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A Guide to Building Secure Web Applications
some-guy writes "The Open Web Application Security Project has released
A Guide to Building Secure Web Applications, Version 1.1
"While this document doesn't provide a silver bullet to cure all the ills, we hope it goes a
long way in taking the first step towards helping people understand the inherent problems
in web applications and build more secure web applications and Web Services in the
future...""
I wonder if they are going to cover Project Managment which is the leading cause of poor security. When the project runs short on time security tends to be left till last and when your short on time, functionality out-ranks security (After all what good is the security of the app doesn't work? Right?)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I work at a web application security consulting company and do pen-tests on large corporations web applications regularly. I can tell you from experience that the hype *is* real. I have *never* seen a medium to large sized web application infastructure that does not have holes in it. I have always found a way to get customer records, administrate the site, or some other essential flaw. People do not know how to program securely, or even know that they have to. Guides like this are an excellent. If I were a manager, I would have all of my developers read it.
As far as your "there is no such thing as security" argument, I think it's pretty silly. Yes, if a hacker is ultra hardcore and is going to spend an inordinate amount of time breaking into your ISP's domain server to conduct man in the middle attacks or use advanced 0-day techniques, it is difficult to defend against. But a well designed, programmed, administered and protected (think Snort) system is an incredibly difficult thing to break into. A good IDS will stop unknown buffer overflows. A good administrator will not leave backup files out on the webserver. There is a lot that can be done to improve security to the point where you can be reasonably certain that you are secure. What would you have people do, say "Oh, a really great hacker can get into my system anyway, so I'm not going to bother with security anyway."
I think that one of the bigger problems is the amount of self-started developers who rely on bad examples. When I first started programming Perl (and later PHP), I relied heavily on samples or articles online. In other cases, I picked apart common but easy programs.
As a result of this, my initial coding was functional, but crap. Over 3 months I picked up a better coding style, and on looking back at my initial code I was surprised at how badly it had been written. While there are many good resources for starting to code in a particular language, many of these use shortcut-code to get the message across.
For instance, PHP code that relies on "register_globals" is a bad example. For one thing, it doesn't work on all systems. For another, it can lead to programmers leaving holes or vulnerabilities in their sites. While it may be a pain to use $HTTP_POST_VARS["something"] every time, it's also nice to set an example of the most compatible method for coding.
Crap code is like a virus. If you make crap samples, and then somebody else makes crap samples based on the knowledge gained from your samples... pretty soon you have crap^2. A good thread might be for everyone to list the best known sites for PHP/Perl/etc sample, as well as known coding baddies/goodies.
"AND password=$password", not a good idea - phorm