OSEC

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strange_at_nsk.yi.org
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 16:16:24 CDT

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    On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 04:47:11PM -0400, Venkat, Sanjay wrote:
    > To echo most of the comments from the thread, GET and POST are both not
    > secure.

    In an HTTPS context I say that POST is more secure than GET because the
    POST data doesn't get into the browser's history. But the gain in that
    regard is minimum.

    > Further clarify that the GET and POST are sent from the client to the server
    > and cannot pass data back from the server to the client. The response is
    > always a HTTP response of type 200 for OK. (Check HTTP response codes for
    > more)

    No, the response can be any HTTP response, and any type of file
    (text/html, image/jpeg, etc) can be sent back by the server.

    As an example of a cgi that returns an error:
    #! /usr/bin/perl
    print <<EOF;
    Status: 404 Not Found
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
     ...
    EOF

    I agree with the rest of the comment:

    > However, a best practice in selection of a GET or a POST method can be made
    > using the following points.
    > 1. As the application (I assume web tier) is communicating to various
    > application servers at the back end, the GET request and the POST request
    > might not even be visible to the UI and hence are the same.
    >
    > 2. The GET method has a limitation on the size of the data that can be sent.
    > Though some webservers have buffers to deal with data larger than the
    > recommended 4KB, some web/appservers buffers will overflow. (This has been a
    > DoS expliot in the past)
    >
    > POST data has not such size limitation. Hence is a user has direct access to
    > constructing a GET request that is processed by the web application layer,
    > POST is the safer call over a GET.
    >
    > 3. POST data has advantages a it can deal with information other than
    > URLEncoded information(ie MIME) So it is possible to let MIME handle
    > multiple type of data for you instead of the encoding required with a GET.

    Regards,
    Luciano Rocha