Insufficient Transport Layer Protection

What is Insufficient Transport Layer Protection? It is defined as the security weakness that is caused by an application that does not take any measures in order to protect the network traffic. The Insufficient Transport Layer Protection is one of the web application vulnerabilities in which once occurred, will surely affect the performance of your site and some of the necessary data within your website.

During the authentication process, applications may use the TLS/SSL. However, most often, they would tend to fail making use of it elsewhere in the application, which results to leaving the data as well as session ID’s exposed. In relation to this, the session ID’s and exposed data can possibly be intercepted, meaning the application is vulnerable to any exploitation.

According to the OWASP, the application often fails to encrypt, authenticate and protect the integrity and confidentiality of the sensitive network. When this occurs, sometimes the support weak algorithms do not use them correctly and use valid or expired certificates.

Since they are several versions of the SSL/TLS protocols used widespread across, deploying applications such as electronic mail, web browsing, internet faxing, voice-over-IP, instant messaging and other applications for communication over the internet, the Insufficient Transport Layer Protection became the ninth on the OWASP top 10 risks that should not ignored.

How does Insufficient Transport Layer Protection cause damage? By looking at one of the most basic example of the CRLF attack, it could add fake entries into the log files. The vulnerable application can accept the unsatisfied or even improperly neutralized data and then write it to the system log file.

Another damage could be through an application accepting a file name as the user input and executing a somewhat harmless command on the particular file. If the Insufficient Transport Layer Protection affects the vulnerable application, the attacker can provide an input that could wipe out the entire file name of system.

How to prevent Insufficient Transport Layer Protection?

Despite the possible severe harm or damages that this web application vulnerability provides, preventing it to happen is easy. You just have to follow the rule of not trusting the user input. You need to neutralize and sanitize all of the user-supplied data or encode the output properly on the HTTP headers, which otherwise become visible to the users in order to prevent the injection of the CRLF sequences along with their consequences.

Anyone who is in the internet can possibly monitor the network traffic of the users. Whenever the application is on the internet, you are not sure about which among your users is able to access it. You should be careful and do not forget the back end connections.

Knowing what the web application vulnerabilities are can help you to become aware of the right and appropriate things to do in order to protect your website, files and applications. Insufficient Transport Layer Protection is a kind of vulnerability that should not be ignored for you to avoid attackers to take advantage of your application or website being vulnerable.