ESAPI Swingset Interactive - ValidateUserInput

Background

Validation is the cornerstone of a secure application.

The most common web application security weakness is the failure to properly validate input from the client or environment. This weakness leads to almost all of the major vulnerabilities in applications, such as Interpreter Injection, locale/Unicode attacks, file system attacks and buffer overflows. Data from the client should never be trusted for the client has every possibility to tamper with the data.

In many cases, Encoding has the potential to defuse attacks that rely on lack of input validation. For example, if you use HTML entity encoding on user input before it is sent to a browser, it will prevent most XSS attacks. However, simply preventing attacks is not enough - you must perform Intrusion Detection in your applications. Otherwise, you are allowing attackers to repeatedly attack your application until they find a vulnerability that you haven't protected against. Detecting attempts to find these weaknesses is a critical protection mechanism.

Input validation using ESAPI's Validator interface:

The Validator interface defines a set of methods for canonicalizing and validating untrusted input. Implementors should feel free to extend this interface to accommodate their own data formats. Rather than throw exceptions, this interface returns boolean results because not all validation problems are security issues. Boolean returns allow developers to handle both valid and invalid results more cleanly than exceptions.

This lesson demonstrates the use of ESAPI's Validator interface to validate user input. In the unmodified lab page, the user input is not validated, any input in the box becomes a part of the webpage.

If you enter a script in the field, it will become a part of the page and will run.

EXAMPLE: <script>alert(document.cookie)</script>

To fix this problem, we can use the following function of the ESAPI's Validator interface

ESAPI.validator().getValidInput(String context,String input,String type,int maxLength,boolean allowNull,ValidationErrorList errorList)

It Returns canonicalized and validated input as a String. Invalid input will generate a descriptive ValidationException, and input that is clearly an attack will generate a descriptive IntrusionException. Instead of throwing a ValidationException on error, this variant will store the exception inside of the ValidationErrorList.

ESAPI's Validator Interface includes following functions:

OWASP Enterprise Security API Project