[Seaside] Security

[Randal L. Schwartz]

>>>>> "Ross" == Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org> writes:

Ross> First, the attacker could pretend to be someone else.  I need Seaside to
Ross> identify accurately who the requestor is or to reject forged requests
Ross> before they get to my code.  Previous discussion on the list indicates
Ross> that, with suitable precautions, an outsider can not hijack an existing
Ross> session.  Can someone with a legitimate session assume another identity?
Ross> Can someone without a session assume an identity?

Seaside doesn't know "identity".  That's all in your app code.  All seaside is
going to do with the incoming values is reawaken your session-saved state,
including the state of all components.  If one of those values is your
app-defined "identity", that's up to you to manage properly.

Ross> Second, the request could attempt to execute some code that is outside
Ross> the normal flow of operations.  I don't know if the latter is possible
Ross> with Seaside; in other frameworks such as Zope it is possible (and it
Ross> has security systems to keep this in check).  Or they could start
Ross> traversing the object graph, even with the debugging interface off.
Ross> Again, I'm not clear: are either of these scenarios (access to code or
Ross> objects) possible.  Are they?

Not possible, unless you happen to be silly enough to "eval" incoming
arbitrary strings as Smalltalk code.

Of course, if the Smalltalk VM has a buffer overflow problem, all bets are
off. :) But no known bugs at this time on those.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
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