Security takes a layered approach to reduce the risk to our organization. Input validation is the perfect example of one of these layers. In most cases, input validation is 1 factor in a multi-pronged approach to protecting against common vulnerabilities. Take any course on secure development and they will, or should, mention input validation as a mitigating control for so many vulnerabilities. You might notice that it always comes with a but. Use input validation, but also use output … [Read more...] about Input validation is less about specific vulnerabilities
developer security
XSS in a Script Tag
Cross-site scripting is a pretty common vulnerability, even with many of the new advances in UI frameworks. One of the first things we mention when discussing the vulnerability is to understand the context. Is it HTML, Attribute, JavaScript, etc.? This understanding helps us better understand the types of characters that can be used to expose the vulnerability. In this post, I want to take a quick look at placing data within a <script> tag. In particular, I want to look at how embedded … [Read more...] about XSS in a Script Tag
MySpace Account Takeover – Take-aways
Have you ever forgotten your password, or lost access to your accounts? I know I have. The process of getting your access back can range from very easy to quite difficult. In one case, I had an account that required that a pin code be physically mailed to me in 7-10 days. Of course, this was a financial account that required extra protections. I came across this article (https://www.wired.com/story/myspace-security-account-takeover/) that identified that MySpace's process for regaining access … [Read more...] about MySpace Account Takeover – Take-aways
Properly Placing XSS Output Encoding
Cross-Site Scripting flaws, as well as other injection flaws, are pretty well understood. We know how they work and how to mitigate them. One of the key factors in mitigation of these flaws is output encoding or escaping. For SQL, we escape by using parameters. For cross-site scripting we use context sensitive output encoding. In this post, I don’t want to focus on the how of output encoding for cross-site scripting. Rather, I want to focus on when in the pipeline it should be done. Over … [Read more...] about Properly Placing XSS Output Encoding
Application Security and Responsibility
Who is responsible for application security within your organization? While this is something I don't hear asked very often, when I look around the implied answer is the security team. This isn't just limited to application security either. Look at network security. Who, in your organization, is responsible for network security? From my experience, the answer is still the security group. But is that how it should be? Is there a better way? Security has spent a lot of effort to take and … [Read more...] about Application Security and Responsibility
ImageMagick – Take-aways
Do your applications accept file uploads? More specifically, image uploads? Do you use a site that allows you to upload images? If you haven't been following the news lately, there was recently a few vulnerabilities found in the ImageMagick image library. This library is very common in websites to perform image processing. The vulnerability allows remote code execution (RCE) on the web server, which is very dangerous. For more specific details on the vulnerability itself, check out this … [Read more...] about ImageMagick – Take-aways