Java Code Security Toolkit

This utility hosts a number of code security controls for various application security vulnerability categories. It can be used directly by programmers, but you may have been introduced to it by being having it directly added to you code by automation.

Many of the APIs provided are meant to be drop-in replacements that either offer more secure defaults, harden against common attacks, or at least surface the security questions developers should answer when using risky APIs. Here are a few examples:

Example 1: Safely accessing URLs

Fetching URLs is potentially unsafe because of the wide universe of hosts, protocols, and capabilities this may expose. We offer an API that makes it considerably higher assurance, allowing the developer to dictate their expectations about the result, causing a SecurityException to be thrown if they're not met:

-  URL u = new URL(str); // dangerous -- can be to ftp://evil.com/ for all we know
+  URL u = Urls.create(str, Set.of(UrlsProtocols.HTTPS), HostValidator.fromAllowedHostPattern(Pattern.compile("good\\.com"));

Example 2: Hardening Java deserialization

Deserializing using ObjectInputStream is extremely dangerous (here's a from-zero-to-exploit talk we gave about it). We offer an API to offer a strong, 1-line, zero-tradeoff protection against this attack.

   ObjectInputStream ois = ...;
+  ObjectInputFilters.enableObjectFilterIfUnprotected(ois); // now protected against all publicly known gadgets
   Acme acme = (Acme)ois.readObject();

Adding to your project

In Maven:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.github.pixee</groupId>
  <artifactId>java-security-toolkit</artifactId>
  <version>1.2.0</version>
</dependency>

In Gradle:

implementation("io.github.pixee:java-security-toolkit:1.2.0")

Contributing

We'd love to get contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Building

Building is meant for Java 11:

./gradlew check

FAQ

How does this compare to OWASP ESAPI?

We actually contributed to OWASP ESAPI and other OWASP projects in the past and remain fans today!

There is some limited overlap, but ESAPI is much more broad in its ambitions, and as a result is considerably more "heavyweight". It also is not focused on hardening or sandboxing solutions, instead preferring to offer concrete solutions for problems that require business context to implement. Our library also has very few dependencies, no configuration, and is generally designed to offer much less friction to "drop in" to a codebase.