guide-security.asciidoc

Table of Contents

• Security
  • Vulnerabilities and Protection
  • Advanced Security
  • Tools
    • Dependency Check
    • Penetration Testing

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:

Table 1. Security threats and protection-mechanisms

Threat	Protection	Link to details
A1 Injection	validate input, escape output, use proper frameworks	SQL Injection
A2 Broken Authentication	encrypt all channels, use a central identity management with strong password-policy	Authentication
A3 Sensitive Data Exposure	Use secured exception facade, design your data model accordingly	REST exception handling
A4 XML External Entities	Prefer JSON over XML, ensure FSP when parsing (external) XML	XML guide
A5 Broken Access Control	Ensure proper authorization for all use-cases, use @DenyAll as default to enforce	Access-control guide especially method authorization
A6 Security Misconfiguration	Use devon4j application template and guides to avoid	tutorial-newapp and sensitive configuration
A7 Cross-Site Scripting	prevent injection (see A1) for HTML, JavaScript and CSS and understand same-origin-policy	client-layer
A8 Insecure Deserialization	Use simple and established serialization formats such as JSON, prevent generic deserialization (for polymorphic types)	JSON guide especially inheritence, XML guide
A9 Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities	subscribe to security newsletters, recheck products and their versions continuously, use devonfw dependency management	CVE newsletter and dependency check
A10 Insufficient_Logging & Monitoring	Ensure to log all security related events (login, logout, errors), establish effective monitoring	Logging guide and monitoring guide
Insecure Direct Object References	Using direct object references (IDs) only with appropriate authorization	logic-layer
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)	secure mutable service operations with an explicit CSRF security token sent in HTTP header and verified on the server	CSRF guide
Log-Forging	Escape newlines in log messages	logging security
Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards	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	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 security

This 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:

• ZAP (OWASP Zed Attack Proxy Project)

• sqlmap (or HQLmap)

• nmap

• See the marvelous presentation Toolbox of a security professional from Christian Schneider.