Enportal/5.5/admin/system administration/security

Overview

The overall security of, and provided by, Edge Technologies products is very important to us and our customers. This is fulfilled via development processes, staying abreast of known vulnerabilities, and listening to our customers when security concerns are raised.

Our software is deployed in many different scenarios such as Internet facing portals, internal corporate usage, and secure environments with multi-factor authentication. One key reason for this is the ability of enPortal to harden proxied web applications such as restricting who and what someone can access - something the proxied web application cannot do itself. enPortal has even been used to address known vulnerabilities in proxied web applications such as Cross-site scripting (XSS) if the vendor of that application isn't able to address it.

Security Patches

If Edge becomes aware of a vulnerability in a component used by our products, or within the product itself, depending on the severity we will either produce a patch for existing deployments or address the issue in the subsequent product release.

To report security concerns or issues regarding known vulnerability please contact Support.

Passwords & Secrets

enPortal and AppBoard need to store passwords or secrets for a number of different purposes:

• user authentication (if not using an external auth provider such as LDAP)
• Single-Sign-On (SSO) tokens for proxied web applications (if not using auth pass-through)
• access credentials if using an external configuration database
• access credentials for AppBoard Data Sources

By default all these passwords and secrets are stored encrypted using 128-bit AES (approved by NIST). Best practices are to create a new encryption key after installing the product.

Features & Recommendations

Edge Technologies enPortal and AppBoard have a common code base and the following set of features and recommendations apply to both unless otherwise indicated. Although we endeavour to provide a secure configuration out-of-the-box, due to interoperability and some items relying on specific configuration, it is recommended to be familiar with all the security related features and determine what suits your organization best.

1. Run as non-root on Linux/UNIX systems. This is the default configuration. Running as root is possible, for instance to bind to port < 1024, however in this case it's recommended to use JSVC which can be used to bind to the port and give up privileges, or some external mechanism to act as the end point such as a load balancer which talks to the server on a port > 1024.
2. enable SSL/TLS (HTTPS). The products ship with a self-signed certificate to enable for easy testing, however this certificate should be replaced as soon as possible.
3. Ensure the latest supported version of Java is used on the server.
4. Implement system-wide or domain-specific password policies to ensure end-users have secure passwords.
5. Use multi-factor authentication. For example, we have customers using CAC that makes use of HTTPS client authentication. Other options are possible via our extensible authentication handlers.
6. Change the default encryption key as mentioned in the Passwords & Secrets section above.
7. Disable the default accounts. Administrator privileges can be assigned to other users as needed (/portalAdministration role)
8. Customize the login page. This can be used to disable form pre-fill or to provide/remove content as deemed necessary.
9. Restrict access to the host. Clients only require access to the single listening port of the server - and this should be the only port open to the clients. The server itself will need access to the proxied web applications (enPortal) and any data sources (AppBoard).
10. Concurrent user sessions. By default a user can be logged in multiple times, however this can be changed so that only one session can exist for a given user. This really depends on your organizations usage and security policies.
11. use the enPortal CRS to virtually harden proxied web applications. This may be to completely restrict the content that's exposed to users or even to require authentication when the web application doesn't support it.
12. XSS and Vulnerability Tool Hardening:
    • By default, some trust is associated with HTTP requests whose Referer tags indicate local origination. This is conifgurable via Rule 77 in [INSTALL_HOME]/server/webapps/enportal/WEB-INF/config/config.properties which is enabled by default. However, while browsers do not allow changing the Referer dynamically without the user intentionally setting a new value, the Referer in the HTTP request is spoofed by most security attack tools and would yield failed test results if local origin Referers are trusted. Although all XSS issues (that are known) have been dealt with on the response side and thus should not pose a security risk, if there is a need to employ multiple layers of security against XSS attacks, it may be required to comment this rule, which will cause all requests (regardless of Referer) to be checked for XSS attacks via Rule 99 below. Disabling Rule 77 may result in some minimal loss of functionality, including:
      • RegEx Evaluator channel (/system/proxy/Regex Evaluator) will not be able to handle grouping characters (). The input, pattern, and replace fields will not be able to handle any entered text that is matched by the regex pattern. [\'\"].*[;]|[<>\(\)]
      • Channel creation wizard will not be able to create Parameters that is matched by the regex pattern. [\'\"].*[;]|[<>\(\)]
      • The following configuration items could conceivably be affected if the user input happens to match the regex pattern ([\'\"].*[;]|[<>\(\)])
        • SSO token for passwords
        • Portal user passwords
        • XMLImport file name
        • Proxied channel parameters
        • Regex Evaluator
        • Expression Evaluator
        • Display name for menu (folder) and channels
    • By default user and domain credentials are echoed in HTTP responses (but not the password). Some security analysis tools will identify this as a security vulnerability, and users can disable this functionality by editing/adding [INSTALL_HOME]/server/webapps/enportal/WEB-INF/config/custom.properties and adding the line jsp.usercookies=false.
    • CRS XSS Rules: handleXSS.xml is created and placed in [INSTALL_HOME]/server/webapps/enportal/WEB-INF/xmlroot/server/crs/runtimehandlers directory. This file can be assigned to a channel or to the Proxy class of pim packages for specific integration need. Or it can be moved to [INSTALL_HOME]/server/webapps/enportal/WEB-INF/xmlroot/server/crs/defaulthandlers directory for system wide checking.
13. SSL Browser Caching
    • By default, Appboard now marks all content (excpet for images, CSS, or Javascript) as non-cacheable, which is a suggestion to browsers not to retain such content for efficiency purposes. There is a property (request.ssl.cache, specified in WEB-INF/config/config.properties) which can be toggled to "true" and will cause XML, HTML, and SWF content to be cached, as well. Setting this to "true" may slightly increase client performance with the increased risk of possibly sensitive content being retained by browsers.

