Wednesday 18 August 2010

DDS Value Object Presentation Video

Dear Junior

At the OWASP AppSec conference I had a presentation on value objects and Domain Driven Security. It turned out into a 35 minute code kata with refactorings, where I used value objects "DDD style" in two ways.

Firstly, I used them to create a design that makes indata validation come natural in the context of Injection Flaws. I used the classical SQL Injection login-attack as an example and applied "hard type" value objects in the same way as we have discussed before.

Secondly, I addressed a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) scenario. Here I noted that even if XSS is often perceived as a problem with "bad indata", there are cases when those data are perfectly valid. So, instead I choose to look at it from an output-encoding perspective - not "bad indata validation", but "bad outdata encoding".

To be able to do something about the outdata encoding, you can think about the client side browser as a subsystem of your system. Seen that way, the presentation tier plays the role of the API to that subsystem. Then it becomes obvious that we should enforce proper encoding at the border of that subsystem - i e in the API we use for calling it.

Modifying the presentation tier API from "soft type" strings to "hard type" value objects made it obvious where proper encoding should go - thus solving the XSS problem.

The full video coverage from the conference has been released, and my presentation can be found at the OWASP website.
Yours
Dan