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Security: christianhugoch/saltcorn

Security

SECURITY.md

Security Policy

  1. No warrenty
  2. Risks
  3. Known issues
  4. Disclosing new vulnerabilities

No warrenty

Saltcorn is released under the MIT license, which includes the following clause:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Please read the license in full before using Saltcorn.

Nothing in this document or in any other document or communication provided by the Saltcorn developers should be construed as an implicit warranty or guarantee of fitness for any particular purpose. Nor should anything we say be construed as an implicit promise, warrenty or guarantee that Saltcorn has been created with an adequate development methodology, or by individuals with suitable professional qualifications, for any particular purpose.

Risks

Admin users have full control over the server. You should not give admin rights to any user you do not fully trust. Anyone with administrator privileges has the ability to insert security vulnerabilities into your application. Text entered by admin is not escaped for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. There are some efforts to limit what subdomain tenants can do and install but these are likely easier to exploit. You should not operate Saltcorn with open tenant creation (minimum role to create tenant=public) unless you are consigned to such a server being extremely vulnerable.

Saltcorn is developed and deployed based on the nodejs and npm ecosystem. We may be vulnerable to open source supply chain attacks and in addition there are many libraries with low quality and a low level of security scrutiny.

The library we use for CSRF protection (csurf) is deprecated. We may be vulnerable to a sophisticated CSRF attack.

Many other libraries we depend on are deprecated or have security warnings. We have no reason to believe any of these are exploitable but we could be wrong.

You should review the way cookies and sessions are handled and the HTTP headers set. We have disabled some protective measures to allow certain authentication methods.

Our code to use SQLite has received the same degree of scrutiny as that using PostgreSQL as a backend. We recommend using PostgreSQL as a backend for production purposes and only using SQLite for development in desktop environments.

The windows environment has not received the same amount of scrutiny as deployment options on Linux. We recommend using Linux or another Unix-based system for production deployment. Windows deployments are also likely to be less stable. If you must deploy on Windows we recommend using WSL.

Modules are not sandboxed. A module can run any code and cause a full system takeover if it contains malicious code.

Known issues

The role required to run a view is only checked if the view is run directly (i.e. URL /view/{view name}). If a view is embedded in another view or in a page then we do not currently (version 1.0) check if the user has a right to run this view. This will change in the next version of Saltcorn.

Table read access may not be checked when a dropdown is populated with options, e.g. when a Key field is set with a select in Edit or Filter fieldviews. This will change in the next version of Saltcorn.

In the future we will introduce more options around cookies and HTTP headers.

Disclosing new vulnerabilities

If you have discovered a security vulnerability in this project, please report it privately. Do not disclose it as a public issue. This gives us time to work with you to fix the issue before public exposure, reducing the chance that the exploit will be used before a patch is released.

You may submit the report in the following ways:

Please provide the following information in your report:

  • A description of the vulnerability and its impact
  • How to reproduce the issue

You are welcome to submit security vulnerabilities that require administrative privileges to exploit. We will accept these if valid and treat as high priority bugs. We will not issue CVEs or use confidential development facilities to fix security vulnerabilities that require administrative privileges.

There aren’t any published security advisories