Lift 2.6.3: Security Release

Lift 2.6 was found to be using an outdated version of Apache Commons
FileUpload, which had an unpatched DoS vulnerability.

Lift 2.6.3 bumps the dependency to the latest version, 1.3.1, which fixes
this vulnerability. Additionally, if you're using sbt, you can directly depend
on commons-fileupload 1.3.1 to evict the Lift dependency. The versions
are compatible with respect to Lift's usage.

Lift 2.5.4: Security Release

Lift 2.5 was found to be using an outdated version of Apache Commons
FileUpload, which had an unpatched DoS vulnerability.

Lift 2.5.4 bumps the dependency to the latest version, 1.3.1, which fixes
this vulnerability. Additionally, if you're using sbt, you can directly depend
on commons-fileupload 1.3.1 to evict the Lift dependency without upgrading
Lift. The versions are compatible with respect to Lift's usage.

Lift Framework 3.0-M6

This release features a good bit of cleanup from the previous one. It's been a busy
few months for the committers so the work is mostly in targeted improvements and
bug fixes:

Improvements

• (#1706) Thanks to @chriswebster, an up to 90% performance increase in JSON
  serialization for lift-json!
• (#1693) ParamFailure now behaves more correctly with ~>. That operator, when
  used on a Failure, returns a ParamFailure with the passed parameter, while
  preserving the rest of the original Failure's information. Before, invoking ~> with
  a parameter on a ParamFailure would replace the existing parameter with the new
  one, thus losing the previous parameter altogether. Now, we produce a copy of the
  ParamFailure with the new parameter, but we chain the previous ParamFailure
  to it so that it the original parameter is still accessible.
• (#1698) Lift 3 sessions allow an actor proxy for client code to be created via
  serverActorForClient. This release includes some new setup configuration
  when creating those actors, like providing setup and teardown functions as well
  as ways to convert from application messages into client JS content.
• (#1701) There is now a LiftRules.attributeForRemovedEventAttributes. When
  Lift strips event-related attributes (e.g. onclick, onsubmit, etc), if this rule is
  set to a String, it will tag the element whose event attributes were removed
  with the attributes that were removed. For example, setting it to Some("data-lift-removed-attributes")
  might result in a data-lift-removed-attributes="onclick onmouseover" attribute
  in your HTML if that element had its click and mouseover event handlers moved
  into page-specific JS. This allows you to make styling decisions based on these
  attributes, if you want to. See the rule documentation for more.
• (#1705) Until now, jsonCall would fail silently on both client and server if the
  submitted data from the client wasn't valid JSON. Now, it will log (at an ERROR
  log level) on the server if invalid JSON is sent. Whether this log info will be printed
  or not is configurable using usual logger configuration.
• (#1709) You can now register to find out when a function owner no longer has
  available functions bound in a session. Function owners typically (though not always)
  correspond to server-side functions bound or a page rendering (e.g., form fields).
  These usually expire ~2 minutes after the user is no longer on the page, but until
  now there was no way to find out that a given page was no longer “in scope”. In
  certain cases, that could be interesting to clean up page-related temporary assets
  or resource allocations. We now provide LiftSession.onFunctionOwnersRemoved,
  which can be set during application startup so that any new sessions can register
  those listeners. @andreak posted an excellent example of how they are using this
  on the mailing list.

Bug Fixes

• (#1694) When generating post-page JavaScript (mostly used by Wiring), there
  were some cases where null pointer exceptions could be thrown. These should
  be gone.
• (#1692) When binding onclick to an element that had an href, the new code
  that extracts event handlers into page-specific JS was failing to bind the click
  handler. This is now fixed, as is a related bug where elements that didn't need
  handlers still had a random id assigned to them.
• (#1677) When sending messages to comet actors before they are created (via
  LiftSession.sendCometActorMessage), they would arrive in reverse order.
  This is now fixed, and the first message sent using sendCometActorMessage
  arrives first.
• (#1703) When we moved away from bind, the CSS bindings in ProtoUser
  that checked password changes were incorrect, in that they never saw the
  user having submitted two versions of the same password. This is now fixed,
  and the change password stuff provided by ProtoUser is now correct.

Lift 2.5.3: Security Release

Lift 2.5.1 was found to be vulnerable to XML External Entity attacks,
which can leak private files through your application when parsing certain
types of XML. In the process of communicating the vulnerability to Typesafe,
they referred us to a more-restricted version of XML parsing used to prevent
additional vulnerabilities like the billion laughs vulnerability and its sibling
quadratic blowup vulnerability.

Lift 2.5.2 fixed the XXE attacks, but Lift 2.5.3 was released to shore up the
additional vulnerabilities we were made aware of. This is done by disabling
inline DTDs altogether. We also enable secure processing, which adds restrictions
to supporting parsers to prevent denial-of-service style attacks on XML parsing.
Anyone who switched to use net.liftweb.util.Helpers.secureXML will automatically
get these additional protections.

To do this, Lift 2.5.3 depends on Apache Xerces version 2.11. Some concerns
have been brought up about this additional dependency and how it may interact
with other XML parsing that may occur in the application; please provide feedback
on the mailing list if you run into any issues related to this new dependency.

