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type | stage | group | info |
---|---|---|---|
reference, dev | none | Development | See the Technical Writers assigned to Development Guidelines: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments-to-development-guidelines |
Secure Coding Guidelines
This document contains descriptions and guidelines for addressing security vulnerabilities commonly identified in the GitLab codebase. They are intended to help developers identify potential security vulnerabilities early, with the goal of reducing the number of vulnerabilities released over time.
Contributing
If you would like to contribute to one of the existing documents, or add
guidelines for a new vulnerability type, please open an MR! Please try to
include links to examples of the vulnerability found, and link to any resources
used in defined mitigations. If you have questions or when ready for a review,
please ping gitlab-com/gl-security/appsec
.
Permissions
Description
Application permissions are used to determine who can access what and what actions they can perform. For more information about the permission model at GitLab, please see the GitLab permissions guide or the EE docs on permissions.
Impact
Improper permission handling can have significant impacts on the security of an application. Some situations may reveal sensitive data or allow a malicious actor to perform harmful actions. The overall impact depends heavily on what resources can be accessed or modified improperly.
A common vulnerability when permission checks are missing is called IDOR for Insecure Direct Object References.
When to Consider
Each time you implement a new feature/endpoint, whether it is at UI, API or GraphQL level.
Mitigations
Start by writing tests around permissions: unit and feature specs should both include tests based around permissions
- Fine-grained, nitty-gritty specs for permissions are good: it is ok to be verbose here
- Make assertions based on the actors and objects involved: can a user or group or XYZ perform this action on this object?
- Consider defining them upfront with stakeholders, particularly for the edge cases
- Do not forget abuse cases: write specs that make sure certain things can't happen
- A lot of specs are making sure things do happen and coverage percentage doesn't take into account permissions as same piece of code is used.
- Make assertions that certain actors cannot perform actions
- Naming convention to ease auditability: to be defined, for example, a subfolder containing those specific permission tests or a
#permissions
block
Be careful to also test visibility levels and not only project access rights.
Some example of well implemented access controls and tests:
NB: any input from development team is welcome, for example, about Rubocop rules.
Regular Expressions guidelines
Anchors / Multi line
Unlike other programming languages (for example, Perl or Python) Regular Expressions are matching multi-line by default in Ruby. Consider the following example in Python:
import re
text = "foo\nbar"
matches = re.findall("^bar$",text)
print(matches)
The Python example will output an empty array ([]
) as the matcher considers the whole string foo\nbar
including the newline (\n
). In contrast Ruby's Regular Expression engine acts differently:
text = "foo\nbar"
p text.match /^bar$/
The output of this example is #<MatchData "bar">
, as Ruby treats the input text
line by line. In order to match the whole string the Regex anchors \A
and \z
should be used.
Impact
This Ruby Regex specialty can have security impact, as often regular expressions are used for validations or to impose restrictions on user-input.
Examples
GitLab-specific examples can be found in the following path traversal and open redirect issues.
Another example would be this fictional Ruby on Rails controller:
class PingController < ApplicationController
def ping
if params[:ip] =~ /^\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}$/
render :text => `ping -c 4 #{params[:ip]}`
else
render :text => "Invalid IP"
end
end
end
Here params[:ip]
should not contain anything else but numbers and dots. However this restriction can be easily bypassed as the Regex anchors ^
and $
are being used. Ultimately this leads to a shell command injection in ping -c 4 #{params[:ip]}
by using newlines in params[:ip]
.
Mitigation
In most cases the anchors \A
for beginning of text and \z
for end of text should be used instead of ^
and $
.
Denial of Service (ReDoS) / Catastrophic Backtracking
When a regular expression (regex) is used to search for a string and can't find a match, it may then backtrack to try other possibilities.
For example when the regex .*!$
matches the string hello!
, the .*
first matches
the entire string but then the !
from the regex is unable to match because the
character has already been used. In that case, the Ruby regex engine backtracks
one character to allow the !
to match.
ReDoS is an attack in which the attacker knows or controls the regular expression used. The attacker may be able to enter user input that triggers this backtracking behavior in a way that increases execution time by several orders of magnitude.
Impact
The resource, for example Puma, or Sidekiq, can be made to hang as it takes a long time to evaluate the bad regex match. The evaluation time may require manual termination of the resource.
