Biblio

Spring security is tremendously popular among practitioners for its ease of use to secure enterprise applications. In this paper, we study the application framework misconfiguration vulnerabilities in the light of Spring security, which is relatively understudied in the existing literature. Towards that goal, we identify 6 types of security anti-patterns and 4 insecure vulnerable defaults by conducting a measurement-based approach on 28 Spring applications. Our analysis shows that security risks associated with the identified security anti-patterns and insecure defaults can leave the enterprise application vulnerable to a wide range of high-risk attacks. To prevent these high-risk attacks, we also provide recommendations for practitioners. Consequently, our study has contributed one update to the official Spring security documentation while other security issues identified in this study are being considered for future major releases by Spring security community.

The Java platform and its third-party libraries provide useful features to facilitate secure coding. However, misusing them can cost developers time and effort, as well as introduce security vulnerabilities in software. We conducted an empirical study on StackOverflow posts, aiming to understand developers' concerns on Java secure coding, their programming obstacles, and insecure coding practices. We observed a wide adoption of the authentication and authorization features provided by Spring Security - a third-party framework designed to secure enterprise applications. We found that programming challenges are usually related to APIs or libraries, including the complicated cross-language data handling of cryptography APIs, and the complex Java-based or XML-based approaches to configure Spring Security. In addition, we reported multiple security vulnerabilities in the suggested code of accepted answers on the StackOverflow forum. The vulnerabilities included disabling the default protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, breaking SSL/TLS security through bypassing certificate validation, and using insecure cryptographic hash functions. Our findings reveal the insufficiency of secure coding assistance and documentation, as well as the huge gap between security theory and coding practices.