Vulnerability In Java Commons Library Leads To Hundreds of Insecure Applications (foxglovesecurity.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Breen from the FoxGlove Security team is calling attention to what he calls the "most underrated, underhyped vulnerability of 2015." It's a remote code execution exploit that affects the latest versions of WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Jenkins, and OpenMMS, and many other pieces of software. How? An extremely common Java library. He says, "No one gave it a fancy name, there were no press releases, nobody called Mandiant to come put out the fires. In fact, even though proof of concept code was released over 9 months ago, none of the products mentioned in the title of the blog post have been patched, along with many more. In fact no patch is available for the Java library containing the vulnerability. In addition to any commercial products that are vulnerable, this also affects many custom applications.

Comments

Re:Too much hype for what it actually is

[DarkOx]

2) Accept said user input and sanitize it.

Good luck with that! its like accepting user input that you are going to insert into a javascript string to write back to the client in a web application. No matter what you have done to sanitize it there is still almost always a hole. You just can't safely inject user controlled content into an interpreter or execution context, less the syntax is really well defined and limited. Consider SQL injection, SQL syntax and grammar is pretty specific yet it too 10 years before functions like 'escapestrings' became dependable in major frameworks and everyone had rightly moved on to tools like parametrized queries or solutions like linq by then.

Thinking you can take a object as an external input from anything but a trusted source is asking for trouble. If you do trust the source than the input domain is probably limited to begin with and there is almost certainly a better way.