I am using salesforce PHP toolkit in order to insert values of javascript functions (Just in order to document functions I am using, not for execution in salesforce) inside a custom object I have.
In my PHP function I am saving a string like:
(function(d,f){var b={src:(d.location.protocol=="https:"?"https:":"http:")...
after I insert this string using SF API, The result I see in the field is:
(function(d,f){var b={src:(d.location.protocol=="https:"?"...
As you can see, salesforce has added special characters to my string.
I haven't found anyway to pass that.
Any idea's?
The solution was to remove the htmlspecialchars from the string. I didn't think that SF would accept the string without because you could not echo the string without it as well (Due to special characters in my string). But it seems that it does pass the parameter without any issue. I'd be happy to understand that if anyone understands.
Related
I use JS to sent encodeURIComponent string to a PHP file write and has been working fine for years; until recently I met with a strange effect that the text need to be further encoded with escape in order to get it to work! The sympton start to show only when I use an open source wysiwyg editor !
What could be the offending characters in URI that need escape to fix it? I used to think URI only reserve ? & = for its syntax to work.
The situation you describe could possibly be explained--although there's no way of knowing without you telling us what the string is, and how it's being used--by a URL which involves two levels of nested URL-like values.
Consider a URL taking a query parameter which is another URL:
http://me.com?url=http://you.com?qp=1
That URL is subject to misinterpretation, so we would normally URL-encode the you.com URL, giving us:
http://me.com?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyou.com%3Fqp%3D1
Whoever is working with this URL can now extract the query parameter named url with the value http%3A%2F%2Fyou.com%3Fqp%3D1, decode it (often a framework or library will decode it for you), and then use it to jump to or call that URL.
Consider, however, the case where the you.com URL itself has a query parameter, not ?qp=1 as given in the first example, but rather something that itself needs to be URL-encoded. To keep things simple, we'll just use "cat?pictures". We'd need to encode that, making the query parameter
In other words, the URL in question is going to be
?qp=cat%3Fpictures
If we just use that as is, then our entire URL becomes
http://me.com?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyou.com%3Fqp=cat%3Fpictures
Unfortunately, if we now decode that in a naive way, we get
http://me.com?url=http://you.com?qp=cat?pictures
In other words, the nested URL has been decoded as well, meaning that it will think the URL has two query paramters, namely url and qp. To successfully deal with this problem, we need to encode the second query parameter a second time, yielding
http://me.com?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyou.com%3Fqp%3Dcat%253Fpictures
Please note, however, that if you use your language or environment's built-in tools and libraries for handling query parameters, most of this will happen automatically and prevent you from having to worry about it.
The symptom start to show only when I use an open source wysiwyg editor
An editor merely places characters in a file. It's very hard to imagine that an editor is causing the problem you refer to, unless perhaps one editor is configured to use smart quotes, for example, which would pretty much break everything that involved quotes.
I'm trying to identify the difference between encodeForHTMLAttribute and encodeForJavaScript. Still, I couldn't find a scenario where untrusted data is used as javascript data values, which broke the code when escaped with encodeForHTMLAttribute, but works securely after escaped using encodeForJavaScript.
I know that for all javascript, its recommended to use encodeForJavaScript. But I like to see the difference.
The answer to your question is boring: The fact is that passing an HTML Entity encoded string to JavaScript is largely an unspecified operation.* JavaScript expects data passed to it to be escaped for JavaScript, with the exception of some API methods, it has no idea what you're sending it.
HTML and JavaScript are different languages. If you'll note, they both have different reserved characters--some the same, meaning they each have reserved characters that make up the language that have to be treated specially when using them in that language.
The correct way to ensure that javascript will always treat incoming code as data, is to escape for JavaScript. Passing it an HTMLEntity encoded String, might work, but we have to say might because that behavior is unspecified. One reason that the question I linked at the beginning partially answers your question is that it is common for JavaScript frameworks to DO that kind of processing on your input... so you better be sure that if that happens, the data is appropriately escaped for JavaScript. Otherwise it will unwrap your HTMLEntity encoding, render and execute script code.
I saved the damning part for last: You can write legal JavaScript with only six characters. And none of these characters are commonly escaped by HTML encoders. Here's an entire guide on using JavaScript escaping like this to evade XSS filters. And for proof that it works, look here.
Or run it yourself in an HTML file on your computer:
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However, if you escape what's between the <script> tags for Javascript... it will be treated purely as data and will not be executed.
*Except for those JavaScript functions that are designed to take HTML-encoded strings as input.
