Robert Auger*
Cesar Currudo
Sverre H. Huseby
Amit Klein
Mitja Kolsek
Matthew Chalmers
Matthieu Estrade
Sverre H. Huseby
Steve Orrin
Caleb Sima

*Project Leader

The 80/20 Rule for Web Application Security
"Increase your security without touching the source code"

By Jeremiah Grossman
Version 1.8
Last Modified: 1/31/2005

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After performing hundreds of web security assessments you're bound to encounter many frighteningly insecure websites. Websites so badly protected you could literally make off with the credit card numbers in a way reminiscent of the movie Gone in Sixty Seconds. On the other hand there are many websites frustratingly impervious to attack. What I'll describe below are the subtle variations between the security "haves" and "have-nots". Using the age old "80/20 rule", we'll look at a few techniques anyone can use to decrease the risk of their website being hacked. And to make it really easy you won't have to alter a single line of code! But before jumping too far ahead lets first discuss the 80/20 rule.

At the beginning of 20th century, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula for describing his country's unequal distribution of wealth. He observed that 80% of the wealth was owned by 20% of the population. Following Pareto's observation, many others noticed similar phenomena in their own areas of expertise. In the 1930s and 1940s, Quality Management pioneer Dr. Joseph Juran observed what he described as the "vital few and trivial many". Juran's identified that 20% of the defects caused 80% of the problems. This has long since been known as Pareto's Principle or "The 80/20 Rule". In the web application security environment, I've noticed similar trends with regard to security safeguards.

The quest for developing perfectly secure code is a noble pursuit. Let the heavens smile down if anyone is actually successful at the endeavor. In the course of managing website security, there's often many occasions where fixing vulnerabilities in the source code is not an available course of action. For example, you might have inherited a website where the original developers are gone and no one is familiar with the application. Your development staff is already heavily burdened by other pressing projects. Maybe you simply have too many websites on your plate to spend quality time securing. Whatever the particular situation fixing the code is just not an option due to time, money, or the lasting benefit. A few security purist may disagree with me on this point, but I think we should have access to alternative security solutions not embedded within the code.

We'll now begin applying Pareto's Principle to certain areas within web application security. Specifically identifying the "vital few" security solutions essential to protecting a website, according to the WASC Threat Classification (http://www.webappsec.org/threat.html), without touching any of the application code. These solutions guard against the most common issues such as SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, worms and more! From this point forward I'm going to assume the security basics have been taken care of. The web server and underlying operating system is up-to-date on patches, and a properly configured firewall is guarding the perimeter.

Disclaimer: The following is a compilation of well-known techniques that should be used in combination with secure coding practices or as a short-term solution towards a more permanent remedy.

The Vital Few

1) Default server error messages

Typically when hackers are looking to exploit websites, they look for the easiest route to take. This usually manifests by testing for Cross-Site Scripting, SQL Injection, OS Commanding, and a few other weaknesses. These issues are the most commonly found type of vulnerability in websites today. Take a look at BugTraq (http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1) if you're interested.

To test for these problems, hackers will lace URL's and post-data requests with certain meta-characters (single quotes, semicolons, less-than-greater-than signs, etc.) in attempts to elicit some type of error message. Standard system error message are the most revealing sign of weakness and invaluable during a break-in attempt.

Take the following URL's for example...

Normal URL:

Modified URL:

The result may produce the following error message:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e14'M
Unclosed quotation mark before the character string '; ORDER BY PageNumbers'.
/articles.asp, line 152

When the error message is received, it's a dead giveaway that there is probably a SQL Injection problem. Further, the error is helpful to the point that it describes the nature of the problem and on which specific line. What the hackers are trying to do is reverse engineer the system to understand the backend SQL query. Once they understand the structure of the query, this specific vulnerability can lead to complete data compromise. This error message makes SQL Injection attacks 10-times easier to exploit.

Suppressing error message can be accomplished at two locations, the web server and application server.

Web Server
When a web server encounters a processing error it should respond with a generic web page, devoid of any revealing debug information. Redirecting to a standard location works equally well.

Apache (version 1.3x and 2.0x are effectively identical)
Syntax: ErrorDocument <3-digit-code>
Example: ErrorDocument 500 /webserver_errors/server_error500.txt

Microsoft IIS
The various software versions have GUI configuration interfaces. Consult these following resources for proper assistance:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/iis/6/all/proddocs/en-us/ cerr_enablingcustom.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/en/server/iis/default.asp?url=/windows2000/ en/server/iis/htm/core/iierrabt.htm

For completeness, error codes of 4xx and 5xx should all be handled in the same fashion.

