CRV2 RevCodeStoredAntiPatternJava

XSS Stored vulnerabilities in Java

Once understood how the vulnerability works, inspect a correct implementation of input sanitizers in the Java application. For example The OWASP HTML Sanitizer is a fast and easy to configure HTML Sanitizer written in Java which lets you include HTML authored by third-parties in your web application while protecting against XSS. The existing dependencies are on guava and JSR 305. The other jars are only needed by the test suite. The JSR 305 dependency is a compile-only dependency, only needed for annotations. This code was written with security best practices in mind, has an extensive test suite, and has undergone adversarial security review. A great place to get started using the OWASP Java HTML Sanitizer is here: https://code.google.com/p/owasp-java-html-sanitizer/wiki/GettingStarted.

Bad Session Stores

As described in the research paper written by V.Benjamin Livshits(2005), Bad session stores occurs when objects stored in attributes of javax.servlet.http.HttpSession are not subclasses of java.io.Serializable.

As further described by Livshits, it causes issues because HttpSessions objects could be written out to disk especially when all objects stored are handled as attributes that must be serialized, if not done properly this will cause exceptions or data corruption.

What to look for in the code

• Parameters of HttpSession.set Attribute
• Control if javax.servlet.httpSession is a subclass of java.io.Serializable

References

OWASP Java HTML Sanitizer available at https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Java_HTML_Sanitizer_Project

V. Benjamin Livshits, "Findings Security Errors in Java Applications Using Lightweight Static Analysis" 2005 available at (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/livshits/papers/pdf/acsac04v.pdf) Last Viewed October 3rd 2013