Failure to Restrict URL

Are you having trouble using your web application? It might be due to the web application vulnerability, which refers to the system weakness in a particular application. It can be exploited that will compromise the security of a particular application.

One of the vulnerabilities of a web application is the failure to restrict the URL access. Once your application fails to properly restrict the URL access, the security can be compromised through a particular technique known as forced browsing. Having experienced forced browsing might be crucial, especially when an attacker is trying to gather the sensitive data through the web browser. This is done through requesting data files or specific pages.

How to protect your web applications from forced browsing?

In order to keep your website free from forced browsing attacks, it is a must that your access-control settings are up to date and accurate for every page as well as application on the site. There are actually automated tools that can be used for this process however they are less accurate, which can result to your site vulnerabilities.

There is the best approach on how to ensure that your site is protected, which is through the use if code analysis along with the security testing across your site. Through this process, the security testers and developers can ensure that the access-control policy is effective and is able to extend to each site page. Testing should occur prior to the launch so that you can ensure that the pages really are protected.

In order to prevent breaches due to Failure to restrict the URL access, you can consider the following:

• Using appropriate permissions or ACLs in order to disallow any anonymous reading
• Defining the list of the file types available for the remote reading found on the server
• Removing of all the unnecessary files form the web-accessible directories
• Using the virtual directories for the web access and separating the secure directories data

An attacker can take advantage when this web application vulnerability happens. The particular attacker can bypass the website security through accessing the files directly, not the following links. This will enable the attacker of accessing the data instead of using web application. It is also possible for an attacker to guess the names of the backup files that contain such sensitive information, read and locate source code and bypass the order of the web pages.

This only implies that Failure to Restrict URL will occur whenever an error about the access control settings would result the users to access the pages, which are meant to be hidden and restricted. This error might usually happen since these pages are frequently less protected than of the pages that are meant for the public access, wherein unauthorized users can reach the pages anonymously.

How are you going to protect restricted pages?

Well in most cases, the only solution in order to protect the restricted and hidden pages is through not publicly showing the link to them and not linking to certain pages.