Application Server
Application servers, such as ColdFusion or WebSphere, may install with certain error messages or debug settings enabled by the default configuration. These features should be suppressed to everyone except perhaps the administrator.

Consult your vendor's documentation for how to lock-down and turn off its specific administrative settings.

Macromedia ColdFusion (mode=debug)

This security technique will increase the difficulty for most of the common Command Execution category attacks from actually succeeding. Including SQL Injection, LDAP Injection, OS Commanding, SSI Injection, XPath Injection, etc. Our goal is to increase the difficultly of hacker reverse engineering the backend system. Without access to informative error messages, the hacker is forced to perform the attack while blind to the system internals. This defense makes these classes of vulnerabilities many times harder for a hacker to detect and further exploit.

2) Remove or protect hidden files and directories

Many times web administrators or developers will leave files on the server not intended for the public. These could be default files, log files, backup files, administrative directories, temporary files, backdoor functionality, press releases, etc. The administrator's assumption is if the location of the file is secret and not directly linked to the contents are safe because no one will ever find it. This is a very dangerous assumption to make with sensitive data at risk.

Most of the time these hidden files have easily guessable names (/admin/, /logs/, /includes/, WS_FTP.LOG, etc.) or common naming conventions (*.bak, *.orig, *.zip). In days long past, hackers hunted for these files by typing directly into the browser location bar. Being a manual process it limited the number attempts a person could make it a given amount of time. Today through a process known as "Forced Browsing" or "Predictable File Location" (WASC Glossary: http://www.webappsec.org/glossary.html#PredictableFileLocation), widely available scanners of the commercial or open source variety have become very adept at testing for tens of thousands of filename variants making the attack much more exhaustive and likely to succeed.

To solve the problem, there are few alternatives to choose from:

a) If the number of web servers or publicly available files is not exceedingly large, you could go through the document root tree by hand. Using find, search for any file not ending with one of your commonly used extensions. (*.html, gif, jpg, etc.). Then proceed directory-by-directory removing any sensitive or non-essential files wherever possible.

If the number of websites or file directories is just too numerous to go through by hand, consider using a scanner. Open source scanning such as Nikto, Paros, Wikto and others can help cut the workload. Commercial scanning products including AppDetective, AppScan, NTOSpider, ScanDo, and WebInspect also do the job well.

b) If the private areas need to remain on the web server, Apache and IIS can be configured to password-protect and/or IP restrict the resources. Even using something as simple as http basic authentication can significantly increase the level of security.

c) If your filesystem (NTFS, EXT2/3, etc.) supports "last access" timestamps, you can also locate files that haven't been accessed in an extended period of time. If you don't need these files, remove them.

d) In your web server configuration turn off Apache "Directory Indexing". Or IIS "Directory Browsing" This feature is commonly used to create web pages on the fly for directories without index files (index.html, default.htm, etc). But this feature can also aid an attacker in locating sensitive files on the web server.

Syntax: Options -Indexes

Microsoft IIS
Within the IIS console, turn off Directory browsing in the web site properties.

e) Google is a powerful resource for identifying many kinds of sensitive data in your website. A few simple searches can reveal a lot. Consult the Google Hacking Database (http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/index.php?module=prodreviews) for information on the various types of searches you can try.

3) Web server security add-ons

IIS Lockdown, URL Scan, mod_security, and SecureIIS are web server security add-ons designed to guard against attacks before being processed further by the web application. Of the many great features within these products, which would take too long to fully explore here, I'll focus on a few of the recommended highlights. At a high level, these add-ons are again great for preventing many of the common attacks like SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, Worms, and Buffer Overflows you're likely to endure.

IIS Lockdown

IIS Lockdown, designed for Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), assists by allowing administrators the ability to easily turn off unnecessary features that might pose a security risk. With IIS Lockdown you can disable unnecessary services, un-map unused file handlers, un-map unused sample scripts and directories, modify permissions, etc. And making configuration a breeze, a GUI-Driven interface and security templates are made available as well.

IIS Lockdown and Urlscan

URL Scan

URL Scan, again designed for IIS, picks up where IIS Lockdown leaves off by focusing on the http request specifically. Attacks on websites are usually achieved by using specially crafted URL's. These URL's may contain special characters, be overly long, or even cleverly encoded to disguise an attack. URL Scan helps by using rules to interrogate several facets of an http request. If anything looks out of the ordinary, an exception can be raised.

