Premature Ajax-ulation
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Ajax on
The Blackhat security conference in Las Vegas has come up trumps in the bad puns but good advice stakes, with SPI Labs warning business about the dangers of premature Ajax-ulation.
What researchers Bryan Sullivan and Billy Hoffman were actually referring to was the threat of web developers relying too much upon their urge to use Ajax techniques. Techniques, the researchers claim, that can force far too much business logic over to the client side and as a result enable user manipulation leading to security breaches.
Demonstrating their logic with the use of SQl and XPath injection exploits, the pair built a travel site which could be easily hacked to trick the system into not only blocking the sale of tickets for any given flight, but also to reduce the cost of the tickets being purchased. Sounds good to me, cheap tickets and an empty plane! Probably wouldn’t sound so good to the travel agent if it had been a genuine site though.
The whole area of web application security is something that needs to be taken much more seriously than it would appear to be at the moment, as more and more companies seek to get that competitive edge by leveraging Ajax technologies. A dynamic web is a great thing which holds much promise, but if basic security tenets are ignored in a rush to get to market advantage, well it doesn’t take a genius to predict how quickly that advantage will turn sour.
Hoffman says “Ajax applications run more code on the client than traditional web applications, this provides an attacker with all kinds of insight into how Ajax applications function, such as what web services it talks to, the function names and variable data types, as well as the control flow of Ajax applications and how data is stored.”
I’d be inclined to listen to the man.
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