Goals
The OWASP Java Project's overall goal is to...
Produce materials that show J2EE architects, developers, and
deployers how to deal with most common application security
problems throughout the lifecycle.
In the near term, we are focused on the following tactical goals:
- Provide examples of how to prevent Cross Site Scripting attacks in popular web frameworks
- Provide examples of how to prevent SQL Injection in popular data access frameworks
- Provide examples of how to prevent LDAP injection in Java
- A practical guide to implementing a security policy for a Java web application
- Secure configuration guides for popular application servers
Current Tasks
Ideas
Please submit your ideas for the OWASP Java Project here (you can sign your ideas by adding four tilde characters like this ~~~~)
- It would be useful to have a library of J2EE security resources on the web. In addition to URLs, I think these should have short summaries that explain what the resource is about. I've clicked on far too many "J2EE Security" links only to find that the article is about implementing access control in Tomcat.
- A tool that automatically generates a security policy for a given application could be useful. The tool is first run in learning mode where it maps all the accesses that the application attempts and then generates a policy based on those access attempts. Status: tool sent to Stephen.
Design considerations
| Objective: | Discuss the security implications of common J2EE architectures. This could be discussed in terms of: Authentication, Authorisation, Data Validation, Cross Site Scripting protection. Other architecture concerns such as scalability, performance and maintainability can also be mentioned, but the focus on security should not be lost.
Any other security concerns that should be addressed during the design phase should also be mentioned here. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- Architectural considerations
- EJB Middle tier
- Web Services Middle tier
- Spring Middle tier
Noteworthy Frameworks
| Objective: | Discuss important and relevant Java security frameworks that would be useful to architects. The information should be at a suitably high level, for example, by discussing the advantages and features as well as the associated costs (direct and indirect) of using the frameworks. |
| Status: | Comparison of Frameworks in progress |
| Contributors: | Claire McDonough, Ranjita Shankar Iyer |
| Reviewers: | Rohyt Belani, Stephen De Vries |
1. Struts
2. Turbine
3. JFS (MyFaces)
4. Tapestry
5. Webwork
6. Cocoon
7. Tiles
8. SiteMesh
9. Spring
Java Security Basics
| Objective: | Provide an introduction into the basic security services provided by the Java language and environment. Remember to keep this relevant for web developers for the initial release - there may be a potential to expand this to thick clients in subsequent releases. |
| Status: | Outline development |
| Contributors: | Shyaam Sundhar |
| Reviewers: | Rohyt Belani, Stephen De Vries |
- Class Loading
- Bytecode verifier
- The Security Manager and security.policy file
Input Validation
- Overview
- Dangerous calls (BufferedReader.readLine(), ServletRequest.getParameter(), etc...)
SQL Injection
| Objective: | Provide cursory background information on SQL injection and refer to the Guide for more indepth coverage (no need to duplicate info in the Guide). This section should provide practical advise and real-world code examples for developers. If you feel that a popular persistence framework is not covered, please add it! |
| Status: | Work is underway |
| Contributors: | Stephendv, Joe Kumar |
| Reviewers: | |
- Overview
- Prevention
- White Listing
- Prepared Statements
- Stored Procedures
- Hibernate
- Ibatis
- Spring JDBC
- EJB 3.0
- JDO
Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
| Objective: | Provide cursory background information on XSS and refer to the Guide for more indepth coverage. This section should provide practical advise and real-world code examples for developers. If you would like to see coverage of a web framework that's not listed, please add it! |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- Overview
- Prevention
- White Listing
- Manual HTML Encoding
- Preventing XSS in popular Web Frameworks
- JSP/JSTL
- Struts
- Spring MVC
- Java Server Faces
- WebWork
- Wicket
- Tapestry
- CSRF attack
LDAP Injection
| Objective: | As with the other Injection sections, only provide cursory information on the general case. Should contain practical real-world advise and code examples for preventing LDAP injection. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | Stephendv |
| Reviewers: | |
XPATH Injection
| Objective: | As with the other Injection sections, only provide cursory information on the general case. Should contain practical real-world advise and code examples for preventing XPATH injection. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
Miscellaneous Injection Attacks
| Objective: | Should contain practical real-world advise and code examples. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- HTTP Response splitting
- Command injection - Runtime.getRuntime().exec()
Authentication
| Objective: | Discuss authentication for Java and J2EE apps under the suggested headings below. Examples for container managed authentication of specific application servers are also welcome. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | Dave Ferguson, Michel Prunet, Adrian San Juan, Philippe Curmin |
| Reviewers: | |
- Storing credentials - Adrian San Juan
- Hashing - Michel Prunet
- SSL Best Practices - Philippe Curmin is working on it. This topic shall include the following points:
- What is SSL
- How SSL is implemented in J2EE
- HTTPS best practices in general
- HTTPS best practices in J2EE
- Examples with Tomcat
- Examples with JBoss.
