Jim Manico wrote... > Rafal, > > It's not that tough to blacklist this vuln while you are waiting for your > team to patch your JVM (IBM and other JVM's have not even patched yet). > I've seen three generations of this filter already. Walk with me, Rafal and > I'll show you. :) > > 1) Generation 1 WAF rule (reject one number only) > > This mod security rule only blocks a small portion of the DOSable range. > The mod security team is working to improve this now (no disrespect meant > at all!) > > SecRule ARGS|REQUEST_HEADERS "@contains 2.2250738585072012e-308" > "phase:2,block,msg:'Java Floating Point DoS Attack',tag:'CVE-2010-4476'" > > Reference: http://mobile.twitter.com/modsecurity/status/35734652652093441 >
Depending how & when the exponent conversion is done, this mod_security rule may be completely ineffective. For example, if an attacker can write this floating point # as the equivalent 22.250738585072012e-309 (which note, I have not tested), then the test above is invalid. I presumed that this was why Adobe's blacklist *first* removed the decimal point. Adobe's blacklist could be generalized a bit to cover appropriate ranges with a regular expression, but I agree wholeheartedly with you that what you dubbed as the "Chess Defense" (I like it) is the best approach short of getting a fix from the vendor of your JRE. So on a somewhat related note, does anyone have any idea as to how common it is for application developers to call ServletRequest.getLocale() or ServletRequest.getLocales() for Tomcat applications? Just curious. I'm sure it's a lot more common than developers using double-precision floating point in their applications (with the possible exception within the scientific computing community). -kevin --- Kevin W. Wall Qwest Risk Mgmt / Information Security kevin.w...@qwest.com Phone: 614.215.4788 "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" - Edsger Dijkstra, How do we tell truths that matter? http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html This communication is the property of Qwest and may contain confidential or privileged information. Unauthorized use of this communication is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the communication and any attachments. _______________________________________________ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php SC-L is hosted and moderated by KRvW Associates, LLC (http://www.KRvW.com) as a free, non-commercial service to the software security community. Follow KRvW Associates on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/KRvW_Associates _______________________________________________