Examples
Here are some GitLab-specific examples.
User inputs used to create regular expressions:
Hardcoded regular expressions with backtracking issues:
- Repository name validation
- Link validation, and a bypass
- Entity name validation
- Validating color codes
Consider the following example application, which defines a check using a regular expression. A user entering user@aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!.com
as the email on a form will hang the web server.
class Email < ApplicationRecord
DOMAIN_MATCH = Regexp.new('([a-zA-Z0-9]+)+\.com')
validates :domain_matches
private
def domain_matches
errors.add(:email, 'does not match') if email =~ DOMAIN_MATCH
end
end
Mitigation
Ruby
GitLab has Gitlab::UntrustedRegexp
which internally uses the re2
library.
re2
does not support backtracking so we get constant execution time, and a smaller subset of available regex features.
All user-provided regular expressions should use Gitlab::UntrustedRegexp
.
For other regular expressions, here are a few guidelines:
- If there's a clean non-regex solution, such as
String#start_with?
, consider using it - Ruby supports some advanced regex features like atomic groups and possessive quantifiers that eliminate backtracking
- Avoid nested quantifiers if possible (for example
(a+)+
) - Try to be as precise as possible in your regex and avoid the
.
if there's an alternative- For example, Use
_[^_]+_
instead of_.*_
to match_text here_
- For example, Use
- If in doubt, don't hesitate to ping
@gitlab-com/gl-security/appsec
Go
Go's regexp
package uses re2
and isn't vulnerable to backtracking issues.
Further Links
- Rubular is a nice online tool to fiddle with Ruby Regexps.
- Runaway Regular Expressions
- The impact of regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) in practice: an empirical study at the ecosystem scale. This research paper discusses approaches to automatically detect ReDoS vulnerabilities.
- Freezing the web: A study of ReDoS vulnerabilities in JavaScript-based web servers. Another research paper about detecting ReDoS vulnerabilities.
Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
Description
A Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) is an attack in which an attacker is able coerce a application into making an outbound request to an unintended resource. This resource is usually internal. In GitLab, the connection most commonly uses HTTP, but an SSRF can be performed with any protocol, such as Redis or SSH.
With an SSRF attack, the UI may or may not show the response. The latter is called a Blind SSRF. While the impact is reduced, it can still be useful for attackers, especially for mapping internal network services as part of recon.
Impact
The impact of an SSRF can vary, depending on what the application server can communicate with, how much the attacker can control of the payload, and if the response is returned back to the attacker. Examples of impact that have been reported to GitLab include:
- Network mapping of internal services
- This can help an attacker gather information about internal services that could be used in further attacks. More details.
- Reading internal services, including cloud service metadata.
- The latter can be a serious problem, because an attacker can obtain keys that allow control of the victim's cloud infrastructure. (This is also a good reason to give only necessary privileges to the token.). More details.
- When combined with CRLF vulnerability, remote code execution. More details.
When to Consider
- When the application makes any outbound connection
Mitigations
In order to mitigate SSRF vulnerabilities, it is necessary to validate the destination of the outgoing request, especially if it includes user-supplied information.
The preferred SSRF mitigations within GitLab are:
- Only connect to known, trusted domains/IP addresses.
- Use the GitLab::HTTP library
- Implement feature-specific mitigations
GitLab HTTP Library
The GitLab::HTTP wrapper library has grown to include mitigations for all of the GitLab-known SSRF vectors. It is also configured to respect the
Outbound requests
options that allow instance administrators to block all internal connections, or limit the networks to which connections can be made.
In some cases, it has been possible to configure GitLab::HTTP as the HTTP connection library for 3rd-party gems. This is preferable over re-implementing the mitigations for a new feature.
Feature-specific mitigations
For situations in which an allowlist or GitLab:HTTP cannot be used, it will be necessary to implement mitigations directly in the feature. It is best to validate the destination IP addresses themselves, not just domain names, as DNS can be controlled by the attacker. Below are a list of mitigations that should be implemented.
There are many tricks to bypass common SSRF validations. If feature-specific mitigations are necessary, they should be reviewed by the AppSec team, or a developer who has worked on SSRF mitigations previously.
