Category:OWASP Stinger Project

Overview

Developers consistently implement sporadic, ad-hoc input validation mechanisms for web applications. Lack of a centralized and well-defined input validation mechanism opens the application to a variety of attacks: including SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting (XSS), and Command Injection. The OWASP Stinger Project aims to develop a centralized input validation component which can be easily applied to existing or developmental applications. Using a declarative security model, Stinger has the ability to validate all HTTP requests coming into an application. Stinger is such a simplistic yet strong validation engine that organizations have begun integrating it into their software development life-cycle.

Project Lead

Current Project Leader: Jeroen de Beer

Previous Project Leader: Wesley West.

License

Stinger is offered under the LGPL. For further information on OWASP licenses, please consult the OWASP Licenses page.

Versions

• Click here to view the OWASP Stinger 2.x Project page
• Deprecated Click here to view the OWASP Stinger 1.x Project page
• Defunct Click here to view the OWASP Stinger 3.x Project page

Stinger News

Latest version available! - 25 March 2009 

Well, I have updated the site with version 2.2.2 of Stinger for JDK 1.4. There have been some questions about why I have updated from version 2.2, rather than 2.5. This is because I have only been working with the version supporting JDK 1.4, as that's what my environments are. This version includes the fix to the MutableHTTPRequest to support multiple parameter values, as well as the fix to address the multipart vulnerability as included in 2.5.

I am trying to get the request object changes made to the later code to allow for a 2.6 release. But my schedule isn't allowing me much time to work on Stinger lately.

Major Flaw: New versions coming soon! - 26 August 2008 

In working with Stinger over the past year I have found some issues in the way that Stinger implemented handling of the HTTP request. In short, it overlooked the fact that a parameter can have multiple values. This has been corrected and will be available for download within the next week or two.

Security Fix: Stinger 2.5 Released - 13:32, 12 August 2007 (EDT)

Meder Kydyraliev recently brought to my attention a flawed assumption in the implementation of a J2EE filter-based input validation solution. Much of the J2EE HttpServletRequest API assumes the content of a POST request is form-urlencoded. Calls like "getParameter(String)" and "getParameterNames()" will only return values of a form-urlencoded POST request. Consequently, these API will return nothing of the body of the request is multipart encoded, allowing the attacker to bypass filter-based validation.

Click here for the original write-up provided by Meder Kydyraliev.

Click here to download Stinger 2.5

Stinger 2.4 Released - 13:58, 21 May 2007 (EDT)

The OWASP Stinger Project is proud to release Stinger 2.4. As noted in RC1, this release is intended to address code quality issues as well as implement several community suggested updates. The following is a list of notable changes:

• Backported the Stinger 3.0 "DROP/CONTINUE/PROCESS" doAction() logic. No need for "BreakChainException"
• Cleaned up some code quality issues (removed all instances of System.out and printStackTrace, using interfaces properly, fixed synchronization issues)
• Added the ability to define an "exclude" list which searches for patterns within a pattern. For example, if we allow the character '.' and the character '/', we may want to prevent instances of '../'. This can now be done by adding an "<exclude>../</exclude>" tag underneath the "<regex></regex>" element of a rule. See the example "stinger.xml" file included with the Stinger Eclipse project for more information.
• Modified the Log action to hashsession ID's before logging them as well as fixed "getHandler()" property default bug
• The inclusion of the "exclude-set" value which tells Stinger to do nothing with these pages. Useful for patterns that cover too much (ex. *.*)
• The stinger.xml file is expected to be found relative to /WEB-INF. This means that we simply set the filter-init "config" parameter to "stinger.xml" rather than "C:\Documents and Settings....\WEB-INF\stinger.xml"
• Removed the "DisplayMessage" action as it is not very useful
• Added better logging throughout the code base

You can get the latest Stinger release here.

Stinger 2.4 RC1 Released - 11:40, 29 January 2007 (EST)

The OWASP Stinger Project is proud to release Stinger 2.4 RC1. This release is largely intended to address some code quality issues.

The following is a list of notable changes:

• We now allow for an "exclude" option for each parameter. After defining a regular expression for a parameter, we can now define strings that should *NOT* exist within the input. For example, let us assume our regular expression accepts all numbers, characters, a period, and a slash (/). However, note that "aaa../../etc/passwd" would be considered a valid input. Therefore, we can specify an "exclude" tag to prevent such input:

...
<rule>
   <name>file</name>
   <regex>filetext</regex>
   <exclude>../</exclude>
...

• The "invalidate" action will properly clear the cookie from the user's browser.

The current list of tasks to complete is as follows:

• Remove the absolute path dependence when specifying the Stinger configuration file in web.xml

As always, let me know if you have any suggestions for improving the Stinger 2.4 release!

Click here for the Stinger 2.x release page.

Click here for old news...

Feedback and Participation

We hope you find Stinger useful. Please contribute back to the project by sending your comments, questions, and suggestions to the Stinger mailing list. Thanks!

To join the OWASP Stinger mailing list or view the archives, please visit the subscription page.

Donations

The Open Web Application Security Project is purely an open-source community driven effort. As such, all projects and research efforts are contributed and maintained with an individual's spare time. If you have found this or any other project useful, please support OWASP with a donation.

Project Sponsors

None at this time