F5 Friday: It is now safe to enable File Upload

Web 2.0 is about sharing content – user generated content. How do you enable that kind of collaboration without opening yourself up to the risk of infection? Turns out developers and administrators have a couple options…

The goal of many a miscreant is to get files onto your boxen. The second step after that is often remote execution or merely the hopes that someone else will look at/execute the file and spread chaos (and viruses) across your internal network. It’s a malicious intent, to be sure, and makes developing/deploying Web 2.0 applications a risky proposition. After all, Web 2.0 is about collaboration and sharing of content, and if you aren’t allowing the latter it’s hard to enable the former.

Most developers know about and have used the ability to upload files of just about any type through a web form. Photos, documents, presentations – these types of content are almost always shared through an application that takes advantage of the ability to upload data via a simple web form. But if you allow users to share legitimate content, it’s a sure bet (more sure even than answering “yes” to the question “Will it rain in Seattle today?”) that miscreants will find and exploit the ability to share content.

Needless to say information security professionals are therefore not particularly fond of this particular “feature” and in some organizations it is strictly verboten (that’s forbidden for you non-German speakers).

So wouldn’t it be nice if developers could continue to leverage this nifty capability to enable collaboration? Well, all you really need to do is integrate with an anti-virus scanning solution and only accept that content which is deemed safe, right? After all, that’s good enough for e-mail systems and developers should be able to argue that the same should be good enough for web content, too.

The bigger problem is in the integration. Luckily, ICAP (Internet Content Adaptation Protocol) is a fairly ready answer to that problem.

SOLUTION: INTEGRATE ANTI-VIRUS SCANNING via ICAP

The Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP) is a lightweight HTTP based protocol specified in RFC 3507 designed to off-load specific content to dedicated servers, thereby freeing up resources and standardizing the way in which features are implemented. ICAP is generally used in proxy servers to integrate with third party products like antivirus software, malicious content scanners and URL filters.

ICAP in its most basic form is a "lightweight" HTTP based remote procedure call protocol. In other words, ICAP allows its clients to pass HTTP based (HTML) messages (Content) to ICAP servers for adaptation. Adaptation refers to performing the particular value added service (content manipulation) for the associated client request/response.

-- Wikipedia, ICAP

Now obviously developers can directly take advantage of ICAP and integrate with an anti-virus scanning solution directly. All that’s required is to extract every file in a multi-part request and then send each of them to an AV-scanning service and determine based on the result whether to continue processing or toss those bits into /dev/null. This is assuming, of course, that it can be integrated: packaged applications may not offer the ability and even open-source which ostensibly does may be in a language or use frameworks that require skills the organization simply does not have. Or perhaps the cost over time of constantly modifying the application after every upgrade/patch is just not worth the effort.

For applications for which you can add this integration, it should be fairly simple as developers are generally familiar with HTTP and RPC and understand how to use “services” in their applications.

Of course this being an F5 Friday post, you can probably guess that I have an alternative (and of course more efficient) solution than integration into the code. An external solution that works for custom as well as packaged applications and requires a lot less long term maintenance – a WAF (Web Application Firewall).

BETTER SOLUTION: web application firewall INTEGRATION

The latest greatest version (v10.2) of F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) included a little touted feature that makes integration with an ICAP-enabled anti-virus scanning solution take approximately 15.7 seconds to configure (YMMV). Most of that time is likely logging in and navigating to the right place. The rest is typing the information required (server host name, IP address, and port number) and hitting “save”.

F5 Application security manager (ASM) v10 includes easy integration with a/v solutions

It really is that simple.

The configuration is actually an HTTP “class”, which can be thought of as a classification of sorts. In most BIG-IP products a “class” defines a type of traffic closely based on a specific application protocol, like HTTP. It’s quite polymorphic in that defining a custom HTTP class inherits the behavior and attributes of the “parent” HTTP class and your configuration extends that behavior and attributes, and in some cases allows you to override default (parent) behavior. The ICAP integration is derived from an HTTP class, so it can be “assigned” to a virtual server, a URI, a cookie, etc…

In most ASM configurations an HTTP class is assigned to a virtual server and therefore it sees all requests sent to that server. In such a configuration ASM sees all traffic and thus every file uploaded in a multipart payload and will automatically extract it and send it via ICAP to the designated anti-virus server where it is scanned.

The action taken upon a positive result, i.e. the file contains bad juju, is configurable. ASM can block the request and present an informational page to the user while logging the discovery internally, externally or both. It can forward the request to the web/application server with the virus and log it as well, allowing the developer to determine how best to proceed. ASM can be configured to never allow requests to reach the web/application server that have not been scanned for viruses using the “Guarantee Enforcement” option. When configured, if the anti-virus server is unavailable or doesn’t respond, requests will be blocked. This allows administrators to configure a “fail closed” option that absolutely requires AV scanning before a request can be processed.

A STRATEGIC POINT of CONTROL

Leveraging a strategic point of control to provide AV scanning integration and apply security policies regarding the quality of content has several benefits over its application-modifying code-based integration cousin:

• Allows integration of AV scanning in applications for which it is not feasible to modify the application, for whatever reason (third-party, lack of skills, lack of time, long term maintenance after upgrades/patches )
• Reduces the resource requirements of web/application servers by offloading the integration process and only forwarding valid uploads to the application. In a cloud-based or other pay-per-use model this reduces costs by eliminating the processing of invalid requests by the application.
• Aggregates logging/auditing and provides consistency of logs for compliance and reporting, especially to prove “due diligence” in preventing infection.