Question

User equals untrustworthy. Never trust untrustworthy user’s input. I get that. However, I am wondering when the best time to sanitize input is. For example, do you blindly store user input and then sanitize it whenever it is accessed/used, or do you sanitize the input immediately and then store this ‘cleaned’ version? Maybe there are also some other approaches I haven’t though of in addition to these. I am leaning more towards the first method, because any data that came from user input must still be approached cautiously, where the ‘cleaned’ data might still unknowingly or accidentally be dangerous. Either way, what method do people think is best, and for what reasons?

Answer 1

I like to sanitize it as early as possible, which means the sanitizing happens when the user tries to enter in invalid data. If there’s a TextBox for their age, and they type in anything other that a number, I don’t let the keypress for the letter go through.

Then, whatever is reading the data (often a server) I do a sanity check when I read in the data, just to make sure that nothing slips in due to a more determined user (such as hand-editing files, or even modifying packets!)

Edit: Overall, sanitize early and sanitize any time you’ve lost sight of the data for even a second (e.g. File Save -> File Open)