the tangled web a guide to securing modern web applications

[...]... flaws and implementation shortcomings of the World Wide Web are those of a technology that never aspired to its current status and never had a chance to pause and look back at previous mistakes The resulting issues have quickly emerged as some of the most significant and prevalent threats to data security today: As it turns out, the protocol design standards one would apply to a black-on-gray home page... zone After all, even the best-designed and most thoroughly audited web applications have far more issues, far more frequently, than their nonweb counterparts We all messed up, and it is time to repent In the interest of repentance, The Tangled Web tries to take a small step toward much-needed normalcy, and as such, it may be the first publication to provide a systematic and thorough analysis of the. .. ta i l PREFACE Just fifteen years ago, the Web was as simple as it was unimportant: a quirky mechanism that allowed a handful of students, plus a bunch of asocial, basementdwelling geeks, to visit each other’s home pages dedicated to science, pets, or poetry Today, it is the platform of choice for writing complex, interactive applications (from mail clients to image editors to computer games) and a. .. as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise One could argue that practitioners are not the ones to be asked for nuanced definitions, but go ahead and pose the same question to a group of academics and they’ll offer you roughly the same answer For example, the following common academic definition traces back to the Bell-La Padula security model, published in the 1960s (This was one of about... inherently relative The paper also provides a retrospective assessment of earlier efforts and the unacceptable sacrifices made to preserve the theoretical purity of said models: Experience has shown that, on one hand, the axioms of the BellLa Padula model are overly restrictive: they disallow operations that users require in practical applications On the other hand, trusted subjects, which are the mechanism... grew as a result of its operating system–bundling strategy By the beginning of the new decade, Netscape Navigator was on the way out, and Internet Explorer * For example, Microsoft did not want to deal with Sun to license a trademark for JavaScript (a language so named for promotional reasons and not because it had anything to do with Java), so it opted to name its almost-but-not-exactly-identical version... not translate to mathematical models particularly well Several exotic approaches will allow such vague requirements to be at least partly formalized, but they put heavy constraints on softwareengineering processes and often result in rulesets and models that are far more complicated than the validated algorithms themselves And, in turn, they are likely to need their own correctness to be proven ad... culminating with the attacker gaining access to, and leaking data from, internal source code repositories At least to the general public, the perpetrator remains unknown Security in the World of Web Appli cati ons 5  Statistical forecasting is not a robust predictor of individual outcomes Simply because on average people in cities are more likely to be hit by lightning than mauled by a bear does not mean... how to use the available tools safely, which bits of the Web are commonly misunderstood, and how to control collateral damage when things go boom And that is, pretty much, the best take on security engineering that I can think of A Brief History of the Web The Web has been plagued by a perplexing number, and a remarkable variety, of security issues Certainly, some of these problems can be attributed to. .. document all the newly added code Core HTML tweaks ranged from the silly (the ability to make text blink, a Netscape invention that became the butt of jokes and a telltale sign of misguided web design) to notable ones, such as the ability to change typefaces or embed external documents in so-called frames Vendors released their products with embedded programming languages such as JavaScript and Visual Basic, . in a trade jour- nal three decades ago. And why should they care about web security, anyway? What is the impact of an obscene comment injected onto a dull pet-themed home page compared to the. flaws. The term describes any vector that allows the attacker to trick a program into misusing some “authority” (access privileges) to manipulate a resource in an unintended manner—presumably. Preface and implementation shortcomings of the World Wide Web are those of a technology that never aspired to its current status and never had a chance to pause and look back at previous mistakes.