Security Features

Unlike some low level frameworks Seaside offers built in protection against many common web application vulnerabilities.

Attacks

This is how Seaside protects you against common attacks against your web application.

Session Fixation

Session fixation is not possible because client supplied session ids are ignored when no matching session is found. Review the implementors of #noHandlerFoundForKey:in:context:.

Further information:

• https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Session_fixation

Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

The Seaside templating engine "the render canvas" escapes all output by default. It therefore adopts a safe by default policy. Special effort has to be taken to render values without escaping. Such places can easily be found and audited by looking at all the senders of #html:.

Further information:

• https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/xss/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
• https://wonko.com/post/html-escaping

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Seaside uses a capability based security model where only handles to actions are handed to the client. These handles are bound to a state snapshot (continuation). The state snapshots are identified by a random number which is session specific and acts like a CSRF token.

It is important that this only applies to "traditional" usage of Seaside with sessions and components, this does not apply to Seaside-REST where Seaside provides no built-in protection against CSRF.

Further information:

• https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/csrf

Response Splitting

Seaside prevents response splitting does by not allowing CR or LF values in HTTP headers.

Further information:

• https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/HTTP_Response_Splitting
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_response_splitting
• https://nealpoole.com/blog/2011/01/http-response-splitting-on-reddit-com/

Malicious File Execution

Since Seaside is not executing files or templates it is not vulnerable to malicious file execution.

Further information:

• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2007-A3

Features

In addition to the protections against the attacks above Seaside offers the following security related features.

Capabilities

Seaside uses a capability based security model where only handles to actions are handed to the client. These handles are bound to a state snapshot (continuation).

Strict Transport Security (STS)

Seaside offers the built in WAStrictTransportSecurityFilter that adds a Strict-Transport-Security and redirects to the HTTPS version of the current URL.

Further information:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security

DoS

Seaside offers limited protection against DoS-attacks by offering the option to limit the amount of session.

In general Seaside has not been throughly reviewed to make sure it is not vulnerable to:

• hash collisions
• request headers (body size)

Further information:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
• https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Denial_of_Service

Arbitrary Code Execution

Seaside does not interpret or execute data sent by the client. However some Smalltalk dialects have what is essentially an implementation of eval() in the form of Object class >> #readFrom:. You have to review that you never pass user input to this method either directly or indirectly, eg. in the form of Boolean class >> #readFrom:

Further Information

• Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)
• Ruby On Rails Security Guide
• 4 HTTP Security headers you should always be using