this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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The issue is the filter that we're using to avoid multiple encoding attacks de-escapes everything via multiple rounds, then tries to pass it to the next layer of filtering with the de-escaped request body as a json string. Your absolutely right that this is a silly way of doing it, but sometimes we have to live with decisions that were made before we were onboarded to a project. In this particular case, I pushed to improve the filters but all our PO heard was "spend development time weakening security" and at the end of the day they decide what to do and we do it.
Ah, that's understandable. Sorry you have to go through that!
The filter you're using to avoid multiple encoding attacks creates multiple encoding attacks.
You should tell that to OWASP then, they wrote it. org.owasp.esapi 2.5.2.0, class is Encoder, method is canonicalize(String, bool, bool)
This method is a band-aid patch when your downstream code is all messed up and you can't fix it. Instead of treating the input string correctly, it just removes anything that might possibly trigger some vulnerability in wrong code.