- Block connections to all localhost addresses
127.0.0.1/8
(IPv4 - note the subnet mask)::1
(IPv6)
- Block connections to networks with private addressing (RFC 1918)
10.0.0.0/8
172.16.0.0/12
192.168.0.0/24
- Block connections to link-local addresses (RFC 3927)
169.254.0.0/16
- In particular, for GCP:
metadata.google.internal
->169.254.169.254
- For HTTP connections: Disable redirects or validate the redirect destination
- To mitigate DNS rebinding attacks, validate and use the first IP address received
See url_blocker_spec.rb
for examples of SSRF payloads
XSS guidelines
Description
Cross site scripting (XSS) is an issue where malicious JavaScript code gets injected into a trusted web application and executed in a client's browser. The input is intended to be data, but instead gets treated as code by the browser.
XSS issues are commonly classified in three categories, by their delivery method:
Impact
The injected client-side code is executed on the victim's browser in the context of their current session. This means the attacker could perform any same action the victim would normally be able to do through a browser. The attacker would also have the ability to:
- log victim keystrokes
- launch a network scan from the victim's browser
- potentially obtain the victim's session tokens
- perform actions that lead to data loss/theft or account takeover
Much of the impact is contingent upon the function of the application and the capabilities of the victim's session. For further impact possibilities, please check out the beef project.
For a demonstration of the impact on GitLab with a realistic attack scenario, see this video on the GitLab Unfiltered channel (internal, it requires being logged in with the GitLab Unfiltered account).
When to consider?
When user submitted data is included in responses to end users, which is just about anywhere.
Mitigation
In most situations, a two-step solution can be used: input validation and output encoding in the appropriate context.
Input validation
Setting expectations
For any and all input fields, ensure to define expectations on the type/format of input, the contents, size limits, the context in which it will be output. It's important to work with both security and product teams to determine what is considered acceptable input.
Validate input
- Treat all user input as untrusted.
- Based on the expectations you defined above:
- Validate the input size limits.
- Validate the input using an allowlist approach to only allow characters through which you are expecting to receive for the field.
- Input which fails validation should be rejected, and not sanitized.
- When adding redirects or links to a user-controlled URL, ensure that the scheme is HTTP or HTTPS. Allowing other schemes like
javascript://
can lead to XSS and other security issues.
Note that denylists should be avoided, as it is near impossible to block all variations of XSS.
Output encoding
Once you've determined when and where the user submitted data will be output, it's important to encode it based on the appropriate context. For example:
- Content placed inside HTML elements need to be HTML entity encoded.
- Content placed into a JSON response needs to be JSON encoded.
- Content placed inside HTML URL GET parameters need to be URL-encoded
- Additional contexts may require context-specific encoding.
Additional information
XSS mitigation and prevention in Rails
By default, Rails automatically escapes strings when they are inserted into HTML templates. Avoid the methods used to keep Rails from escaping strings, especially those related to user-controlled values. Specifically, the following options are dangerous because they mark strings as trusted and safe:
Method | Avoid these options |
---|---|
HAML templates | html_safe , raw , != |
Embedded Ruby (ERB) | html_safe , raw , <%== %> |
In case you want to sanitize user-controlled values against XSS vulnerabilities, you can use
ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper
.
Calling link_to
and redirect_to
with user-controlled parameters can also lead to cross-site scripting.
Do also sanitize and validate URL schemes.
References:
XSS mitigation and prevention in JavaScript and Vue
- When updating the content of an HTML element using JavaScript, mark user-controlled values as
textContent
ornodeValue
instead ofinnerHTML
. - Avoid using
v-html
with user-controlled data, usev-safe-html
instead. - Render unsafe or unsanitized content using
dompurify
. - Consider using
gl-sprintf
to interpolate translated strings securely. - Avoid
__()
with translations that contain user-controlled values. - When working with
postMessage
, ensure theorigin
of the message is allowlisted. - Consider using the Safe Link Directive to generate secure hyperlinks by default.
