ANTLR Tutorial - Hello Word

Antlr stands for ANother Tool for Language Recognition. The tool is able to generate compiler or interpreter for any computer language. Besides obvious use, e.g. need to parse a real 'big' programming language such as Java, PHP or SQL, it can help with smaller, more common tasks.

It is useful any time you need to evaluate expressions unknown at compile-time or to parse non-trivial user input or files in a weird format. Of course, it is possible to create custom hand made parser for any of these tasks. However, it usually takes much more time and effort. A little knowledge of a good parser generator may turn these time-consuming tasks into easy and fast exercises.

Testing for XSS Vulnerabilities - Choosing a Scanner

We have decided to introduce testing for security vulnerabilities into web application development. Previous part introduced cross site scripting, our web application and expectations we have for this project.

In this part, we go through all penetration testing tools we could find. Our goal is to find a suitable open source scanner. We wrote mini review of each found tool and picked up two scanners we will use.

Testing for XSS Vulnerabilities - Introduction

Cross site scripting (XSS) is second most popular type of attack on web application. It allows attackers to execute scripts in victim’s browser and perform almost any action on users behalf. For example, script may hijack sessions or redirect the user to malicious sites.

This type of attack is relatively easy to perform and difficult to protect against. There are numerous different attack vectors and attacker needs only some knowledge of web technologies (JavaScript, CSS, HTML) to perform any of them. Moreover, one vulnerable place is enough to make whole application vulnerable.

This series of posts introduces XSS testing to a fictional development team working on a web project. The introduction describes both cross site scripting and fictional project requirements.

AppSensor - Intrusion Detection

Imagine that you have created a nice web application and secured it to your best. Users came, used it and everything was OK until someone stumbled upon vulnerability in your application and used it. Of course, you analyzed logs and found that the bad guy was looking for the vulnerability for weeks until he found one.

Creators of AppSensor intrusion detection framework believe that the above situation should not happen. The application should not just lie there and let itself beat with SQL injections, XSS attacks and whatever else. It should take active measures to protect itself. As the average attacker has to make several attempts to find the vulnerability in the application, it should by possible to detect hacking attempts.

AppSensor - Integration with Shiro

AppSensor is intrusion detection framework described in an another post. Out of the box version assumes that underlying application supports ESAPI interfaces. In this post, we will take an application secured by Shiro framework which does not support ESAPI and integrate it with AppSensor.

This post is only about integration. It does not show how to add AppSensor to the application, nor what it is, nor how to use it. All that can be found in AppSensor - Intrusion Detection post.

Apache Shiro Part 2 - Realms, Database and PGP Certificates

This is second part of series dedicated to Apache Shiro. We started previous part with simple unsecured web application. When we finished, the application had basic authentication and authorization. Users could log in and log out. All web pages and buttons had access rights assigned and enforced. Both authorization and authentication data have been stored in static configuration file.

As we promised in the end of last part, we will move user account data to database. In addition, we will give users an option to authenticate themselves via PGP certificates. As a result, our application will have multiple alternative log in options: log in with user name/password and log in with certificate. We will finish by turning alternative log in options mandatory.

Apache Shiro Part 1 - Basics

Apache Shiro, originally called JSecurity, is Java security framework. It was accepted and became Apache top level project in 2010. It aims to be powerful and easy to be used.

The project is in active development with active both users and developers mailing lists. Most important areas are documented on its web page. However, it has lot of gaps in documentation. It is not possible to learn to use most Shiro features from documentation alone. Luckily, the code is well commented and where I tried it was also easily readable.

Main Shiro features are:

• authentication,
• authorization,
• cryptography,
• session management.

In this article article we try and demonstrate various Shiro features. We start with simple unsecured web application, then we add security features into it.  All code code is available in SimpleShiroSecuredApplication project on Github.