TECHNIQUES FOR APPLICATION SECURITY

Software developers previously dealt with each security threat by incorporating a corresponding set of code lines into individual web applications, which required significant amount of time and code lines for each security threat and the resulting code was hard to maintain or modify. One aspect of the present invention addresses common security concerns in a standardized and centralized approach. All user requests for web applications are centralized to a single input and validated by a Web Security Filter. Selected layers of validation filters (e.g., ESAPI and AntiSamy) could be sequentially applied to the user requests, and those filters can be individually maintained/modified as discrete modules. Not only is this centralized, holistic approach to application security effective against a majority of malicious attacks, it is also saves a lot of time and costs in code development and maintenance.