racket / racket/web-server

Consider disabling ;-separated query parameters by default

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#100 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Racket
Stars
99
Forks
48
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Recently, people have pointed out that the combination of common caching proxies and web frameworks that treat ; as a query separator can lead to security problems; see here: https://snyk.io/blog/cache-poisoning-in-popular-open-source-packages/

This led Python to change the default behavior: https://bugs.python.org/issue42967

See also this article: https://lwn.net/Articles/846847/

We have a few choices here:

  1. Do nothing (probably a bad idea)
  2. Enable users of the web server to disable ; as a separator.
  3. Like 2, but make that the default. (This is what Python did)

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No file, test, or entry point is named. Start by reviewing how the web server parses query parameters and the cited Python, Snyk, and LWN references; done requires an agreed choice among the three proposed behaviors and corresponding implementation coverage.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
backend, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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