Safe object check

The Safe Object check provides user-configurable protection for sensitive business information, such as customer numbers, order numbers, and country-specific or region-specific telephone numbers or postal codes. A user-defined regular expression or custom plug-in tells the Web App Firewall the format of this information and defines the rules to be used to protect it. If a string in a user request matches a safe object definition, the Web App Firewall either blocks the response, masks the protected information, or removes the protected information from the response before sending it to the user, depending on how you configured that particular safe object rule.

The Safe Object check prevents attackers from exploiting a security flaw in your web server software or on your web site to obtain sensitive private information, such as company credit card numbers or social security numbers. If your web sites do not have access to these types of information, you do not need to configure this check. If you have a shopping cart or other application that can access such information, or your web sites have access to database servers that contain such information, you should configure protection for each type of sensitive private information that you handle and store.

Note:

A web site that does not access an SQL database usually does not have access to sensitive private information.

The Safe Object Check dialog box is unlike that for any other check. Each safe object expression that you create is the equivalent of a separate security check, similar to the Credit Card check, for that type of information. If you use the wizard or the GUI, you add a new expression by clicking Add and configuring the expression in the Add Safe Object dialog box. You modify an existing expression by selecting it, then clicking Open, and then configuring the expression in the Modify Safe Object dialog box.

In the Safe Object dialog box for each safe object expression, you can configure the following:

• Safe Object Name. A name for your new safe object. The name can begin with a letter, number, or the underscore symbol, and can consist of from one to 255 letters, numbers, and the hyphen (-), period (.) pound (#), space ( ), at sign (@), equals (=), colon (:), and underscore (_) symbols.
• Actions. Enable or disable the Block, Log, and Statistics actions, and the following actions:
  • X-Out. Mask any information that matches the safe object expression with the letter “X”.
  • Remove. Remove any information that matches the safe object expression.
• Regular Expression. Enter a PCRE-compatible regular expression that defines the safe object. You can create the regular expression in one of three ways: by typing the regular expression directly into the text box, by using the Regex Tokens menu to enter regular expression elements and symbols directly into the text box, or by opening the Regular Expressions Editor and using it to construct the expression. The regular expression must consist of ASCII characters only. Do not cut and paste characters that are not part of the basic 128-character ASCII set. If you want to include non-ASCII characters, you must manually type those characters in PCRE hexadecimal character encoding format. Note: Do not use start anchors (^) at the beginning of Safe Object expressions, or end anchors ($) at the end of Safe Object expressions. These PCRE entities are not supported in Safe Object expressions, and if used, will cause your expression not to match what it was intended to match.
• Maximum Match Length. Enter a positive integer that represents the maximum length of the string that you want to match. For example, if you want to match U.S. social security numbers, enter the number eleven (11) in this field. That allows your regular expression to match a string with nine numerals and two hyphens. If you want to match California driver’s license numbers, enter the number eight (8).

  Caution:

  If you do not enter a maximum match length in this field, the Web App Firewall uses a default value of one (1) when filtering for strings that match your safe object expressions. As a result, most safe object expressions fail to match their target strings.

You cannot use the command-line interface to configure the Safe Object check. You must configure it by using either the Web App Firewall wizard or the GUI.

Following are examples of Safe Object check regular expressions:

• Look for strings that appear to be U.S. social security numbers, which consist of three numerals (the first of which must not be zero), followed by a hyphen, followed by two more numerals, followed by a second hyphen, and ending with a string of four more numerals:

   [1-9][0-9]{2,2}-[0-9]{2,2}-[0-9]{4,4}
  

• Look for strings that appear to be California driver’s license IDs, which start with a letter and are followed by a string of exactly seven numerals:

   [A-Za-z][0-9]{7,7}
  

• Look for strings that appear to be Example Manufacturing customer IDs which, consist of a string of five hexadecimal characters (all the numerals and the letters A through F), followed by a hyphen, followed by a three-letter code, followed by a second hyphen, and ending with a string of ten numerals:

   [0-9A-Fa-f]{5,5}-[A-Za-z]{3,3}-[0-9]{10,10}
  

Caution: Regular expressions are powerful. Especially if you are not thoroughly familiar with PCRE-format regular expressions, double-check any regular expressions you write to ensure that they define exactly the type of string you want to add as a safe object definition, and nothing else. Careless use of wildcards, and especially of the dot-asterisk (.*) metacharacter/wildcard combination, can have results you did not want or expect, such as blocking access to web content that you did not intend to block.