Encrypting parameters

[Stephane Cosmeur <co...@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I would like to improve the security of my web application. My problem is I
would like to encrypt the visible parameters in the URL to prevent user to
change it to access data he should not see.
At start i thought the simple attribute encode of s:url will work for what i
need, but it's not the case. Then i don't believe a such useful feature is
implemented in struts 2.

So what is the best solution to perform it ?

I was thinking to an interceptor which unencrypt each request for each
action and a java function which encry the url in each jsp, but i'm not sure
it's the good way to do it.

Any help would be appreciated !

Regards

-- 
Stéphane Cosmeur

Re: Encrypting parameters

[Dale Newfield <da...@newfield.org>]

On 6/2/10 11:22 PM, Stephane Cosmeur wrote:
> I would like to improve the security of my web application. My problem is I
> would like to encrypt the visible parameters in the URL to prevent user to
> change it to access data he should not see.

No amount of obfuscation can prevent someone from eventually guessing 
other valid parameters, or getting urls from other sources, etc.  If you 
want the data to be secure, obfuscation won't do it.  When those actions 
are doing the lookups, they should take the current user into account, 
only allowing appropriate users to access any given model object.

-Dale

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Re: Encrypting parameters

[Rahul Mohan <ra...@tcs.com>]

Hi,

I don't think its a good idea to expose the URLs to the users in a secure 
application. Avoid GET requests and stick to POST. Also, sticking to 
request forwarding instead of redirects will keep the URL fixed on the 
browser's address bar. You might have some issues with back button because 
of this, but in most business applications this is OK since going back one 
step in some process is anyways not allowed. Combined with HTTPS this will 
give you good enough protection against eavesdropping. But, to protect 
data access, you would still need to enforce some access control on the 
data based on the user credentials.

cheers,
Rahul Mohan



From:
Stephane Cosmeur <co...@gmail.com>
To:
Struts Users Mailing List <us...@struts.apache.org>
Date:
03-06-2010 08:53
Subject:
Encrypting parameters



Hello,

I would like to improve the security of my web application. My problem is 
I
would like to encrypt the visible parameters in the URL to prevent user to
change it to access data he should not see.
At start i thought the simple attribute encode of s:url will work for what 
i
need, but it's not the case. Then i don't believe a such useful feature is
implemented in struts 2.

So what is the best solution to perform it ?

I was thinking to an interceptor which unencrypt each request for each
action and a java function which encry the url in each jsp, but i'm not 
sure
it's the good way to do it.

Any help would be appreciated !

Regards

-- 
Stéphane Cosmeur


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