Google Releases a Web-App Case Study For Hackers 95
Hugh Pickens writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Google has released Jarlsberg, a 'small, cheesy' web application specifically designed to be full of bugs and security flaws as a security tutorial for coders, and encourages programmers to try their hands at exploiting weaknesses in Jarlsberg as a way of teaching them how to avoid similar vulnerabilities in their own code. Jarlsberg has multiple security bugs ranging from cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery, to information disclosure, denial of service, and remote code execution. The codelab is organized by types of vulnerabilities." (Read on for more.)
"In black box hacking, users try to find security bugs by experimenting with the application and manipulating input fields and URL parameters, trying to cause application errors, and looking at the HTTP requests and responses to guess server behavior while in white-box hacking, users have access to the source code and can use automated or manual analysis to identify bugs. The tutorial notes that accessing or attacking a computer system without authorization is illegal in many jurisdictions but while doing this codelab, users are specifically granted authorization to attack the Jarlsberg application as directed."
Re:That's brilliant (Score:4, Interesting)
Five bucks says we start seeing this code in copy-paste applications soon because people too lazy to write and understand the code they're producing are also to lazy to look where the code came from...
the problem with learning insecurity from web-devs (Score:3, Interesting)
"This codelab doesn't cover overflow vulnerabilities because Jarlsberg is written in Python, and therefore not vulnerable to typical buffer and integer overflow problems. Python won't allow you to read or write outside the bounds of an array and integers can't overflow. While C and C++ programs are most commonly known to expose these vulnerabilities, other languages are not immune. For example, while Java was designed to prevent buffer overflows, it silently ignores integer overflow. "
The thing is google of all organizations, and specifically appspot should know better. I mean, I [seclists.org] already [seclists.org] told [eusecwest.com] them [eusecwest.com]. I mean seriously, look at this [python.org].
Of particular interest is: http://bugs.python.org/issue2620 [python.org]
Just stop with this incessant bullshit 'lol hey my program-by-number language of choice doesnt have memory corruption security issues@#@!#'. It's all assembly at the end, and the processor does whatever you tell it, so everything has this problem. I thought this would be clear from my work, Dowd's actionscript work, nemo's obj-c work, ilja's pascal work, brezinski & mcdonalds ruby work, et cetera.
In short, when you try to talk about things you don't know, especially in the realm of security; you do more harm than good.