Security Explained

[aw]

My company is looking for an explanation of how Lift is secure.

I recall reading a comment saying that Lift deals well with most of
the Top 10 OWASP vulnerabilities (http://www.owasp.org/index.php/
Top_10_2007), but how? Most, not all? Are there strategies that are
recommended to deal with the weaknesses?

I am very interested in a Wiki post that explains how Lift addresses
the top 10 vulnerabilities. (No pressure, but I needed this
yesterday.) Please point me to any existing resource/documentation
that explains this.

Very often, I see points that mention how secure Lift is, and I
certainly appreciate the fact that Lift promotes security as a core
initiative. I can also see how secure it is compared to other
strategies (yeah, you heard me ColdFusion!). Keep up the good work.


Does anybody have experience submitting Lift Apps to third party
security assessment or vulnerability analysis? Any tips from that
experience?

[David Pollak]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:49 AM, aw <ant...@whitford.com> wrote:

My company is looking for an explanation of how Lift is secure.

I recall reading a comment saying that Lift deals well with most of
the Top 10 OWASP vulnerabilities (http://www.owasp.org/index.php/
Top_10_2007), but how?  Most, not all?  Are there strategies that are
recommended to deal with the weaknesses?

Quickly:

1. Lift is resistant to XSS attacks.  By default pages are composed in XML rather than Strings.  It takes the developer extra work to insert XSS strings into output rather than having to make sure each String is properly escaped before being cat'ed to the output.
2. Lift is resistant to SQL Injection attacks because mapper and JPA do not compose Strings into SQL statements, but rather bind well typed parameters into prepared statements.  So, if you go the normal path, you get SQL injection resistance.  If you want to manually craft a String to send as a query, in mapper you have to "sign" the string with the time, date and a certification that you've reviewed the String for SQL Injection problems.
3. Lift never shells out.  You can't cause a file to be executed from a Lift app unless your app manually uses Java's Runtime.execute() call.
4. By default, Lift creates opaque GUIDs to refer to components on the server side (whether that's a function to execute when a form field is submitted, what to do on an Ajax call, etc.)  By default, it's easier to use this callback mechanism than advertise a primary key or other sensitive piece of information.  Lift also has the KeyObfuscator which will create a session-specific mapping of primary keys to opaque ids.  Using KeyObfuscator, you can send JSON objects to the client with stable primary keys that are obfuscated and not usable outside the current session.
5. By default Lift's form fields contain GUIDs that are cryptographically impossible to predict.  It's not possible to do CSRF because one does not know the name of form fields (they are not stable)
6. Lift has different production vs. development mode error messages.  There's little information that leaks about underlying configurations, even exceptions, in production mode.
7. Lift uses the container's session management (usually JSESSIONID) for session management.  As far as I know, Jetty, Tomcat, Glassfish are secure in terms of the way they deal with sessions.  Of course, anything that's not over SSL is vulnerable to a cookie stealing attack.
8. Crypto key storage is a container-level issue.  See #7
9. See #7
10. Lift's sitemap is the best and most secure integration of UI and page-level access.  You can look at the sitemap to determine the access control rules for a given page (it's declarative) and it's enforced long before your page gets accessed.

Hope this helps.
 

I am very interested in a Wiki post that explains how Lift addresses
the top 10 vulnerabilities.  (No pressure, but I needed this
yesterday.)  Please point me to any existing resource/documentation
that explains this.

Very often, I see points that mention how secure Lift is, and I
certainly appreciate the fact that Lift promotes security as a core
initiative.  I can also see how secure it is compared to other
strategies (yeah, you heard me ColdFusion!).  Keep up the good work.


Does anybody have experience submitting Lift Apps to third party
security assessment or vulnerability analysis?  Any tips from that
experience?

--
Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net
Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890
Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Surf the harmonics

[Randinn]

I've been pondering this for some time, could an actor be used as a
cookie, if so would that render the stealing attack mote?

>    7. Lift uses the container's session management (usually JSESSIONID) for

[David Pollak]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Randinn <ran...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been pondering this for some time, could an actor be used as a
cookie,

No
 

if so would that render the stealing attack mote?

>    7. Lift uses the container's session management (usually JSESSIONID) for

>    session management.  As far as I know, Jetty, Tomcat, Glassfish are secure
>    in terms of the way they deal with sessions.  Of course, anything that's not
>    over SSL is vulnerable to a cookie stealing attack.

[aw]

Thank you for this, and so quickly! I was able to leverage this for
what I needed.