Security Advisory

Clickjacking, also known as a UI redress attack, is a method in which an attacker uses multiple transparent or opaque layers to trick a user into clicking a button or link on a page other than the one they believe they are clicking. Thus, the attacker is "hijacking" clicks meant for one page and routing the user to an illegitimate page.

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a web security policy mechanism whereby a web server declares that complying user agents (such as a web browser) are to interact with it using only secure HTTPS connections (i.e. HTTP layered over TLS/SSL). HSTS is an IETF standards track protocol and is specified in RFC 6797.

The cache-control and pragma HTTP header have not been set properly or are missing allowing the browser and proxies to cache content.

Ensure that the web browser's XSS filter is enabled, by setting the X-XSS-Protection HTTP response header to '1'.

The Anti-MIME-Sniffing header X-Content-Type-Options was not set to 'nosniff'. This allows older versions of Internet Explorer and Chrome to perform MIME-sniffing on the response body, potentially causing the response body to be interpreted and displayed as a content type other than the declared content type. Current (early 2014) and legacy versions of Firefox will use the declared content type (if one is set), rather than performing MIME-sniffing.

Content Security Policy (CSP) is an added layer of security that helps to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks, including Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. These attacks are used for everything from data theft to site defacement or distribution of malware. CSP provides a set of standard HTTP headers that allow website owners to declare approved sources of content that browsers should be allowed to load on that page — covered types are JavaScript, CSS, HTML frames, fonts, images and embeddable objects such as Java applets, ActiveX, audio and video files.

The response contents are storable by caching components such as proxy servers, and may be retrieved directly from the cache, rather than from the origin server by the caching servers, in response to similar requests from other users. If the response data is sensitive, personal or user-specific, this may result in sensitive information being leaked. In some cases, this may even result in a user gaining complete control of the session of another user, depending on the configuration of the caching components in use in their environment. This is primarily an issue where "shared" caching servers such as "proxy" caches are configured on the local network. This configuration is typically found in corporate or educational environments, for instance.

X-Frame-Options header is not included in the HTTP response to protect against 'ClickJacking' attacks.

The Secure attribute tells the browser to only send the cookie if the request is being sent over a secure channel such as HTTPS. This will help protect the cookie from being passed over unencrypted requests. If the application can be accessed over both HTTP and HTTPS, then there is the potential that the cookie can be sent in clear text.

HttpOnly is an additional flag included in a Set-Cookie HTTP response header. If supported by the browser, using the HttpOnly flag when generating a cookie helps mitigate the risk of client side script accessing the protected cookie. If a browser that supports HttpOnly detects a cookie containing the HttpOnly flag, and client side script code attempts to read the cookie, the browser returns an empty string as the result. This causes the attack to fail by preventing the malicious (usually XSS) code from sending the data to an attacker's website.

Buffer overflow errors are characterized by the overwriting of memory spaces of the background web process, which should have never been modified intentionally or unintentionally. Overwriting values of the IP (Instruction Pointer), BP (Base Pointer) and other registers causes exceptions, segmentation faults, and other process errors to occur. Usually these errors end execution of the application in an unexpected way.

A cookie has been set without the HttpOnly flag, which means that the cookie can be accessed by JavaScript. If a malicious script can be run on this page then the cookie will be accessible and can be transmitted to another site. If this is a session cookie then session hijacking may be possible.

A cookie has been set without the secure flag, which means that the cookie can be accessed via unencrypted connections.

A cookie has been set without the SameSite attribute, which means that the cookie can be sent as a result of a 'cross-site' request. The SameSite attribute is an effective counter measure to cross-site request forgery, cross-site script inclusion, and timing attacks.

Initial Publication

Update release information for ACOS 4.1.0 and 3.2.2 release families. Corrected affected releases for ACOS 4.1.0.

Added ACOS 3.2.2 affected and resolved release information

Added 4.1.100 release family