If you're already using IIS 6.0, Microsoft recommends you evaluate the need to use URL Scan at all. Most of the important functionality of URL Scan is already included in the web server.

IIS Lockdown and Urlscan


Mod_Security is the Apache equivalent of URL Scan. By working in conjunction with Snort rules, Mod_Security can be used to analyze the legitimacy of an incoming http request. Simple rules can be configured to stop many forms of SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting and a host of other undesirables. But, this is only the beginning. The tool has loads of power when you really dive into it.

Introducing mod_security

Web Security Appliance With Apache and mod_security


A commercial product by Eeye, SecureIIS is a specifically designed as an IIS ISAPI filter to block incoming attacks. Using specially crafted filter rules (no signatures to update), SecureIIS sits between the Internet and the web server SecureIIS to protect against buffer overflows, parser evasions, directory traversal and other attacks. Another good add-on to have.

4) Add httpOnly flag to sensitive cookies

When a hacker Cross-Site Scripts one of your users, cookies are a popular target to steal. Cookie theft can lead to account compromise (session-hijacking) and beyond to outright fraud. A user depends on security practices of a website for protection against Cross-Site Scripting. Users simply can't protect themselves alone. If the latest rounds of Phishing Scam emails that exploit Cross-Site Scripting are any indication, these attacks are bound to happen to everyone sooner or later. While many Cross-Site Scripting defenses revolve around data validation and sanitization, there is another powerful alternative that is not utilized nearly enough. Microsoft created "httpOnly" cookie flag.

Set-Cookie: VAL=012; expires=Monday, 09-Nov-99 23:12:40 GMT; httpOnly

When a cookie is set and tagged with httpOnly, JavaScript is then unable to read the cookie value. Meaning, when a Cross-Site Scripting attack occurs, the hacker gets an empty value from the cookie and stealing it becomes a pointless exercise, thereby making a session hi-jacking attack via Cross-Site Scripting much harder.

Because setting cookies can be done at multiple levels (web server, application server, web application, etc.), I may have to break my promise of "without touching the code". Often times a simple configuration is all that's required with web servers and application servers depending on your distribution. But if a code edit is required, it shouldn't amount to more than editing a single line. Sorry.

At the moment, the httpOnly feature is only supported by recent versions of Internet Explorer (90% market share). The word is the Mozilla Project should be adding the support soon.

Mitigating Cross-site Scripting With HTTP-only Cookies


As we began this discussion, the goal was to decrease the risk of a website being hacked without resorting to source code updates. Using the various techniques above, the difficultly level of a hacker exploiting a website has been increased. Maybe even by as much as 80% (per the 80/20 rule), but it's hard to be certain exactly. Keep in mind though, if a security issue remains present, the website can still theoretically be hacked. This much has not changed. Either by fixing the code or removing the website entirely, any problems still need to be permanently corrected. Whatever your particular situation, these tips can assist websites with even the most secure application code.

At this point you may be wondering, 80% sounds great, but what about the other 20% of attacks left out? What attacks still threaten a website? The answer is "logical flaws" and also certain varieties of "technical vulnerabilities" (http response splitting). In other articles I've published, I described what's called "logical flaws" or flaws in business logic. An example would be when someone changes the sale price of a product during the checkout process. Often these are the most damaging type of attack since they directly circumvent business controls. Predominantly, logical flaws are not protected by the measures I've described. So if your business depends on the integrity of business control functions, there is little choice but to identify and fix logical flaws at a code level. In the meantime, hopefully this article has helped you implement additional layers of website protection and given access to a larger set of solutions for consideration.

About the Author

Jeremiah Grossman is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of WhiteHat (http://www.whitehatsec.com) Security where he is responsible for web application security R&D and industry evangelism. As a 7-year industry veteran and world-renowned security expert, Mr. Grossman is a frequent conference speaker at the Blackhat Briefings, ISSA, ISACA, NASA, and many other industry events. Mr. Grossman's research, writings, and discoveries have been featured in USA Today, VAR Business, NBC, ZDNet, eWeek, etc. Mr. Grossman is also a founder of the Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) as well as a contributing member of the Center for Internet Security Apache Benchmark Group. Prior to WhiteHat, Mr. Grossman was an information security officer at Yahoo! responsible for performing security reviews on the company's hundreds of web applications.

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