Day 1
Security basics
What is security?
Threat and risk
Types of threats against computer systems
Consequences of insecure software
Constraints and the market
Bugs, vulnerabilities and exploits
Categorization of bugs
- Seven pernicious kingdoms
- Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
- CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors
- SEI Cert Secure Coding Guidelines
- Vulnerabilities in the environment and the dependencies
Input validation
Input validation principles
- Blacklists and whitelists
- Validation with regex
- What to validate – the attack surface
- When to validate – validation vs transformations
- Where to validate – defense in depth
Injection
- Injection principles
- Injection attacks
- CRLF injection
- Log forging
- Lab – Log forging
- Log forging – best practices
- Code injection
- Command injection
- Lab – Command injection
- Command injection best practices
- Using Runtime.exec()
- Using ProcessBuilder
- Case study – Shellshock
- Lab - Shellshock
- Script injection
- Expression language injection
- Injection best practices
- Input validation
- Output sanitization
- Encoding and escaping the output
- Encoding challenges
Integer handling
- Representing signed numbers
- Integer visualization
- Integer problems
- Integer overflow
- Lab – Integer overflow
- Signed / unsigned confusion
- Signed / unsigned confusion in Java
- Integer truncation
- Best practices
- Upcasting
- Precondition testing
- Postcondition testing
- Using big integer libraries
- Integer handling in Java
- Lab – Integer handling
- Other numeric problems
- Division by zero
- Working with floating-point numbers
Data structures
- Data structure sentinels
- Containers
- Container error
- Associative containers
- Iterators
Files and streams
- Path traversal
- Path traversal-related examples
- Path traversal best practices
- Lab – Path traversal
- Virtual resources
Unsafe reflection
- Reflection without validation
- Lab – Unsafe reflection
Unsafe native code
- Native code dependence
- Lab – Unsafe JNI
Some other input validation problems
Using vulnerable components
Assessing the environment
Hardening
Importing functionality from untrusted sources
Vulnerability management
- Patch management
- Vulnerability databases and scanning tools
- Vulnerability rating – CVSS
- Lab – Finding vulnerabilities of used components
- The build process and CI / CD
- Dependency checking in Maven
- Lab – Detecting vulnerable components during the build
Day 2
Security features
Authentication
- Authentication basics
- Authentication weaknesses
- Case study – PayPal two factor authentication bypass
- User interface best practices
- Password management
- Inbound password management
- Storing account passwords
- Plaintext passwords at Facebook
- Lab – Why just hashing passwords is not enough?
- Dictionary attacks and brute forcing
- Salting
- Adaptive hash functions for password storage
- Password in transit
- Password policy
- Weak and strong passwords
- Using passphrases
- Lab – Applying a password policy
- The Ashley Madison data breach
- The dictionary attack
- The ultimate attack
- Exploitation of the results and the lessons learnt
- Outbound password management
- Hard coded passwords
- Lab – Hardcoded password
- Password in configuration file
- Protecting sensitive information in memory
- Challenges in protecting memory
- Storing sensitive data in memory
- Lab – Using secret-handling classes
Authorization
- Access control basics
- Missing or improper authorization
- Access control in databases
- Lab – Database access control
- Privileges and permissions
- Permission manipulation
- Incorrect use of privileged APIs
- Permission best practices
- Principle of least privilege
- Principle of separation of privileges
- Permission granting
- Privilege dropping
- Handling of insufficient privileges
Java platform security
- The Java programming language and runtime environment
- Type safety and security
- Security features of the JRE
- The ClassLoader and the BytecodeVerifier
- Application-level access control in Java
- Permissions and the Security Manager
- Privilege best practices
- Lab – Working with permissions in Java
- Role-based access control
- Java Authentication and Authorization Services (JAAS)
- Protecting Java code and applications
- Code signing
Information exposure
- Exposure through extracted data and aggregation
- System information leakage
- Leaking system information
- Relying on accessibility modifiers
- Lab – Inappropriate protection by accessibility modifier
- Information exposure best practices
UI security
- UI security principles
- Sensitive information in the user interface
- Misinterpretation of UI features or actions
- Insufficient UI feedback
- Relying on hidden or disabled UI element
- Lab – Hidden or disabled UI element
- Insufficient anti-automation
Day 3
Common software security weaknesses
Time and state
- Thread management best practices
- Thread management best practices in Java
- Thread Pools
- Race conditions
- Race condition in object data members
- Singleton member fields
- Lab – Singleton member fields
- File race condition
- Time-of-check-to-time-of-usage (TOCTTOU)
- Lab - TOCTTOU
- Insecure temporary file
- Database race conditions
- Lab – Database race conditions
- Avoiding race conditions in Java
- Mutual exclusion and locking
- Deadlocks
- Lab – Locking
- Synchronization and thread safety
- Synchronization and thread safety in Java
Errors
- Error and exception handling principles
- Error handling
- Returning a misleading status code
- Reachable assertion
- Information exposure through error reporting
- Exception handling
- In the catch block. And now what?
- Empty catch block
- Best practices for catch blocks
- Overly broad throws
- Catching NULL pointer exceptions
- Improper completing of the finally block
- Swallowed ThreadDeath
- Checked exceptions escaping from finally
- Throwing undeclared checked exceptions
- Throwing RuntimeException, Exception, or Throwable
- Lab – Exception handling mess
Code quality
- Data
- Arrays and toString()
- Initialization and cleanup
- Constructors and destructors
- Class initialization cycles
- Lab – Initialization cycles
- Unreleased resource
- Object oriented programming pitfalls
- Accessibility modifiers
- Overriding and accessibility modifiers
- Inheritance and overriding
- Implementing equals()
- Mutability
- Lab – Mutable object
- Cloning
- Cloning sensitive classes – object hijacking
- Object hijacking – best practices
- Serialization
Denial of service
- Denial of Service
- Resource exhaustion
- Cash overflow
- Flooding
- Sustained client engagement
- Denial of service problems in Java
- Infinite loop
- Lab – Resource exhausting
- Amplification
- Network amplification
- Amplification in databases
- Other amplification examples
- Algorithm complexity issues
- Regular expression denial of service (ReDoS)
- Lab – ReDos
- Hashtable collision
- How hashtables work?
- Hash collision in case of hashtables
- Hashtable collision in Java
Wrap up
Secure coding principles
- Principles of robust programming by Matt Bishop
- Secure design principles of Saltzer and Schröder
- Some more principles
And now what?
- Further sources and readings
Further labs and challenges to do
