Jeff, I believe it is the responsibility of the application to secure itself against XSS attacks, and not the web container's. As you know, the web container really has no way to differentiate between legitimate and "tainted" content in the output stream.  The container could do paranoid things such as replacing suspicous characters when it logs request URIs.  But, as you say, that type of approach could be seen as too heavy handed.

Best wishes,
Paul

On 1/18/06, Jeff Genender <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
Where I am going at with this...is this a vulnerability caused by coding
the apps, or the containers themselves?

i.e., Will I have this problem with a perl app running on httpd? or
ASP/C# on IIS?  Is this type of vulnerability a facet of responsibility
that lies on the container, or the developer?

I am just trying to assess this as a true vulnerability from a web
container perspective.  I am assuming, that yes, the container could
change the < and > to lt&; and gt&;.  But, I am wondering where we draw
the line and wonder if that is too heavy handed.

If the other web servers provide protection from this, then I guess its
safe to assume we should follow the pack. OTOH, I surely would not want
to take away too much responsibility of the developer to ensure they are
properly securing their own apps, while maintaining a bit of flexibility
for them.

Jeff

Kevan Miller wrote:
>
> On Jan 18, 2006, at 11:24 AM, Jeff Genender wrote:
>
>> So assuming this appears to be somewhat "examples" related, is this
>> truly a container problem, or just the jsp examples implementation?
>
> IANASE, but it seems that any vulnerabilities must be fixed in the apps
> themselves -- certainly seems like the only course of action for G
> 1.0.1. I'm currently aware of problems with samples and the admin console.
>
> Apps must insure they return appropriate content to clients. I don't see
> how a container could provide general XSS protection... I'm sure there
> are people who know much more than I on the topic...
>
> --kevan

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