templates: properly escape inline JavaScript values TLDR: Kallithea has issues with escaping values for use in inline JS. Despite judicious poking of the code, no actual security vulnerabilities have been found, just lots of corner-case bugs. This patch fixes those, and hardens the code against actual security issues. The long version: To embed a Python value (typically a 'unicode' plain-text value) in a larger file, it must be escaped in a context specific manner. Example: >>> s = u'<script>alert("It\'s a trap!");</script>' 1) Escaped for insertion into HTML element context >>> print cgi.escape(s) &lt;script&gt;alert("It's a trap!");&lt;/script&gt; 2) Escaped for insertion into HTML element or attribute context >>> print h.escape(s) &lt;script&gt;alert(&#34;It&#39;s a trap!&#34;);&lt;/script&gt; This is the default Mako escaping, as usually used by Kallithea. 3) Encoded as JSON >>> print json.dumps(s) "<script>alert(\"It's a trap!\");</script>" 4) Escaped for insertion into a JavaScript file >>> print '(' + json.dumps(s) + ')' ("<script>alert(\"It's a trap!\");</script>") The parentheses are not actually required for strings, but may be needed to avoid syntax errors if the value is a number or dict (object). 5) Escaped for insertion into a HTML inline <script> element >>> print h.js(s) ("\x3cscript\x3ealert(\"It's a trap!\");\x3c/script\x3e") Here, we need to combine JS and HTML escaping, further complicated by the fact that "<script>" tag contents can either be parsed in XHTML mode (in which case '<', '>' and '&' must additionally be XML escaped) or HTML mode (in which case '</script>' must be escaped, but not using HTML escaping, which is not available in HTML "<script>" tags). Therefore, the XML special characters (which can only occur in string literals) are escaped using JavaScript string literal escape sequences. (This, incidentally, is why modern web security best practices ban all use of inline JavaScript...) Unsurprisingly, Kallithea does not do (5) correctly. In most cases, Kallithea might slap a pair of single quotes around the HTML escaped Python value. A typical benign example: $('#child_link').html('${_('No revisions')}'); This works in English, but if a localized version of the string contains an apostrophe, the result will be broken JavaScript. In the more severe cases, where the text is user controllable, it leaves the door open to injections. In this example, the script inserts the string as HTML, so Mako's implicit HTML escaping makes sense; but in many other cases, HTML escaping is actually an error, because the value is not used by the script in an HTML context. The good news is that the HTML escaping thwarts attempts at XSS, since it's impossible to inject syntactically valid JavaScript of any useful complexity. It does allow JavaScript errors and gibberish to appear on the page, though. In these cases, the escaping has been fixed to use either the new 'h.js' helper, which does JavaScript escaping (but not HTML escaping), OR the new 'h.jshtml' helper (which does both), in those cases where it was unclear if the value might be used (by the script) in an HTML context. Some of these can probably be "relaxed" from h.jshtml to h.js later, but for now, using h.jshtml fixes escaping and doesn't introduce new errors. In a few places, Kallithea JSON encodes values in the controller, then inserts the JSON (without any further escaping) into <script> tags. This is also wrong, and carries actual risk of XSS vulnerabilities. However, in all cases, security vulnerabilities were narrowly avoided due to other filtering in Kallithea. (E.g. many special characters are banned from appearing in usernames.) In these cases, the escaping has been fixed and moved to the template, making it immediately visible that proper escaping has been performed. Mini-FAQ (frequently anticipated questions): Q: Why do everything in one big, hard to review patch? Q: Why add escaping in specific case FOO, it doesn't seem needed? Because the goal here is to have "escape everywhere" as the default policy, rather than identifying individual bugs and fixing them one by one by adding escaping where needed. As such, this patch surely introduces a lot of needless escaping. This is no different from how Mako/Pylons HTML escape everything by default, even when not needed: it's errs on the side of needless work, to prevent erring on the side of skipping required (and security critical) work. As for reviewability, the most important thing to notice is not where escaping has been introduced, but any places where it might have been missed (or where h.jshtml is needed, but h.js is used). Q: The added escaping is kinda verbose/ugly. That is not a question, but yes, I agree. Hopefully it'll encourage us to move away from inline JavaScript altogether. That's a significantly larger job, though; with luck this patch will keep us safe and secure until such a time as we can implement the real fix. Q: Why not use Mako filter syntax ("${val|h.js}")? Because of long-standing Mako bug #140, preventing use of 'h' in filters. Q: Why not work around bug #140, or even use straight "${val|js}"? Because Mako still applies the default h.escape filter before the explicitly specified filters. Q: Where do we go from here? Longer term, we should stop doing variable expansions in script blocks, and instead pass data to JS via e.g. data attributes, or asynchronously using AJAX calls. Once we've done that, we can remove inline JavaScript altogether in favor of separate script files, and set a strict Content Security Policy explicitly blocking inline scripting, and thus also the most common kind of cross-site scripting attack.

=======================
Database schema changes
=======================

Kallithea uses Alembic for :ref:`database migrations <upgrade_db>`
(upgrades and downgrades).

If you are developing a Kallithea feature that requires database schema
changes, you should make a matching Alembic database migration script:

1. :ref:`Create a Kallithea configuration and database <setup>` for testing
   the migration script, or use existing ``development.ini`` setup.

   Ensure that this database is up to date with the latest database
   schema *before* the changes you're currently developing. (Do not
   create the database while your new schema changes are applied.)

2. Create a separate throwaway configuration for iterating on the actual
   database changes::

    paster make-config Kallithea temp.ini

   Edit the file to change database settings. SQLite is typically fine,
   but make sure to change the path to e.g. ``temp.db``, to avoid
   clobbering any existing database file.

3. Make your code changes (including database schema changes in ``db.py``).

4. After every database schema change, recreate the throwaway database
   to test the changes::

    rm temp.db
    paster setup-db temp.ini --repos=/var/repos --user=doe --email doe@example.com --password=123456 --no-public-access --force-yes
    paster repo-scan temp.ini

5. Once satisfied with the schema changes, auto-generate a draft Alembic
   script using the development database that has *not* been upgraded.
   (The generated script will upgrade the database to match the code.)

   ::

    alembic -c development.ini revision -m "area: add cool feature" --autogenerate

6. Edit the script to clean it up and fix any problems.

   Note that for changes that simply add columns, it may be appropriate
   to not remove them in the downgrade script (and instead do nothing),
   to avoid the loss of data. Unknown columns will simply be ignored by
   Kallithea versions predating your changes.

7. Run ``alembic -c development.ini upgrade head`` to apply changes to
   the (non-throwaway) database, and test the upgrade script. Also test
   downgrades.

   The included ``development.ini`` has full SQL logging enabled. If
   you're using another configuration file, you may want to enable it
   by setting ``level = DEBUG`` in section ``[handler_console_sql]``.

The Alembic migration script should be committed in the same revision as
the database schema (``db.py``) changes.

See the `Alembic documentation`__ for more information, in particular
the tutorial and the section about auto-generating migration scripts.

.. __: http://alembic.zzzcomputing.com/en/latest/


Troubleshooting
---------------

* If ``alembic --autogenerate`` responds "Target database is not up to
  date", you need to either first use Alembic to upgrade the database
  to the most recent version (before your changes), or recreate the
  database from scratch (without your schema changes applied).