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Modeling CORS frameworks with CodeQL to find security vulnerabilities

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There are many different types of vulnerabilities that can occur when setting up CORS for your web application, and insecure usage of CORS frameworks and logic errors in homemade CORS implementations can lead to serious security vulnerabilities that allow attackers to bypass authentication. What's more, attackers can utilize CORS misconfigurations to escalate the severity of other existing vulnerabilities in web applications to access services on the intranet. In this blog post, I'll show how developers and security researchers can use CodeQL to model their own libraries, using work that I've done on CORS frameworks in Go as an example. Since the techniques that I used are useful for modeling other frameworks, this blog post can help you model and find vulnerabilities in your own projects. Because static analyzers like CodeQL have the ability to get the detailed information about structures, functions, and imported libraries, they're more versatile than simple tools like grep. Plus, since CORS frameworks often use set configurations via specific structures and functions, using CodeQL is the easiest way to find misconfigurations in your codebases. Modeling headers in CodeQL When adding code to CodeQL, it's best practice to always check the related queries and frameworks that are already available so that we're not reinventing the wheel. For most languages, CodeQL already has a CORS query that covers many of the default cases. The easiest and simplest way of implementing…Read More

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