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Sanitizing input text for "get" queries?

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
api, backend, security

Research direction

Reproduce the failure with the /study/1/samples endpoint and the term value shown in the issue. Trace the server-side handler for that GET query and determine how the quoted input reaches the failing operation; done means the request no longer returns a 500 for this specimen ID and the expected query behavior is covered by a regression test.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

question

Doesn't look like this has been logged as an issue before, so I'm documenting it here.

In the style of xkcd, I tried plating a specimen with the ID ');console.log('hi');. Fortunately, this doesn't result in hi being printed to the console; unfortunately, it does cause a 500 internal server error:

GET https://127.0.0.1:8181/study/1/samples?term=%27);console.log(%27hi%27); 500 (Internal Server Error)

Looks like it's the ' character (which gets converted to %27) that's problematic.

I don't imagine this is a common use case, but it might be worth addressing?

Edit: also, if this behavior is expected (i.e. the server throws an error if it detects a wacky specimen ID like ');console.log('hi');) then sorry, and feel free to close this.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
2
Forks
15
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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