Security
Security is todays most important cross-cutting concern of an application and an enterprise IT-landscape. We seriously care about security and give you detailed guides to prevent pitfalls, vulnerabilities, and other disasters. While many mistakes can be avoided by following our guidelines you still have to consider security and think about it in your design and implementation. The security guide will not only automatically prevent you from any harm, but will provide you hints and best practices already used in different software products.
An important aspect of security is proper authentication and authorization as described in access-control. In the following we discuss about potential vulnerabilities and protection to prevent them.
Vulnerabilities and Protection
Independent from classical authentication and authorization mechanisms there are many common pitfalls that can lead to vulnerabilities and security issues in your application such as XSS, CSRF, SQL-injection, log-forging, etc. A good source of information about this is the OWASP. We address these common threats individually in security sections of our technological guides as a concrete solution to prevent an attack typically depends on the according technology. The following table illustrates common threats and contains links to the solutions and protection-mechanisms provided by the devonfw:
| Threat | Protection | Link to details |
|---|---|---|
validate input, escape output, use proper frameworks |
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encrypt all channels, use a central identity management with strong password-policy |
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Use secured exception facade, design your data model accordingly |
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Prefer JSON over XML, ensure FSP when parsing (external) XML |
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Ensure proper authorization for all use-cases, use |
Access-control guide especially method authorization |
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Use devon4j application template and guides to avoid |
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prevent injection (see A1) for HTML, JavaScript and CSS and understand same-origin-policy |
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Use simple and established serialization formats such as JSON, prevent generic deserialization (for polymorphic types) |
JSON guide especially inheritence, XML guide |
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subscribe to security newsletters, recheck products and their versions continuously, use devonfw dependency management |
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Ensure to log all security related events (login, logout, errors), establish effective monitoring |
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Using direct object references (IDs) only with appropriate authorization |
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secure mutable service operations with an explicit CSRF security token sent in HTTP header and verified on the server |
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Escape newlines in log messages |
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Avoid using redirects and forwards, in case you need them do a security audit on the solution. |
devonfw proposes to use rich-clients (SPA/RIA). We only use redirects for login in a safe way. |
Advanced Security
While OWASP Top 10 covers the basic aspects of application security, there are advanced standards such as AVS.
In devonfw we address this in the
Application Security Quick Solution Guide.
Tools
Dependency Check
To address the thread Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities we recomment to use OWASP dependency check that ships with a maven plugin and can analyze your dependencies for known CVEs.
In order to run this check, you can simply call this command on any maven project:
mvn org.owasp:dependency-check-maven:6.1.5:aggregate|
Note
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The version is just for completeness. You should check yourself for using a recent version of the plugin. |
If you build an devon4j spring application from our app-template you can activate the dependency check even easier with the security profile:
mvn clean install -P securityThis does not run by default as it causes some overhead for the build performance. However, consider to build this in your CI at least nightly.
After the dependency check is performed, you will find the results in target/dependency-check-report.html of each module. The report will also be generated when the site is build (mvn site) even without the profile.
Penetration Testing
For penetration testing (testing for vulnerabilities) of your web application, we recommend the following tools:
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ZAP (OWASP Zed Attack Proxy Project)
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See the marvelous presentation Toolbox of a security professional from Christian Schneider.