Tuesday, August 21, 2012

File Upload Security - Restrict file types

In web applications, we often have to restrict the file types that can be uploaded to the server. One way to restrict it is by checking the file extensions. But what if someone changes the file extension and tries to upload a file.

For common file types such as GIF, PDF, JPEG we can check the contents of the file for a "signature" or "magic number". More information given in this blog post - http://hrycan.com/2010/06/01/magic-numbers/

The Apache Tika project can be used to quickly extract meta-data information from a file stream. 

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