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.

Women, Development, Analysis and Accusations

According to some statistics, tech women leave the field more often then men. The same statistics shows us going into analysis a lot and that career move is supposed to show that women are mistreated by hostile tech culture.

I have no problem with the stats themselves. If they show women moving from tech to analysis, then it is what it is. What I do have a problem with is the implication.

If one dislikes communication with male tech colleges, moving into analysis is likely to be a monumental mistake. Significant part of analyst job is to communicate with techies. In a sense, communication with techies is the job itself. Women in tech know this.