GitLab specific libraries for mitigating XSS
Vue
Content Security Policy
Free form input field
Select examples of past XSS issues affecting GitLab
- Stored XSS in user status
- XSS vulnerability on custom project templates form
- Stored XSS in branch names
- Stored XSS in merge request pages
Internal Developer Training
- Introduction to XSS
- Reflected XSS
- Persistent XSS
- DOM XSS
- XSS in depth
- XSS Defense
- XSS Defense in Rails
- XSS Defense with HAML
- JavaScript URLs
- URL encoding context
- Validating Untrusted URLs in Ruby
- HTML Sanitization
- DOMPurify
- Safe Client-side JSON Handling
- iframe sandboxing
- Input Validation
- Validate size limits
- RoR model validators
- Allowlist input validation
- Content Security Policy
Path Traversal guidelines
Description
Path Traversal vulnerabilities grant attackers access to arbitrary directories and files on the server that is executing an application, including data, code or credentials.
Impact
Path Traversal attacks can lead to multiple critical and high severity issues, like arbitrary file read, remote code execution or information disclosure.
When to consider
When working with user-controlled filenames/paths and file system APIs.
Mitigation and prevention
In order to prevent Path Traversal vulnerabilities, user-controlled filenames or paths should be validated before being processed.
- Comparing user input against an allowlist of allowed values or verifying that it only contains allowed characters.
- After validating the user supplied input, it should be appended to the base directory and the path should be canonicalized using the file system API.
GitLab specific validations
The methods Gitlab::Utils.check_path_traversal!()
and Gitlab::Utils.check_allowed_absolute_path!()
can be used to validate user-supplied paths and prevent vulnerabilities.
check_path_traversal!()
will detect their Path Traversal payloads and accepts URL-encoded paths.
check_allowed_absolute_path!()
will check if a path is absolute and whether it is inside the allowed path list. By default, absolute
paths are not allowed, so you need to pass a list of allowed absolute paths to the path_allowlist
parameter when using check_allowed_absolute_path!()
.
To use a combination of both checks, follow the example below:
path = Gitlab::Utils.check_path_traversal!(path)
Gitlab::Utils.check_allowed_absolute_path!(path, path_allowlist)
In the REST API, we have the FilePath
validator that can be used to perform the checking on any file path argument the endpoints have.
It can be used as follows:
requires :file_path, type: String, file_path: { allowlist: ['/foo/bar/', '/home/foo/', '/app/home'] }
The Path Traversal check can also be used to forbid any absolute path:
requires :file_path, type: String, file_path: true
Absolute paths are not allowed by default. If allowing an absolute path is required, you
need to provide an array of paths to the parameter allowlist
.
OS command injection guidelines
Command injection is an issue in which an attacker is able to execute arbitrary commands on the host
operating system through a vulnerable application. Such attacks don't always provide feedback to a
user, but the attacker can use simple commands like curl
to obtain an answer.
Impact
The impact of command injection greatly depends on the user context running the commands, as well as how data is validated and sanitized. It can vary from low impact because the user running the injected commands has limited rights, to critical impact if running as the root user.
Potential impacts include:
- Execution of arbitrary commands on the host machine.
- Unauthorized access to sensitive data, including passwords and tokens in secrets or configuration files.
- Exposure of sensitive system files on the host machine, such as
/etc/passwd/
or/etc/shadow
. - Compromise of related systems and services gained through access to the host machine.
You should be aware of and take steps to prevent command injection when working with user-controlled data that are used to run OS commands.
Mitigation and prevention
To prevent OS command injections, user-supplied data shouldn't be used within OS commands. In cases where you can't avoid this:
- Validate user-supplied data against an allowlist.
- Ensure that user-supplied data only contains alphanumeric characters (and no syntax or whitespace characters, for example).
- Always use
--
to separate options from arguments.
Ruby
Consider using system("command", "arg0", "arg1", ...)
whenever you can. This prevents an attacker
from concatenating commands.
For more examples on how to use shell commands securely, consult Guidelines for shell commands in the GitLab codebase. It contains various examples on how to securely call OS commands.
Go
Go has built-in protections that usually prevent an attacker from successfully injecting OS commands.
Consider the following example:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"os/exec"
)
func main() {
cmd := exec.Command("echo", "1; cat /etc/passwd")
out, _ := cmd.Output()
fmt.Printf("%s", out)
}
This echoes "1; cat /etc/passwd"
.
Do not use sh
, as it bypasses internal protections:
out, _ = exec.Command("sh", "-c", "echo 1 | cat /etc/passwd").Output()
This outputs 1
followed by the content of /etc/passwd
.
