Security for browser forms
Project description
Introduction
This package contains utilities that can help to protect parts of Plone or applications build on top of the Plone framework.
protect decorator
The most common way to use plone.protect is through the protect decorator. This decorator takes a list of checkers as parameters: each checker will check a specific security aspect of the request. For example:
from plone.protect import protect
from plone.protect import PostOnly
@protect(PostOnly)
def SensitiveMethod(self, REQUEST=None):
# This is only allowed with HTTP POST requests.
This relies on the protected method having a parameter called REQUEST.
HTTP POST
If you only need to allow HTTP POST requests you can use the PostOnly checker:
from plone.protect import PostOnly
from plone.protect import protect
@protect(PostOnly)
def manage_doSomething(self, param, REQUEST=None):
pass
This checker only operators on HTTP requests; other types of requests are not checked.
Form authentication
A common problem in web applications is Cross Site Request Forgery or CSRF. This is an attack method in which an attacker tricks a browser to do a HTTP form submit to another site. To do this the attacker needs to know the exact form parameters. Form authentication is a method to make it impossible for an attacker to predict those parameters by adding an extra authenticator which can be verified.
To use the form authenticator you first need to insert it into your form. This can be done using a simple TAL statement inside your form:
<span tal:replace="structure context/@@authenticator/authenticator"/>
this will produce a HTML input element with the authentication information. Next you need to add logic somewhere to verify the authenticator. This can be done using a call to the authenticator view. For example:
authenticator=getMultiAdapter((context, request), name=u"authenticator")
if not authenticator.verify():
raise Unauthorized
You can do the same thing more conveniently using the protect decorator:
from plone.protect import CheckAuthenticator
from plone.protect import protect
@protect(CheckAuthenticator)
def manage_doSomething(self, param, REQUEST=None):
pass
Changelog
2.0 - 2010-07-18
Update license to BSD following board decision. http://lists.plone.org/pipermail/membership/2009-August/001038.html [elro]
2.0a1 - 2009-11-14
Removed deprecated AuthenticateForm class and zope.deprecation dependency. [hannosch]
Avoid deprecation warning for the sha module in Python 2.6. [hannosch]
Specify package dependencies [hannosch]
1.1 - 2008-06-02
Add an optional GenericSetup profile to make it easier to install plone.protect. [mj]
1.0 - 2008-04-19
The protect decorator had a serious design flaw which broke it. Added proper tests for it and fixed the problems. [wichert]
1.0rc1 - 2008-03-28
Rename plone.app.protect to plone.protect: there is nothing Plone-specific about the functionality in this package and it really should be used outside of Plone as well. [wichert]
Made utils.protect work with Zope >= 2.11. [stefan]
1.0b1 - March 7, 2008
Refactor the code to offer a generic protect decorator for methods which takes a list of checkers as options. Add checkers for both the authenticator verification and HTTP POST-only. [wichert]
1.0a1 - January 27, 2008
Initial release [wichert]
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