokeAction() or returning a response in appendToResponse(). And you *do* have to worry
about invokeAction(), by the way: the presence of a senderID in the URL causes the
component action handler to initiate the invokeAction phase. I suppose sessions with no
authenticated user could even be terminated at the same time.
No end to the fun!
- Patrick
On Apr 10, 2012, at 2:43 AM, Cheong Hee (Gmail) wrote:
Hi Patrick
The rationale I am asking is the way web technology is, I think we may not be
able to block the arbitrary access of web pages. However, if we could use user
authentication as a way to check, terminate the unwanted sessions and redirect
to another stateless page, the impacts could be reduced. Correct me if wrong..
Cheers
Cheong Hee
----- Original Message ----- From: "Cheong Hee (Gmail)"<[email protected]>
To: "Patrick Robinson"<[email protected]>
Cc: "WebObjects-Dev Mailing List"<[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 12:53 PM
Subject: Re: preventing direct component access
Hi Patrick
This is an interesting old issue. Just curious, what will be your ultimate
ideal resolution to this? Bar the access of the page, or reduce the redundant
sessions creation or something else ...
Cheers
Cheong Hee
----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Robinson"<[email protected]>
To: "Amedeo Mantica"<[email protected]>
Cc: "WebObjects-Dev Mailing List"<[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 4:52 AM
Subject: Re: preventing direct component access
That code represents the per-app version of the "conventional wisdom" that I started out
questioning, below. The problem with this is that the user can specifiy a "senderID" (as in the
URL I gave there), and then senderID() will *not* return null; in the case below, it'll be "99".
On Apr 9, 2012, at 4:48 PM, Amedeo Mantica wrote:
Try this in your Application.java:
public WOComponent pageWithName(String pageName, WOContext context)
{
if((context.senderID()==null)&&(componentRequestHandlerKey().equals(context.request().requestHandlerKey())))
{
log.error("Direct Access attempt");
pageName="Main";
}
return super.pageWithName(pageName, context);
}
On 09/apr/2012, at 21:59, Mike Schrag wrote:
Yeah, you're right ... might be kind of a pain in the butt to fix without
hackery then :)
On Apr 9, 2012, at 3:41 PM, Patrick Robinson wrote:
But it doesn't even have to have the ".wo" on the end of the page name for this hack to
work. If the app has a "SecretPage.wo" component, then a URL like this will instantiate
and return it:
https://myhost.mydomain/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyApp.woa/wo/SecretPage//88.99
- Patrick
On Apr 9, 2012, at 10:10 AM, Mike Schrag wrote:
probably just catch any time you have a ".wo" in your URL and throw ... you
could do it in the url rewriter or something. i don't think there's ever any reason to
have a .wo reference in a normal app.
ms
On Apr 9, 2012, at 10:00 AM, Patrick Robinson wrote:
Yeah, that _does_ sound rather annoying! :-P
Is there a perhaps less-annoying way to approximate similar behavior?
On Apr 5, 2012, at 2:46 PM, Mike Schrag wrote:
I changed this in WO core, and unfortunately it's kind of annoying to fix without some
hackery, but in WOComponentRequestHandler, there's a static method
requestHandlerValuesForRequest ... That dictionary has a key named "wopage" in
it. If you did some class rewriting (with like gluonj or something), you could change
that static method to remove the wopage key ... That MIGHT be enough to do it.
On Apr 5, 2012, at 2:39 PM, Patrick Robinson wrote:
I've stumbled across a wrinkle re: what I had assumed to be the conventional
wisdom for preventing direct access to component pages via URLs like the
following:
http://myhost.mydomain/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyApp.woa/-9876/wo/SecretPage.wo
It's an old, old WO problem, and I'm wondering what other people do to handle
it.
I've always figured the best idea is to just configure the web server to catch
WO URLs that end in /wo/(.+)\.wo and rewrite or redirect them. Another
potential approach is to try to recognize and catch such requests in the app
itself, somewhere like the Application class's pageWithName. The problem is,
these solutions don't catch all the sneaky ways of slipping in a back door.
Consider:
http://myhost.mydomain/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyApp.woa/-9876/wo/SecretPage.wo//1.2
This ends up with Application's pageWithName trying to create a page with the name
"SecretPage". A new session has already been created somewhere down inside the
component request handler, it'll have a WOContext with a contextID of 0, and the senderID
will be 2. You'd be hard-pressed to know that you shouldn't allow the page creation to
proceed.
You could try to change the web server's search pattern to also catch a slash followed by more
characters after the ".wo", but you'd have to be careful not to disallow sessionIDs that
just happen to end in "wo". And even if you could reliably block the above, the hacker
could try this:
http://myhost.mydomain/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyApp.woa/-9876/wo/SecretPage.wox//1.2 (that
is, add more characters after the ".wo")
Now that doesn't fit the pattern at all, and gets hung up in the Application's
pageWithName, where a way-too-informative WOPageNotFoundException is thrown.
Of course, you'd catch that somewhere like handleException(). Doesn't quite
seem like the right approach, either.
My point here is, there are more ways of hacking a WebObjects URL than I had
previously considered. Does anyone have what they consider to be an ironclad
solution to this problem?
(I hate it when I discover stuff I thought I had dealt with 10 years ago is
still biting me.)
- Patrick
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