This site is the archived OWASP Foundation Wiki and is no longer accepting Account Requests.
To view the new OWASP Foundation website, please visit https://owasp.org

Difference between revisions of "Practical Logging In Web Applications"

From OWASP
Jump to: navigation, search
(New page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/aa302420.aspx#c04618429_004)
 
 
(6 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
 +
==The Problem==
 +
 +
==Identity Flow Through Application Layers==
 +
All web application security experts will tell you how important logging is [1][2][3][4]. How else can you detect attacks, successful or otherwise? Logs should allow you to replay a user's request lifecycle. In an enterprise web application, this is a lot of work and I'm not happy to tell you not many people are doing it right.
 +
 +
There's generally two things development teams have to figure out when architecting a logging strategy; what to log and when to log.
 +
 +
===When to Log===
 +
There's sdfsdf
 +
sdfsdfsdf
 +
sdfsdfsdf
 +
 +
===What to Log===
 +
There's a general consensus on what kind of information an application log message should contain:
 +
 +
*date and time
 +
*server IP
 +
*source IP
 +
*URL requested
 +
*module/action/class responsible
 +
*user ID
 +
*description of the event
 +
*severity level
 +
 +
Whether you're investigating your web application's log files as part of a regular monitoring program or incident response, you should be able to follow a user's request lifecycle, all the way from the receival of the request (before the invocation of any HTTP filters).
 +
 +
===References===
 
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/aa302420.aspx#c04618429_004
 
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/aa302420.aspx#c04618429_004

Latest revision as of 02:29, 8 August 2007

The Problem

Identity Flow Through Application Layers

All web application security experts will tell you how important logging is [1][2][3][4]. How else can you detect attacks, successful or otherwise? Logs should allow you to replay a user's request lifecycle. In an enterprise web application, this is a lot of work and I'm not happy to tell you not many people are doing it right.

There's generally two things development teams have to figure out when architecting a logging strategy; what to log and when to log.

When to Log

There's sdfsdf sdfsdfsdf sdfsdfsdf

What to Log

There's a general consensus on what kind of information an application log message should contain:

  • date and time
  • server IP
  • source IP
  • URL requested
  • module/action/class responsible
  • user ID
  • description of the event
  • severity level

Whether you're investigating your web application's log files as part of a regular monitoring program or incident response, you should be able to follow a user's request lifecycle, all the way from the receival of the request (before the invocation of any HTTP filters).

References

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/aa302420.aspx#c04618429_004