I have an old application that I have recently resurrected. The application is CGI::Application based. After our security team scanned the app, a single parameter was noted to be problematic. If the runmode parameter is specified as a non-existing runmode, then the application generates a run-time error and dumps the error--not a problem except if the runmode parameter was specified to have malicious javascript or something else like that. That code is also dumped as part of the error. I have tried to use the error_mode specification to return a custom error page, but it appears that the header that is sent specifies the content-type as "httpd/unix-directory" despite my setting the content-type in my setup subroutine: 

  $self->query->content_type('text/html');

[download]

I am running this all as a mod_perl 2 handler under apache and I have taint checking on. What am I missing here?

The safest thing to do here is probably to url-escape or otherwise scrub the parameters coming in, but I haven't figured out a convenient way to do that in the CGI::Application framework. Is there a standard way of doing this type of thing?

Thanks,
Sean

In reply to XSS protection in CGI::Application by srdst13

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