How to prevent frame injection (clickjacking) in java application?
How can we prevent frame injection in Java application?
Like in a Penetration testing, it is found that if a hacker drafts a demo html page, and inside that page he has used iframe, which has the URL of the working application, he/she can see the data through that URL/request(created in an iframe).
suppose this is the hackers file, test.html:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd\">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Insert title here</title>
</head><body>
<iframe id="inner" src="http://hostname:8080/Application_Name/ABC/DEF/SomePage.jsp?ABC=QWERTYL&XYZ=1&CDE=24" width="600" height="400" scrolling="yes">
</iframe>
</body>
</html>
And now the hacker is able to retrieve the data within the application. How to stop this?
Answer
This is clickjacking attack: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking The simpliest way to prevent it is to add header "X-Frame-Options" with value "DENY". This can be done using filter. Register it in your web.xml and use code like this:
@Override
public void doFilter(ServletRequest req, ServletResponse resp, FilterChain chain) throws IOException,
ServletException {
HttpServletResponse response = (HttpServletResponse) resp;
response.addHeader("X-Frame-Options", "DENY");
chain.doFilter(req, resp);
}
All modern browsers support this header, but to protect users with legacy browsers you will need also defensive javascript in the UI. More details: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_Sheet