What is the difference between encryption and hashing?
Filed under: Development, Security
Encryption is a reversible process, whereas hashing is one-way only. Data that has been encrypted can be decrypted back to the original value. Data that has been hashed cannot be transformed back to its original value. Encryption is used to protect sensitive information like Social Security Numbers, credit card numbers ...
XmlSecureResolver: XXE in .Net
Filed under: Development, Security, Testing
tl;dr Microsoft .Net 4.5.2 and above protect against XXE by default.It is possible to become vulnerable by explicitly setting a XmlUrlResolver on an XmlDocument.A secure alternative is to use the XmlSecureResolver object which can limit allowed domains.XmlSecureResolver appeared to work correctly in .Net 4.X, but did not appear to work ...
Input Validation for Security
Filed under: Development, Security
Validating input is an important step for reducing risk to our applications. It might not eliminate the risk, and for that reason we should consider what exactly we are doing with input validation. Should you be looking for every attack possible? Should you create a list of every known malicious payload?...
Chrome is making some changes… Are you Ready?
Filed under: Development, Security
Last year, Chrome announced that it was making a change to default cookies to SameSite:Lax if there is no SameSite setting explicitly set. I wrote about this change last year (https://www.jardinesoftware.net/2019/10/28/samesite-by-default-in-2020/). This change could have an impact on some sites, so it is important that you test this out. The changes are supposed ...
SameSite By Default in 2020?
Filed under: Development, Security, Testing
If you haven't seen, Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is getting a big protection by default in 2020. Currently, most protections need to be implemented explicitly. While we are seeing some nonces included and checked by default (Razor Pages), you typically still need to explicitly check the nonce. This requires that the developers understand that ...
XXE DoS and .Net
Filed under: Development, Security
External XML Entity (XXE) vulnerabilities can be more than just a risk of remote code execution (RCE), information leakage, or server side request forgery (SSRF). A denial of service (DoS) attack is commonly overlooked. However, given a mis-configured XML parser, it may be possible for an attacker to cause a denial of service attack and ...
Overview of Web Security Policies
Filed under: Development, Security, Testing
A vulnerability was just identified in your website. How would you know? The process of vulnerability disclosure to an organization is often very difficult to identify. Whether you are offering any type of bounty for security bugs or not, it is important that there is a clear path for someone to notify you of a potential ...
Intro to npm-audit
Our applications rely more and more on external packages to enable quick deployment and ease of development. While these packages help reduce the code we have to write ourselves, it still may present risk to our application. If you are building Nodejs applications, you are probably using npm to manage your packages. For those ...
XSS in Script Tag
Filed under: Development, Security, Testing
Cross-site scripting is a pretty common vulnerability, even with many of the new advances in UI frameworks. One of the first things we mention when discussing the vulnerability is to understand the context. Is it HTML, Attribute, JavaScript, etc.? This understanding helps us better understand the types of characters that can be used to expose ...
JavaScript in an HREF or SRC Attribute
Filed under: Development, Security, Testing
The anchor (<a>) HTML tag is commonly used to provide a clickable link for a user to navigate to another page. Did you know it is also possible to set the HREF attribute to execute JavaScript. A common technique is to use the onclick event of the anchor tab to execute a JavaScript method when ...
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