Is this a valid http url
http://www.example.com?x&y
or
we must always have = sign for parameters.
http://www.example.com?x1=x&x2=y
Well, it works, and the W3C recommendations are extremely general -- only the use of ? and + are defined. So I think from the perspective of HTTP/HTML the = is optional. It's use is obviously a common convention and many client & server libraries use it, but there doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't define a service to work on some other scheme.
Anecdotally, I like to leave out the =blah part when I'm using the query string as a flag as in http://www.example.com?logout
Reference: http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html
According to the ABNF in Appendix A of RFC 3986, both examples above are valid URL.
Note that if you read only the Wikipedia article on Query string, you might get the false impression that the second ne is the only valid one.
Related
In the documentation for jsonapi for pagination is says the following:
For example, a page-based strategy might use query parameters such as
page[number] and page[size]
How would I represent this in the query string? http://localhost:4200/people?page[number]=1&page[size]=25, I don't think using a map link structure is a valid query string. Only the page parameter is reserved according to the documentation.
I don't think using a map link structure is a valid query string.
You're right technically, and that's why the spec has the note that says:
Note: The example query parameters above use unencoded [ and ] characters simply for readability. In practice, these characters must be percent-encoded, per the requirements in RFC 3986.
So, page[size] is really page%5Bsize%5D which is a valid query parameter name.
Only the page parameter is reserved according to the documentation.
When the spec text says that only page is reserved, it actually means that any page[......] style query parameter is reserved. (I can tell you that for sure as one of the spec's editors.) But it should say so more explicitly, so I'll open an issue for it.
I know that in most MVC frameworks, for example, both query string params and form params will be made available to the processing code, and usually merged into one set of params (often with POST taking precedence). However, is it a valid thing to do according to the HTTP specification? Say you were to POST to:
http://1.2.3.4/MyApplication/Books?bookCode=1234
... and submit some update like a change to the book name whose book code is 1234, you'd be wanting the processing code to take both the bookCode query string param into account, and the POSTed form params with the updated book information. Is this valid, and is it a good idea?
Is it valid according HTTP specifications ?
Yes.
Here is the general syntax of URL as defined in those specs
http_URL = "http:" "//" host [ ":" port ] [ abs_path [ "?" query ]]
There is no additional constraints on the form of the http_URL. In particular, the http method (i.e. POST,GET,PUT,HEAD,...) used don't add any restriction on the http URL format.
When using the GET method : the server can consider that the request body is empty.
When using the POST method : the server must handle the request body.
Is it a good idea ?
It depends what you need to do. I suggest you this link explaining the ideas behind GET and POST.
I can think that in some situation it can be handy to always have some parameters like the user language in the query part of the url.
I know that in most MVC frameworks, for example, both query string params and form params will be made available to the processing code, and usually merged into one set of params (often with POST taking precedence).
Any competent framework should support this.
Is this valid
Yes. The POST method in HTTP does not impose any restrictions on the URI used.
is it a good idea?
Obviously not, if the framework you are going to use is still clue-challenged. Otherwise, it depends on what you want to accomplish. The major use case (redirection of a data subset to a new POST target) has been irretrievably broken by browser implementations (all mechanically following the broken lead of Mosaic/Netscape), so the considerations here are mostly theoretical.
Should the following URLs be considered functionally equivalent?
http://example.com/foo?a=&b=
http://example.com/foo?a&b
This came about when a user of a Drupal module I wrote which parses apart and then rewrites URIs noticed that the code sometimes causes the query string parts to change in unexpected ways due to how some of the underlying PHP functions behave. For example:
parse_str("a&b", $values); print http_build_query($values);
a=&b=
Is this something I should bother worrying about?
Edit so SO stops complaining that this question is similar to another one: The question is whether it's safe to assume that "no value for X" and "empty value for X" are equivalent, not whether the "no value" style is syntactically correct (which it is).
RFC 3986 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax doesn't have anything to say about the structure of the query string aside from how characters like ? should be dealt with. So strictly speaking, your two example URLs are different. Of course, the application which receives those query strings may treat them as functionally equivalent, but this isn't something you can determine from the URL alone.
As per RFC6570 empty query parameters are allowed. Please refer to section 3.2.9
Example Template Expansion
{&x,y,empty} &x=1024&y=768&empty=
I was wondering if it's acceptable to put custom data in an HTTP authorization header. We're designing a RESTful API and we may need a way to specify a custom method of authorization. As an example, let's call it FIRE-TOKEN authentication.
Would something like this be valid and allowed according to the spec: Authorization: FIRE-TOKEN 0PN5J17HBGZHT7JJ3X82:frJIUN8DYpKDtOLCwo//yllqDzg=
The first part of the second string (before the ':') is the API key, the second part is a hash of query string.
