6.0.0-git
2024-03-19
Last Modified 2008-09-25 by Jan Schneider

Security Measures

All Horde software is developed with strict coding standards and under continuous peer review. It's in development for 7 years and being reviewed for security issues by user, administrators, security experts and developers constantly.

We have active measures against common web application flaws like session fixation and cross site scripting. The following list of measures makes no claim to be complete:

  • A new session is created on login and logout to protect against session fixation.
  • An XSS filter sanitizes HTML content provided from external sources to remove any active content.
  • Form tokens protect important actions like logging out or deleting messages again CSRF attacks.
  • Session information is by default passed with cookies instead of URL parameters, and with secure cookies when using a https connection, to make session hijacking more difficult.
  • A dereferrer is used if the user does not use session cookies and opens an external link, to strip session parameters from the referrer header.
  • This dereferrer is protected against being abused as an open referrer by a hash signature.

The only piece of code that needs regular updates to fix XSS holes is the HTML MIME viewer that is used to view HTML messages in IMP. The reason is that people still find new ways to trick browsers, especially Internet Explorer, to execute script code every other day. Thus this viewer is disabled by default. Our filter is still one of the best available though, so other projects are using it in their applications too.