Understanding security constraint in ewb.xml

[Vivek Jain]

Hi,

I've below snippet related to security constraint in my web.xml for my struts2 application. Can any one explain what it means & how does the security constraint works for below xml?

<security-constraint> <web-resource-collection> <web-resource-name>restricted methods</web-resource-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> <http-method>PUT</http-method> <http-method>DELETE</http-method> <http-method>TRACE</http-method> </web-resource-collection> <auth-constraint /> </security-constraint> <security-constraint> <web-resource-collection> <web-resource-name>no_access</web-resource-name> <url-pattern>/jsp/*</url-pattern> </web-resource-collection> <auth-constraint/> </security-constraint> <security-constraint> <web-resource-collection> <web-resource-name>no_access</web-resource-name> <url-pattern>/myrrunner/*</url-pattern> </web-resource-collection> <auth-constraint/> </security-constraint>

Also, we ran fortify tool & it reported that instead of blacklisting, we should put whitelist of tasks in this security constraint. Can any one tell me how to change above xml to provide whitelisting?

Thanks!

[Tim Holloway]

As it stands right now, you actually appear to have redundant rules. None of them grant access, and the master URL pattern "/*" would apply even if the earlier patterns had not already blocked
everything.

A whitelisting setup would defined URL patterns that determined what roles had authorization and permit access to them. Unmatched URLs would be attempted against each of the remaining patterns. If none matched, the master pattern would reject the request.