BUburo9·Jun 23, 2017
When I see anything that touches web coding practices for Go I always look up an area that I know best: sanitization.
I wrote https://github.com/microcosm-cc/bluemonday which is a pure Go HTML sanitizer inspired by https://github.com/owasp/java-html-sanitizer .
The key things to understand about HTML sanitizers:
* They must be whitelist based
* They must be aware of context
* You must sanitize ALL user input even if you don't think you're going to render it on a web page.
The book linked to in the article does not seem to understand any of the above.
The section on sanitization has the equivalent of "string replace" as the primary recommendation. Elsewhere in the XSS section a focus is on escaping content before it is rendered.
Sanitization needs to know not to run on <pre> blocks, and to escape HTML entities automatically, and to underst
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and what links are safe and which are not.
XSS can be really interesting and quite targeted. It can be that a user-agent contains the XSS, because the target may not be the person reading the page but the admin looking at a web page of their web server logs through an analytics program on the same domain.
The bluemonday package I wrote can deal with all of these things but that isn't the point, the point is that this is an area I know and the book falls way short of a decent standard for creating a secure and safe web application. And if it falls short in this area (the first 2 chapters) then I would assume that it falls short in all areas.