CRV2 FrameworkSpecIssuesdotNetMVC

= ASP.NET Security – MVC =

Traditional ASP.NET applications do not suffer from XSS attacks, contrary to MVC ASP.NET applications. When MVC web apps are exposed to malicious XSS code, they will not throw an errors. To avoid this vulnerability, make sure that use use the following code snipet:

<%server.HtmlEncode(stringValue)%>

The HTMLEncode method applies HTML encoding to a specified string. This is useful as a quick method of encoding form data and other client request data before using it in your Web application. Encoding data converts potentially unsafe characters to their HTML-encoded equivalent.(MSDN,2013)

Protection against SQL injections
The best solution to avoid this OWASP #1 in the top ten list of security vulnerabilities is to use Parameterized queries .Equivalent to these solution, the use the use of Stored procedures is also a form of parameterized queries.

Use an ORM(Object Relational Mapper)
ORM’s are a real blessing regarding protection against SQL injection. By default, the use of ORM will automatically send all SQL request as parameterized queries, however, it’s important to keep in mind that this form of security can be easily bypassed if the developer uses unparameterized HQL or Entity SQL queries dynamically with string concatenations

Request Validation feature against XSS attacks
ASP.NET comes with a built-in request validation feature. This feature was added in the ASP.NET version 1.1, in addition this feature is enabled by default. Once a malformed request containing any HTML tags in send, ASP.NET will simply display an error as shown in the following figure

Unfortunately, this inherent feature can also create issues when legitimate requests are sent by users who need to submit data containing certain kind of characters such as brackets. Another disadvantage is that this does not avoid any attacks originated from other application or if stored in the database, neither will offer any protection when input is injected in HTML attributes.

MVC’s CSFR anti-forgery system
This is one handy feature found in .NET which contra rest the #8 owasp top 10 security issue.

Use Anti-forgery Helpers
There are 2 methods which a developer can use to avoid CSFR attacks, these are Html.AntiForgeryToken and the filter [ValidateAntiForgeryToken]. To use these features, call the AntiForgeryToken method from within your form, and add the ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute to the action method you want to protect. A combination between the Html.AntiForgeryToken and Ajax.ActionLink is a recommended way to go in order to make sure that no attacker can send a false deletion request

$.ajaxPrefilter(      function (options, localOptions, jqXHR) {           if (options.type !== "GET") {               var token = GetAntiForgeryToken;               if (token !== null) {                   if (options.data.indexOf("X-Requested-With") === -1) {                       options.data = "X-Requested-With=XMLHttpRequest" + (options.data === "") ? "" : "&" + options.data;                   }                   options.data = options.data + "&" + token.name + '=' + token.value;               }           }       }       );

Limitations

 * Users must accept cookies otherwise the [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] will deny their form’s posts
 * Works only with POST request
 * Can be bypassed if the application has XSS vulnerabilities since it will be possible to read _RequestVerificationToken value