About ColdFusion security

Security is especially important in web-based applications, such as those you develop in ColdFusion. ColdFusion developers and administrators must fully understand the security risks that could affect their development and runtime environments so they can enable and restrict access appropriately.

Whether you have an e-commerce site where customers enter credit card information or a global collaboration site where users share confidential data, you should understand the security risks that could threaten your web applications.

Snooping and eavesdropping: Someone can monitor data sent over the public connections of the web.
User impersonation: Someone can impersonate a trusted user to gain access to information that only the trusted user should see or download.
Unauthorized access: Unauthorized users can gain access to sensitive information. This security risk is the most complex because the Internet links every computer to one large network. Completely allowing or disallowing access to a given system or data source is relatively straight-forward, but allowing the partial access required for an application to be useful remains risky. For example, a bank can easily publish a public, freely accessible site with general banking information. Creating an account maintenance site where users have exclusive access to their own personal account information is more difficult.

ColdFusion provides a highly secure environment for web application development and deployment. It helps you reduce security risks in the following ways:

Encryption: Use of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol prevents snooping, eavesdropping, and message tampering as information passes between clients and servers. SSL, which is supported by most web servers, encrypts Internet protocols (such as HTTP) with public key cryptography. A private key resides on the server to decrypt inbound data and encrypt outbound data.

After the key is installed, the web server automatically handles encryption and decryption.
Authentication: Authentication checks whether someone is a valid system user. It prompts a user for a unique login or user name, and a password or personal identification number (PIN).
Access Control: Authenticated users have access to particular features or components based on security clearance, group affiliation, or other criteria specified by the developer.

You can implement development security by requiring a password to use the ColdFusion Administrator and a password for Remote Development Services (RDS), which allows developers to develop CFML pages remotely. You implement runtime security in your CFML pages and in the ColdFusion Administrator. ColdFusion has the following runtime security categories:

User security

Programmatically determine the logged-in user and allow or disallow restricted functionality based on the roles assigned to that user. For more information about user security, see ColdFusion security features in Securing Applications in the Developing ColdFusion Applications.

Sandbox security

Using the ColdFusion Administrator, define the actions and resources that the ColdFusion pages in and below a specified directory can use.

Note: If you have the Enterprise Edition of ColdFusion, you can configure multiple security sandboxes. If you have the Standard Edition of ColdFusion, you can only configure a single security sandbox.

The Security area in the Administrator lets you do the following tasks:

Configure password protection for the ColdFusion Administrator. For more information, see ColdFusion Administrator password protection.
Configure password protection for RDS access. For more information, see RDS password protection.
Enable, disable, and customize ColdFusion security, on the Security > Sandbox Security page (called Resource Security page in the Standard edition). For more information, see Using sandbox security.