in reply to Re^2: Essential CGI Security Practices
in thread Essential CGI Security Practices

Are you replying to the right node? If so, I say nothing of fatalsToBrowser. And Invalid password/Invalid login is something the user can fix, and it is not really input validation as you cannot (usually) do it programmatically i.e. verify that the user has in fact authenticated himself. Also my discussion of paths (your point about open) was seperate, following "on the other hand", therefore we are in accordance.

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Re^4: Essential CGI Security Practices
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Feb 03, 2002 at 02:46 UTC
    Yes, I was replying to your note. I think you simply confused the one kind of error message with a different kind of error message. There's a distinct difference between what you were talking about and those error messages that should not be let out due to CGI security concerns. Input validation, as I mentioned it, was meant in the extended sense of any and all checks you may perform on your input data - ie not only the initial "does this look like a valid username" but also "do we have this username in our database" and "does the password match". Point taken that you mention paths and similar information separately, however I think you should drop the condition "if you're truly paranoid" because if you're anything less than truly paranoid there's not even a chance of achieving security. :-)

    Makeshifts last the longest.

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