XSS prevention in JSP/Servlet web application

Question

How can I prevent XSS attacks in a JSP/Servlet web application?

Answer 1

I had great luck with OWASP Anti-Samy and an AspectJ advisor on all my Spring Controllers that blocks XSS from getting in.

public class UserInputSanitizer {

    private static Policy policy;
    private static AntiSamy antiSamy;

    private static AntiSamy getAntiSamy() throws PolicyException  {
        if (antiSamy == null) {
            policy = getPolicy("evocatus-default");
            antiSamy = new AntiSamy();
        }
        return antiSamy;

    }

    public static String sanitize(String input) {
        CleanResults cr;
        try {
            cr = getAntiSamy().scan(input, policy);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
        return cr.getCleanHTML();
    }

    private static Policy getPolicy(String name) throws PolicyException {
        Policy policy = 
            Policy.getInstance(Policy.class.getResourceAsStream("/META-INF/antisamy/" + name + ".xml"));
        return policy;
    }

}

You can get the AspectJ advisor from the this stackoverflow post

I think this is a better approach then c:out particular if you do a lot of javascript.

Answer 2

The how-to-prevent-xss has been asked several times. You will find a lot of information in StackOverflow. Also, OWASP website has an XSS prevention cheat sheet that you should go through.

On the libraries to use, OWASP's ESAPI library has a java flavour. You should try that out. Besides that, every framework that you use has some protection against XSS. Again, OWASP website has information on most popular frameworks, so I would recommend going through their site.

Answer 3

I would suggest regularly testing for vulnerabilities using an automated tool, and fixing whatever it finds. It's a lot easier to suggest a library to help with a specific vulnerability then for all XSS attacks in general.

Skipfish is an open source tool from Google that I've been investigating: it finds quite a lot of stuff, and seems worth using.