The format defined in RFC2617 is credentials = auth-scheme #auth-param. So, in agreeing with fumanchu, I think the corrected authorization scheme would look like
Authorization: FIRE-TOKEN apikey="0PN5J17HBGZHT7JJ3X82", hash="frJIUN8DYpKDtOLCwo//yllqDzg="
Where FIRE-TOKEN is the scheme and the two key-value pairs are the auth parameters. Though I believe the quotes are optional (from Apendix B of p7-auth-19)...
auth-param = token BWS "=" BWS ( token / quoted-string )
I believe this fits the latest standards, is already in use (see below), and provides a key-value format for simple extension (if you need additional parameters).
Some examples of this auth-param syntax can be seen here...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth-19#section-4.4
https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_clientlogin
https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/AuthSub#WorkingAuthSub
Put it in a separate, custom header.
Overloading the standard HTTP headers is probably going to cause more confusion than it's worth, and will violate the principle of least surprise. It might also lead to interoperability problems for your API client programmers who want to use off-the-shelf tool kits that can only deal with the standard form of typical HTTP headers (such as Authorization).
No, that is not a valid production according to the "credentials" definition in RFC 2617. You give a valid auth-scheme, but auth-param values must be of the form token "=" ( token | quoted-string ) (see section 1.2), and your example doesn't use "=" that way.
Old question I know, but for the curious:
Believe it or not, this issue was solved ~2 decades ago with HTTP BASIC, which passes the value as base64 encoded username:password. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication#Client_side)
You could do the same, so that the example above would become:
Authorization: FIRE-TOKEN MFBONUoxN0hCR1pIVDdKSjNYODI6ZnJKSVVOOERZcEtEdE9MQ3dvLy95bGxxRHpnPQ==
I was reading some questions trying to find a good solution to preventing XSS in user provided URLs(which get turned into a link). I've found one for PHP but I can't seem to find anything for .Net.
To be clear, all I want is a library which will make user-provided text safe(including unicode gotchas?) and make user-provided URLs safe(used in a or img tags)
I noticed that StackOverflow has very good XSS protection, but sadly that part of their Markdown implementation seems to be missing from MarkdownSharp. (and I use MarkdownSharp for a lot of my content)
Microsoft has the Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library; you could start by taking a look at it and determining if it fits your needs. They also have some guidance on how to avoid XSS attacks that you could follow if you determine the tool they offer is not really what you need.
There's a few things to consider here. Firstly, you've got ASP.NET Request Validation which will catch many of the common XSS patterns. Don't rely exclusively on this, but it's a nice little value add.
Next up you want to validate the input against a white-list and in this case, your white-list is all about conforming to the expected structure of a URL. Try using Uri.IsWellFormedUriString for compliance against RFC 2396 and RFC 273:
var sourceUri = UriTextBox.Text;
if (!Uri.IsWellFormedUriString(sourceUri, UriKind.Absolute))
{
// Not a valid URI - bail out here
}
AntiXSS has Encoder.UrlEncode which is great for encoding string to be appended to a URL, i.e. in a query string. Problem is that you want to take the original string and not escape characters such as the forward slashes otherwise http://troyhunt.com ends up as http%3a%2f%2ftroyhunt.com and you've got a problem.
As the context you're encoding for is an HTML attribute (it's the "href" attribute you're setting), you want to use Encoder.HtmlAttributeEncode:
MyHyperlink.NavigateUrl = Encoder.HtmlAttributeEncode(sourceUri);
What this means is that a string like http://troyhunt.com/<script> will get escaped to http://troyhunt.com/<script> - but of course Request Validation would catch that one first anyway.
Also take a look at the OWASP Top 10 Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards.
i think you can do it yourself by creating an array of the charecters and another array with the code,
if you found characters from the array replace it with the code, this will help you ! [but definitely not 100%]
character array
<
>
...
Code Array
& lt;
& gt;
...
I rely on HtmlSanitizer. It is a .NET library for cleaning HTML fragments and documents from constructs that can lead to XSS attacks.
It uses AngleSharp to parse, manipulate, and render HTML and CSS.
Because HtmlSanitizer is based on a robust HTML parser it can also shield you from deliberate or accidental
"tag poisoning" where invalid HTML in one fragment can corrupt the whole document leading to broken layout or style.
Usage:
var sanitizer = new HtmlSanitizer();
var html = #"<script>alert('xss')</script><div onload=""alert('xss')"""
+ #"style=""background-color: test"">Test<img src=""test.gif"""
+ #"style=""background-image: url(javascript:alert('xss')); margin: 10px""></div>";
var sanitized = sanitizer.Sanitize(html, "http://www.example.com");
Assert.That(sanitized, Is.EqualTo(#"<div style=""background-color: test"">"
+ #"Test<img style=""margin: 10px"" src=""http://www.example.com/test.gif""></div>"));
There's an online demo, plus there's also a .NET Fiddle you can play with.
(copy/paste from their readme)