I've got a record in my database: \w{3}_\d{5}
When I retrieve that record to java string it comes as is: \w{3}_\d{5}
However when I am assigning that java string to JavaScript variable it looks as follows: w{3}_d{5} i.e without back slashes
So if I save it to the database as \\w{3}_\\d{5}
Java String will be: \\w{3}_\\d{5}
Java String assigned to JavaScript variable will be: \w{3}_\d{5}
To summarize the above - I need a regular expression to function on both (client and server), the only solution I see is to save a regular expression as \\w{3}_\\d{5} and get read of extra back slashes on java side.
Why does JavaScript looses the back slashes? Whats the best way to go around this?
Apache Commons Lang has a class with string escape functions suitable for different languages. The class is called StringEscapeUtils and has the static method String = escapeJava(String).
An older version of the library had an escapeJavaScript method, but hopefully escapeJava will work just as well.
One solution can be
\w{3}_\d{5} ===> [a-zA-Z0-9_]{3}_[0-9]{5}
I'm trying to determine the best practices for storing and displaying user input in MongoDB. Obviously, in SQL databases, all user input needs to be encoded to prevent injection attacks. However, my understanding is that with MongoDB we need to be more worried about XSS attacks, so does user input need to be encoded on the server before being stored in mongo? Or, is it enough to simply encode the string immediately before it is displayed on the client side using a template library like handlebars?
Here's the flow I'm talking about:
On the client side, user updates their name to "<script>alert('hi');</script>".
Does this need to be escaped to "<script>alert('hi');</script>" before sending it to the server?
The updated string is passed to the server in a JSON document via an ajax request.
The server stores the string in mongodb under "user.name".
Does the server need to escape the string in the same way just to be safe? Would it have to first un-escape the string before fully escaping so as to not double up on the '&'?
Later, user info is requested by client, and the name string is sent in JSON ajax response.
Immediately before display, user name is encoded using something like _.escape(name).
Would this flow display the correct information and be safe from XSS attacks? What about about unicode characters like Chinese characters?
This also could change how text search would need to be done, as the search term may need to be encoded before starting the search if all user text is encoded.
Thanks a lot!
Does this need to be escaped to "<script>alert('hi');</script>" before sending it to the server?
No, it has to be escaped like that just before it ends up in an HTML page - step (5) above.
The right type of escaping has to be applied when text is injected into a new surrounding context. That means you HTML-encode data at the moment you include it in an HTML page. Ideally you are using a modern templating system that will do that escaping for you automatically.
(Similarly if you include data in a JavaScript string literal in a <script> block, you have to JS-encode it; if you include data in in a stylesheet rule you have to CSS-encode it, and so on. If we were using SQL queries with data injected into their strings then we would need to do SQL-escaping, but luckily Mongo queries are typically done with JavaScript objects rather than a string language, so there is no escaping to worry about.)
The database is not an HTML context so HTML-encoding input data on the way to the database is not the right thing to do.
(There are also other sources of XSS than injections, most commonly unsafe URL schemes.)
The short answer is yes, you should still encode all user input.
Whenever you do string concatenation, you need to escape the data correctly. MongoDB supports converting Javascript queries to it's native query language expression in BSON. When doing this there are two contexts to be aware of:
Inside a Javascript string
Everywhere else
If you are concatenating user input outside a string, you really need to be careful. It's really hard to get the escaping right unless the datatype of the variable is an integer or similar where the possible values are known and limited.
The best practice would be to avoid string concatenation whenever possible. You can read more about how MongoDB addresses SQL-Injection here.
This question already has answers here:
How to decode HTML entities using jQuery?
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Closed 8 years ago.
We are doing an AJAX call to retrieve from database. Since our clients may use different languages we encode everything into Unicode to store in the database (saves worrying about collations and such). Now when we fetch such content to be displayed in an input text field it is displaying the Unicode codes. Checked the HTML 4 documentation for input and value is a CDATA which tells me those unicode should be displayed as their character.
From the screen shot attached you can see this is not the case, I'm wondering if there is a way to "force" this behavior.
Since our clients may use different languages we encode everything into ascii to store in the database (saves worrying about collations and such).
IMHO storing html entities into the database is a very bad approach. I would strongly recommend you using UTF-8 encoding everywhere. This is what will save you from worrying about collations and such.
You're passing a JavaScript string full of &#...; numeric character references. JavaScript strings are not HTML-encoded, so your code really does make a JS string containing an ampersand, a hash, and so on.
When you set it as an input's DOM value (val()) naturally those ampersands will still be there. DOM properties are plain strings, not markup. You only need to HTML-encode strings in JavaScript if you intend to make markup out of them for use with innerHTML/html().
So the PHP should not HTML-encode content that isn't going be to inserted into HTML. Use json_encode() to create JavaScript string literals:
$('#js_global_status_input').val(<?php echo json_encode($status_value); ?>);