Top 10 Application Security Vulnerabilities in Web.config Files - Part Two

You're Not Out of the Woods Yet

Now that you've finished reading the top-ten list, and you've checked your configuration settings, your applications are secure forever, right? Not just yet. Web.config files operate in a hierarchical inheritance manner. Every Web.config file inherits values from any Web.config file in a parent directory. That Web.config file in turn inherits values from any Web.config file in its parent directory, and so on. All Web.config files on the system inherit from the global configuration file called Machine.config located in the .NET framework directory. The effect of this is that the runtime behavior of your application can be altered simply by modifying a configuration file in a higher directory.

This can sometimes have unexpected consequences. A system administrator might make a change in a configuration file in response to a problem with a completely separate application, but that change might create a security vulnerability in your application. For example, a user might report that he is not able to access the application without enabling cookies in his browser. The administrator, trying to be helpful, modifies the global configuration file to allow cookieless authentication for all applications.

To keep your application-specific settings from being unexpectedly modified, the solution is to never rely on default setting values. For example, debugging is disabled by default in configuration files. If you're examining the configuration file for your application and you notice that the debug attribute is blank, you might assume that debugging is disabled. But it may or may not be disabled--the applied value depends on the value in parent configuration settings on the system. The safest choice is to always explicitly set security-related values in your application's configuration.

Ultimately, securing a Web application requires the efforts and diligence of many different groups, from quality assurance to security operations. However, the developer who codes the application itself has an inherent responsibility to instill security into the application from the beginning of the development process. By making security-conscious decisions from the beginning, developers can create applications that users can trust with their confidential information and that are capable of withstanding attacks launched by hackers. As I've tried to show here, sometimes that process can be as simple as making the right decisions when configuring your application.

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Bryan Sullivan United States

Bryan Sullivan is a development manager at SPI Dynamics, a Web application security products company. Bryan manages the

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