- Using JCaptcha
- Container-managed authentication with Realms
- JAAS Authentication
- Password length & complexity - Adrian San Juan
Session Management
| Objective: | The generic problems and solutions for session management are covered in the Guide. This section should focus on Java specific examples. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- Logout
- Session Timeout
- Absolute Timeout
- Session Fixation
- Terminating sessions
- Terminating sessions when the browser window is closed
Authorization
| Objective: | Java and J2EE specific discussion and examples. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
Encryption
| Objective: | Java and J2EE specific discussion and examples. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- JCE
- Storing db secrets
- Encrypting JDBC connections
- JSSE
- Random number generation
Error Handling & Logging
| Objective: | Java and J2EE specific discussion and examples. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- Output Validation
- Custom Errors
- Logging - why log? what to log? log4j, etc.
- Exception handling techniques
- fail-open/fail-closed
- resource cleanup
- finally block
- swallowing exceptions
- Exception handling frameworks
- Servlet spec - web.xml
- JSP errorPage
- Web application forensics
Web Services Security
| Objective: | Discuss securely implementing Web Services using Java technologies. Examples using specific frameworks are welcome. The topic list is a bit light at the moment, please add more topics if they're relevant. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- SAML
- (X)WS-Security
- SunJWSDP
- XML Signature (JSR 105)
- XML Encryption (JSR 106)
Code Analysis Tools
| Objective: | The introduction should cover the advantages and short comings of code analysis tools. An overview of the current state of the art and the available tools would go well here. As a start, only open source tools are listed, but if vendors of commercial tools adhere to the Tutorial guidelines, these submissions will be gladly received. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- Introduction
- FindBugs
- PMD
- JLint
- Jmetrics
Securing Popular J2EE Servers
| Objective: | Practical step-by-step guides to securing various J2EE servers. Examples of secure configurations can also be provided for download. If configurations are provided, they should be properly commented so that the rationale for configuration settings is clearly explained. Users of the configurations should be provided with enough information to make their own risk decisions. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | Darren Edmonds |
| Reviewers: | |
- Securing Tomcat - Darren Edmonds
- Securing JBoss
- Securing WebLogic
- Securing WebSphere
- Others...
Defining a Java Security Policy
| Objective: | Practical information on creating a Java security policies for J2EE servers. |
| Status: | Call for volunteers |
| Contributors: | |
| Reviewers: | |
- PolicyTool
- jChains (www.jchains.org)
Protecting Binaries
| Objective: | This should be focussed on web applications, so examples should include applets and web start apps. |
| Status: | Outline development |
| Contributors: | Richard Seiersen |
| Reviewers: | Rohyt Belani |
- Bytecode manipulation tools and techniques
- Bytecode obfuscation (proguard)
- Convert bytecode to native machine code
- Signing jar files with jarsigner
This is a proposed section that seems to be a good place to put articles that don't fit into some of the other categories. Jeff Williams 17:41, 30 June 2006 (EDT)
- Using Eclipse to verify Java applications
- Using Findbugs, PMD, Metrics, NCSS, jLint to find flaws and bugs
- Using WebScarab to find vulnerabilities in J2EE applications - is there anything that would be specific to J2EE apps here? Wouldn't using webscarab apply to all web apps? Stephendv 07:14, 17 July 2006 (EDT)
- Decompiling Java bytecode
| Objective: | Define other Java security resources, links, papers and books that would be useful to the community. |