GitLab Internal Authorization
Introduction
There are some cases where users
passed in the code is actually referring to a DeployToken
/DeployKey
entity instead of a real User
, because of the code below in /lib/api/api_guard.rb
def find_user_from_sources
strong_memoize(:find_user_from_sources) do
deploy_token_from_request ||
find_user_from_bearer_token ||
find_user_from_job_token ||
user_from_warden
end
end
Past Vulnerable Code
In some scenarios such as this one, user impersonation is possible because a DeployToken
ID can be used in place of a User
ID. This happened because there was no check on the line with Gitlab::Auth::CurrentUserMode.bypass_session!(user.id)
. In this case, the id
is actually a DeployToken
ID instead of a User
ID.
def find_current_user!
user = find_user_from_sources
return unless user
# Sessions are enforced to be unavailable for API calls, so ignore them for admin mode
Gitlab::Auth::CurrentUserMode.bypass_session!(user.id) if Gitlab::CurrentSettings.admin_mode
unless api_access_allowed?(user)
forbidden!(api_access_denied_message(user))
end
Best Practices
In order to prevent this from happening, it is recommended to use the method user.is_a?(User)
to make sure it returns true
when we are expecting to deal with a User
object. This could prevent the ID confusion from the method find_user_from_sources
mentioned above. Below code snippet shows the fixed code after applying the best practice to the vulnerable code above.
def find_current_user!
user = find_user_from_sources
return unless user
if user.is_a?(User) && Gitlab::CurrentSettings.admin_mode
# Sessions are enforced to be unavailable for API calls, so ignore them for admin mode
Gitlab::Auth::CurrentUserMode.bypass_session!(user.id)
end
unless api_access_allowed?(user)
forbidden!(api_access_denied_message(user))
end
Guidelines when defining missing methods with metaprogramming
Metaprogramming is a way to define methods at runtime, instead of at the time of writing and deploying the code. It is a powerful tool, but can be dangerous if we allow untrusted actors (like users) to define their own arbitrary methods. For example, imagine we accidentally let an attacker overwrite an access control method to always return true! It can lead to many classes of vulnerabilities such as access control bypass, information disclosure, arbitrary file reads, and remote code execution.
Key methods to watch out for are method_missing
, define_method
, delegate
, and similar methods.
Insecure metaprogramming example
This example is adapted from an example submitted by @jobert through our HackerOne bug bounty program. Thank you for your contribution!
Before Ruby 2.5.1, you could implement delegators using the delegate
or method_missing
methods. For example:
class User
def initialize(attributes)
@options = OpenStruct.new(attributes)
end
def is_admin?
name.eql?("Sid") # Note - never do this!
end
def method_missing(method, *args)
@options.send(method, *args)
end
end
When a method was called on a User
instance that didn't exist, it passed it along to the @options
instance variable.
User.new({name: "Jeeves"}).is_admin?
# => false
User.new(name: "Sid").is_admin?
# => true
User.new(name: "Jeeves", "is_admin?" => true).is_admin?
# => false
Because the is_admin?
method is already defined on the class, its behavior is not overridden when passing is_admin?
to the initializer.
This class can be refactored to use the Forwardable
method and def_delegators
:
class User
extend Forwardable
def initialize(attributes)
@options = OpenStruct.new(attributes)
self.class.instance_eval do
def_delegators :@options, *attributes.keys
end
end
def is_admin?
name.eql?("Sid") # Note - never do this!
end
end
It might seem like this example has the same behavior as the first code example. However, there's one crucial difference: because the delegators are meta-programmed after the class is loaded, it can overwrite existing methods:
User.new({name: "Jeeves"}).is_admin?
# => false
User.new(name: "Sid").is_admin?
# => true
User.new(name: "Jeeves", "is_admin?" => true).is_admin?
# => true
# ^------------------ The method is overwritten! Sneaky Jeeves!
In the example above, the is_admin?
method is overwritten when passing it to the initializer.
Best practices
- Never pass user-provided details into method-defining metaprogramming methods.
- If you must, be very confident that you've sanitized the values correctly. Consider creating an allowlist of values, and validating the user input against that.
- When extending classes that use metaprogramming, make sure you don't inadvertently override any method definition safety checks.