Struts: Unvalidated Action Form

Incomplete Variant
Structure: Simple
Description

Every Action Form must have a corresponding validation form.

Extended Description

If a Struts Action Form Mapping specifies a form, it must have a validation form defined under the Struts Validator.

Common Consequences 2
Scope: Other

Impact: Other

If an action form mapping does not have a validation form defined, it may be vulnerable to a number of attacks that rely on unchecked input. Unchecked input is the root cause of some of today's worst and most common software security problems. Cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and process control vulnerabilities all stem from incomplete or absent input validation.

Scope: ConfidentialityIntegrityAvailabilityOther

Impact: Other

Although J2EE applications are not generally susceptible to memory corruption attacks, if a J2EE application interfaces with native code that does not perform array bounds checking, an attacker may be able to use an input validation mistake in the J2EE application to launch a buffer overflow attack.

Potential Mitigations 1
Phase: Implementation

Strategy: Input Validation

Map every Action Form to a corresponding validation form. An action or a form may perform validation in other ways, but the Struts Validator provides an excellent way to verify that all input receives at least a basic level of validation. Without this approach, it is difficult, and often impossible, to establish with a high level of confidence that all input is validated.
References 1
Seven Pernicious Kingdoms: A Taxonomy of Software Security Errors
Katrina Tsipenyuk, Brian Chess, and Gary McGraw
NIST Workshop on Software Security Assurance Tools Techniques and MetricsNIST
07-11-2005
ID: REF-6
Applicable Platforms
Languages:
Java : Undetermined
Modes of Introduction
Implementation
Taxonomy Mapping
  • 7 Pernicious Kingdoms
  • Software Fault Patterns