| Name | esotericargot |
|---|---|
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| Posts | 1 |
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- 2008-07-08 16:07:29
- Minimizing the Attack Surface
- Board >> Conference Center >> Technical Tidbits
- Good articles by Chris Eng:
What I’ve observed is that most development groups, even the ones who actively engage in threat modeling, do not understand their web application’s attack surface. The lead architect can whiteboard a high-level diagram of all the major components and how they interact. Individual developers can go a bit deeper, telling you which files they touch, what database permissions they need, or how various pieces of data are encrypted in storage. At the end of this exercise you have a complete picture of the processes, data flows, protocols, privilege boundaries, external entities, and so on, and you’re well on your way to understanding all of the potential attack vectors.
Or are you?
What often gets overlooked or glossed over is the impact of external libraries or packages. Nobody writes everything from scratch. A typical list of third-party libraries for a Java-based Web 2.0 application might include DWR, GWT, Axis, and Dojo, plus about 30 other libraries to do everything from logging to parsing to image manipulation. Nine out of ten times, the libraries will be installed in full, using the default configuration from page one of the README file.
Why is this relevant? Because just as those old Unix boxes exposed unnecessary services, libraries expose unnecessary code. Let’s say you installed Dojo to simplify the process of creating an HTML table with rows and columns that can be sorted on demand. Did you remember to remove all the .js files you didn’t need? Or maybe you installed Axis or DWR or anything else that has its own Servlet(s) for processing requests. Have you compared what that Servlet can do against what you need it to do?
