What's Missing In Form Security
One day, a professor came to me with an interesting question: "Corey, my server is getting hacked! Can you figure out how?" "Can you tell me what exactly is happening?" "Yes," he replied. "Somehow, people are uploading files to my server, and trying to hack me." And with that, I delved into the world of form handling (a solved problem, I had assumed), and was appalled at what I found.
This professor was neither unintelligent nor shoddy in programming skills. What he was not, however, was an expert in web security, and therein lies the problem that this post is about. It's not about SQL injection. It's not about using the newest tools or the most recent library. It's about understanding how form submissions can be your Achilles' heel. The professor was qualified in his programming ability, but he was not a web security expert, and you are probably not an expert, either. He was doing everything right, according to the docs and numerous tutorials on how to work with his particular framework, but the information was wrong. The scariest thing is that it's very likely that the framework that you are using is getting it wrong, too.