Killing Classes of Bugs with Refined Types

A lot of application security defence mitigation fall into validation and sanitization. Many nasty bugs like XSS, SQLi, command injection etc can be avoided by just doing good input validation. Problem is – input validation is boring, and also – sometimes pretty complex. But it doesn’t have to be that way – and this is where using a language like Scala can help us out. Let’s see how!

The problem with Typescript

Typescript is an amazing language: All the good of JavaScript, with proper typing systems. This is why for a very long time, Typescript was my prefered language for a very long time. The problem is, Typescript typing are artificial – they are enforced only on “compile” time – when compiling the Typescript code to Javascript. Let’s take a look at one example: What will happen? So, apparently, if we write our server in Typescript we cannot even trust the types of data we receive! We might have a strongly typed interface defined for the user input – but those are only on “compile” time. And this makes the challenge of input validation even harder.

Scala?

Scala (like Kotlin) is yet another language that compiles to Java bytecode and can run on JVM. It has many benefits, especially “many of Scala’s design decisions are aimed to address criticisms of Java.^[7] (according to wikipedia) Anyhow, recently I started to look into Scala (thank you Baden Delamore for showing me the light!). Not like Typescript, Scala has a real typing system, so issues like the one we just saw in Typescript are irrelevant. But this is not all. Using Refined, we can embed input validation into our typing system. Let’s see an example! Using Refined, we can define our custom types with the required input validation – and move all the mess of input validation to the edge. Now, if I will try to pass a user email that is invalid, the JSON serialization will fail – results in 400 bad request status code. When writing my code, I can focus only on the logic, without the need to worry about input validation.

Wrapping Up

Refined types help us kill classes of bugs just by well defining our typing systems. It has also other benefits, as well defined types (vs using arbitrary Strings everywhere) makes the code clearer and reduced bugs. This is exciting news both for us, Application Security Engineers and for developers, as it could free us all to focus on other, more exciting news.