A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was det

Question

Every time a user posts something containing < or > in a page in my web application, I get this exception thrown.

I don't want to go into the discussion about the smartness of throwing an exception or crashing an entire web application because somebody entered a character in a text box, but I am looking for an elegant way to handle this.

Trapping the exception and showing

An error has occurred please go back and re-type your entire form again, but this time please do not use <

doesn't seem professional enough to me.

Disabling post validation (validateRequest="false") will definitely avoid this error, but it will leave the page vulnerable to a number of attacks.

Ideally: When a post back occurs containing HTML restricted characters, that posted value in the Form collection will be automatically HTML encoded. So the .Text property of my text-box will be something & lt; html & gt;

Is there a way I can do this from a handler?

Answer 1

You can HTML encode text box content, but unfortunately that won't stop the exception from happening. In my experience there is no way around, and you have to disable page validation. By doing that you're saying: "I'll be careful, I promise."

Answer 2

In ASP.NET MVC (starting in version 3), you can add the AllowHtml attribute to a property on your model.

It allows a request to include HTML markup during model binding by skipping request validation for the property.

[AllowHtml]
public string Description { get; set; }

Answer 3

For ASP.NET 4.0, you can allow markup as input for specific pages instead of the whole site by putting it all in a <location> element. This will make sure all your other pages are safe. You do NOT need to put ValidateRequest="false" in your .aspx page.

<configuration>
...
  <location path="MyFolder/.aspx">
    <system.web>
      <pages validateRequest="false" />
      <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" />
    </system.web>
  </location>
...
</configuration>

It is safer to control this inside your web.config, because you can see at a site level which pages allow markup as input.

You still need to programmatically validate input on pages where request validation is disabled.

Answer 4

Please bear in mind that some .NET controls will automatically HTML encode the output. For instance, setting the .Text property on a TextBox control will automatically encode it. That specifically means converting < into <, > into > and & into &. So be wary of doing this...

myTextBox.Text = Server.HtmlEncode(myStringFromDatabase); // Pseudo code

However, the .Text property for HyperLink, Literal and Label won't HTML encode things, so wrapping Server.HtmlEncode(); around anything being set on these properties is a must if you want to prevent <script> window.location = "http://www.google.com"; </script> from being output into your page and subsequently executed.

Do a little experimenting to see what gets encoded and what doesn't.

Answer 5

In ASP.NET MVC you need to set requestValidationMode="2.0" and validateRequest="false" in web.config, and apply a ValidateInput attribute to your controller action:

<httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0"/>

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <pages validateRequest="false" />
    </system.web>
</configuration>

and

[Post, ValidateInput(false)]
public ActionResult Edit(string message) {
    ...
}

Answer 6

The other solutions here are nice, however it's a bit of a royal pain in the rear to have to apply [AllowHtml] to every single Model property, especially if you have over 100 models on a decent sized site.

If like me, you want to turn this (IMHO pretty pointless) feature off site wide you can override the Execute() method in your base controller (if you don't already have a base controller I suggest you make one, they can be pretty useful for applying common functionality).

    protected override void Execute(RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        // Disable requestion validation (security) across the whole site
        ValidateRequest = false;
        base.Execute(requestContext);
    }

Just make sure that you are HTML encoding everything that is pumped out to the views that came from user input (it's default behaviour in ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor anyway, so unless for some bizarre reason you are using Html.Raw() you shouldn't require this feature.