Input Validation Details

Part of Edge enPortal’s cross-site scripting protection involves checking request parameters for validity against a list of patterns and it will reject requests with disallowed characters in a URL (or decoded form of the URL).

This approach can produce occasional false positives since there are applications that actually expect characters that do not comply with the RFC. All aspects of the HTTP request are tested, including request, headers, and body. Captures will cause display of HTTP 500 responses. Updates to the output encoding scheme are also implemented to improve system efficiency and to eliminate XSS attacks. All attacks are logged in [INSTALL_HOME]/server/logs/jspsystem.log. The default behavior is to deny requests that contain malicious characters if the page that initiated the request is not from the portal server. The settings for XSS request validations are in the [INSTALL_HOME]/server/webapps/enportal/WEC-INF/config/config.properties file.

In instances where the application requires/expects these special characters, the portal administrator/integrator is required to place an override for the matching URL, header, referrer, query field pattern. Otherwise, the portal simply denies the request and logs the failure.

The following documents some of the validation rule syntax:

# Global Input Validation Rules
#
# These Rules define an ordered set of request validators that search for
# cross site scripting attacks within input characters.  The ordering 
# establishes a priority for evaluation, allowing general validation rules
# to be skipped by defining rules that are evaluated before the general case.
#
# Specific Usage: These rules are processed in order, based on the alphanumeric
# ordering of the $INSTANCEKEY value.  To override the general validation rule,
# define an earler validator rule that matches the requests whose input
# validation is to be bypassed. 
# 
# Syntax: for request.validator property namespace:
#
# .log_attacks:  Global flag for logging attacks which result in terminated 
#                requests.  Default is on.
# .log_info:     Global flag for info logging of the request.validator
#                Note: This is very noisy and will fill up the jsp-system.log
# .$INSTANCEKEY:  defines an individual rule, using the following subfields:
#   
#   .if.request.matches:      A precondition that matches against the request string
#                             type: regular expression
#   .if.referer.indicates:    A precondition for the HTTP Referer Header of requests.
#                             Qualifies are comparison of the host between the request's
#                             URL and the request's referer header URL.
#                             type: options are [ SELF ], whereSELF is default
#                             SELF indicates that the HTTP page that initiated
#                             this request was originally loaded from this 
#                             server.
#   .if.header.$NAME.matches  A precondition tied to an HTTP Request's header
#                             type: regular expression
#                             $NAME: indicates the name of the HTTP Request
#                             header that will be tested for matches
#
#   .then:           Selects the behavior that this rule proceeds with when all of
#                    the conditionals evaluate positively
#                    type: options are [ ALLOW, TESTFIELDS ], where ALLOW is default
#                    - ALLOW : skips remaining evaluation rules, allowing the request
#                    - TESTFIELDS : activates full examination of request fields 
#                      using the expression declared in this rules field.matches
#
#   .field.matches:  A XSS attack search expression evaluated on a request's fields 
#                    type: regular expression
#                    All fields of a request are tested against this expression
#                    in order to identify characters indicating an XSS attack
#   .field.onMatch:  Selects thebehavior for cases where the evaluation of the 
#                    field.matches expression finds a match.
#                    type: options are [ DENY ], where DENY is the default
#                    DENY indicates that the http request will not be processed