Lift 3.0-M5-1: Security Snapshot Release

Lift 3.0-SNAPSHOT was found to be vulnerable to XML External Entity attacks,
which can leak private files through your application when parsing certain
types of XML. In the process of communicating the vulnerability to Typesafe,
they referred us to a more-restricted version of XML parsing used to prevent
additional vulnerabilities like the billion laughs vulnerability and its sibling
quadratic blowup vulnerability.

Lift 3.0-M5 fixed the XXE attacks, but Lift 3.0-M5-1 was released to shore up the
additional vulnerabilities we were made aware of. This is done by disabling
inline DTDs altogether. We also enable secure processing, which adds restrictions
to supporting parsers to prevent denial-of-service style attacks on XML parsing.
Anyone who switched to use net.liftweb.util.Helpers.secureXML will automatically
get these additional protections.

To do this, Lift 3.0-M5-1 depends on Apache Xerces version 2.11. Some concerns
have been brought up about this additional dependency and how it may interact
with other XML parsing that may occur in the application; please provide feedback
on the mailing list if you run into any issues related to this new dependency.

Lift 3.0-M4-1: Security Milestone Release

Lift 3.0-M3 was found to be vulnerable to XML External Entity attacks,
which can leak private files through your application when parsing certain
types of XML. In the process of communicating the vulnerability to Typesafe,
they referred us to a more-restricted version of XML parsing used to prevent
additional vulnerabilities like the billion laughs vulnerability and its sibling
quadratic blowup vulnerability.

Lift 3.0-M4 fixed the XXE attacks, but Lift 3.0-M4-1 was released to shore up the
additional vulnerabilities we were made aware of. This is done by disabling
inline DTDs altogether. We also enable secure processing, which adds restrictions
to supporting parsers to prevent denial-of-service style attacks on XML parsing.
Anyone who switched to use net.liftweb.util.Helpers.secureXML will automatically
get these additional protections.

To do this, Lift 3.0-M4-1 depends on Apache Xerces version 2.11. Some concerns
have been brought up about this additional dependency and how it may interact
with other XML parsing that may occur in the application; please provide feedback
on the mailing list if you run into any issues related to this new dependency.

Lift 2.6.2: Security Release

Lift 2.6 was found to be vulnerable to XML External Entity attacks,
which can leak private files through your application when parsing certain
types of XML. In the process of communicating the vulnerability to Typesafe,
they referred us to a more-restricted version of XML parsing used to prevent
additional vulnerabilities like the billion laughs vulnerability and its sibling
quadratic blowup vulnerability.

Lift 2.6.1 fixed the XXE attacks, but Lift 2.6.2 was released to shore up the
additional vulnerabilities we were made aware of. This is done by disabling
inline DTDs altogether. We also enable secure processing, which adds restrictions
to supporting parsers to prevent denial-of-service style attacks on XML parsing.
Anyone who switched to use net.liftweb.util.Helpers.secureXML will automatically
get these additional protections.

To do this, Lift 2.6.2 depends on Apache Xerces version 2.11. Some concerns
have been brought up about this additional dependency and how it may interact
with other XML parsing that may occur in the application; please provide feedback
on the mailing list if you run into any issues related to this new dependency.

Lift 3.0-M5: Security Snapshot Release

Lift 3.0-SNAPSHOT was found to be vulnerable to XML External Entity attacks,
which can leak private files through your application when parsing certain
types of XML.

Lift 3.0-M5 introduces net.liftweb.util.Helpers.secureXML, an analogous object to
Scala's scala.xml.XML that is secured against XXE attacks by disabling external
entities in doctypes. If you are parsing untrusted user-provided XML using
scala.xml.XML, it is recommended that you switch to secureXML instead.

Lift 3.0-M5 was rapidly superseded by Lift 3.0-M5-1, which secures the secureXML
object against a few additional XML-based attacks.

Lift 3.0-M4: Security Milestone Release

Lift 3.0-M3 was found to be vulnerable to XML External Entity attacks,
which can leak private files through your application when parsing certain
types of XML.

Lift 3.0-M4 introduces net.liftweb.util.Helpers.secureXML, an analogous object to
Scala's scala.xml.XML that is secured against XXE attacks by disabling external
entities in doctypes. If you are parsing untrusted user-provided XML using
scala.xml.XML, it is recommended that you switch to secureXML instead.

Lift 3.0-M4 was rapidly superseded by Lift 3.0-M4-1, which secures the secureXML
object against a few additional XML-based attacks.

Lift 2.6.1: Security Release

Lift 2.6 was found to be vulnerable to XML External Entity attacks,
which can leak private files through your application when parsing certain
types of XML.

Lift 2.6.1 introduces net.liftweb.util.Helpers.secureXML, an analogous object to
Scala's scala.xml.XML that is secured against XXE attacks by disabling external
entities in doctypes. If you are parsing untrusted user-provided XML using
scala.xml.XML, it is recommended that you switch to secureXML instead.

Lift 2.6.1 was rapidly superseded by Lift 2.6.2, which secures the secureXML
object against a few additional XML-based attacks.