Stronger Anti Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Filter for Java Web Apps

Here is a good and simple anti cross-site scripting (XSS) filter written for Java web applications. What it basically does is remove all suspicious strings from request parameters before returning them to the application. It’s an improvement over my previous post on the topic.

You should configure it as the first filter in your chain (web.xml) and it’s generally a good idea to let it catch every request made to your site.

The actual implementation consists of two classes, the actual filter is quite simple, it wraps the HTTP request object in a specialized HttpServletRequestWrapper that will perform our filtering.

public class XSSFilter implements Filter {

    @Override
    public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) throws ServletException {
    }

    @Override
    public void destroy() {
    }

    @Override
    public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain)
        throws IOException, ServletException {
        chain.doFilter(new XSSRequestWrapper((HttpServletRequest) request), response);
    }

}

The wrapper overrides the getParameterValues(), getParameter() and getHeader() methods to execute the filtering before returning the desired field to the caller. The actual XSS checking and striping is performed in the stripXSS() private method.

import java.util.regex.Pattern;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequestWrapper;

public class XSSRequestWrapper extends HttpServletRequestWrapper {

    private static Pattern[] patterns = new Pattern[]{
        // Script fragments
        Pattern.compile("<script>(.*?)</script>", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE),
        // src='...'
        Pattern.compile("src[\r\n]*=[\r\n]*\\\'(.*?)\\\'", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL),
        Pattern.compile("src[\r\n]*=[\r\n]*\\\"(.*?)\\\"", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL),
        // lonely script tags
        Pattern.compile("</script>", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE),
        Pattern.compile("<script(.*?)>", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL),
        // eval(...)
        Pattern.compile("eval\\((.*?)\\)", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL),
        // expression(...)
        Pattern.compile("expression\\((.*?)\\)", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL),
        // javascript:...
        Pattern.compile("javascript:", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE),
        // vbscript:...
        Pattern.compile("vbscript:", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE),
        // onload(...)=...
        Pattern.compile("onload(.*?)=", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL)
    };

    public XSSRequestWrapper(HttpServletRequest servletRequest) {
        super(servletRequest);
    }

    @Override
    public String[] getParameterValues(String parameter) {
        String[] values = super.getParameterValues(parameter);

        if (values == null) {
            return null;
        }

        int count = values.length;
        String[] encodedValues = new String[count];
        for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
            encodedValues[i] = stripXSS(values[i]);
        }

        return encodedValues;
    }

    @Override
    public String getParameter(String parameter) {
        String value = super.getParameter(parameter);

        return stripXSS(value);
    }

    @Override
    public String getHeader(String name) {
        String value = super.getHeader(name);
        return stripXSS(value);
    }

    private String stripXSS(String value) {
        if (value != null) {
            // NOTE: It's highly recommended to use the ESAPI library and uncomment the following line to
            // avoid encoded attacks.
            // value = ESAPI.encoder().canonicalize(value);

            // Avoid null characters
            value = value.replaceAll("\0", "");

            // Remove all sections that match a pattern
            for (Pattern scriptPattern : patterns){
                value = scriptPattern.matcher(value).replaceAll("");
            }
        }
        return value;
    }
}

Notice the comment about the ESAPI library, I strongly recommend you check it out and try to include it in your projects.

If you want to dig deeper on the topic I suggest you check out the OWASP page about XSS and RSnake’s XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet.