It's not very often that you will hear me badmouth ColdFusion, but in this case, I feel compelled. ColdFusion has some truly fantastic features and in many ways make securing web applications easier, but in this case, it has provided little but a false-sense of security.
The other day in #coldfusion on DALnet IRC chat, several of us got to talking about passwords and about the simple password strength function that I had made some time ago. We worked on improving the regex and making is a better function. But then we go to talking about whitespace.
One of the people I was talking to asked "Why don't you allow spaces in password?". He saw that my password strength checker did not allow white space in it. This is something I asked myself a while ago, but I never really spent any time thinking about it.
Unfortunately, the only answer I could offer was "I dunno, I thought passwords weren't supposed to have spaces".
I hope everyone is aware of the cf.Objective() conference that takes place in Minneapolis/St. Paul every year. In case you are not, you should know that it is an absolutely AMAZING event.
cf.Objective() is touted as "The World's Only Enterprise Engineering Conference for ColdFusion Developers". I have been to two cf.Objective() conferences so far, and this year will be my third. I am very excited about it.
Two years ago, there was a two-day pre-conference training session held on the Mach-II framework. It was a very successful training (I believe they sold out every seat), but beyond that, it was a fantastic training. I attended it, and I loved it. I learned a lot. Last year they had ColdBox training prior to the conference. I did not attend that one, but I hear it was also great.
This year, the organizers of cf.Objective() are trying the pre-conference training again, but with more training sessions. This year there will be six!
The first time I looked at the OWASP Top Ten web vulnerabilities, they all made sense to me, save for one. That one was A4 - Insecure Direct Object Reference. At the time I was still pretty new to object-oriented programming and so the first thing I thought was that it was referring to those kinds of objects.
But that is not what they are talking about. The are talking about any direct reference to an "implementation object". Meaning objects like files, folders, database records, or other types of "keys".
I just closed the comments of my last post announcing the release of the new Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. Now it is time to announce the winners. But first.
NOTE: I have closed the comments on this post. The contest is over. I will post the winners soon.
It seems like not many people are talking about the new Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. It has been out for about 3 weeks, I think, and it seems that there is very little buzz about it. So I thought I would generate some.
This is a little self-serving, as I have two articles in the newest version, but I don't mind :) My two articles are in a new "Let's Talk Security" column. They are "Application Security Primer" and "SQL Injection: A Persistent Threat". I was very excited to be asked to start writing for FAQU and I hope to be able to contribute more.
In addition to my two articles, there is some amazing content from authors like Todd Sharp, Ray Camden, Terry Ryan, Mark Kruger, Mike Brunt, Mike Henke, Charlie Arehart, S. Isaac Dealey, Pete Ruckelshaus, Adrian J. Moreno and Mark Phillips. And I am especially looking forward to reading Dave Konopka's "SOA for the rest of us"
To help bring attention to the new Quarterly Update and to generate some buzz, I am going to have a little giveaway. I like to do giveaways once in a while. It is fun. Judith and Michael at House of Fusion have graciously offered two 1-year subscriptions of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update for me to giveaway.
So on Friday of this week (only three days from now) I am going to give away two 1-year subscriptions to the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update.
I have said on several occasions that catering to users who insist on disabling cookies is a bad idea. I have blogged a couple times on the reasons.
So why am I suddenly bringing this topic up again? Well I recently read (I cannot recall where, it was probably on the OWASP site) about a way that session tokens in URLs can be easily compromised. I am a little embarrassed that I never realized that this vulnerability existed before. It is pretty simple.
During Bob Silverberg's awesome ORM presentation today the topic of SQL injection came up. There was a question was about whether or not the Hibernate ORM service built into ColdFusion 9 would prevent SQL injection. On the surface it would seem that it does, but just like everything else, there are exceptions.
On Thursday evening (Nov 12, 2009 @ 5:30) I will be speaking to the Twin Cities Language User Group about CFML.
The Twin Cities Language User Group is, to me, a unique group. It is not focused on a particular language or family of languages, its concept seems to be to bridge the divide between languages and to expose developers to new ideas and methodologies. It seemed like a perfect place to pitch CFML and show other developers just how great CFML is.
I had hoped to get these up sooner, but with travel snafus, work obligations, and sick children, time has slipped away.
Anyway, I am finally posting my notes and slides. I hope to be able to put up some narration for it in the near future. We'll see if that happens.
Anyway, here is the SlideSix embedded version.
