Deconstructing ColdFusion

ColdFusion is a somewhat forgotten but still very prevalent web application development platform. This presentation is a technical survey of ColdFusion security that will be of interest mostly to code auditors, penetration testers, and developers.

In the talk, we’ll cover the history of the ColdFusion platform and its relevance to today’s security landscape. We’ll describe basics of ColdFusion markup, control flow, functions, and components and demonstrate how to identify common web application vulnerabilities in the source code.

We’ll also delve into ColdFusion J2EE internals, showing what CFML pages and components look like when compiled down to Java, and describing some of the unusual behavior we’ve observed at that level. Included in the talk is a detailed description of the WAR/EAR structure for compiled ColdFusion apps. We'll release open-source tools to aid reverse engineers in working with ColdFusion's proprietary classfile format.

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