Disallow the Serialization of ResourceResolvers via Sling Model Exporter disallow-the-serialization-of-resourceresolvers-via-sling-model-exporter
The Sling Model Exporter feature allows to serialize Sling Models objects into a JSON format. This feature is widely used as it enables SPAs (single page applications) to easily access data from AEM. On the implementation side the Jacson Databind library is used to serialize these objects.
The serialization is a recursive operation. Starting from a „root object", it recursively iterates through all eligible objects and serializes them and their children. You can find a description what fields are serialized in this article.
This approach serializes all types of objects into JSON, and naturally it can also serialize a Sling ResourceResolver object, if it is covered by the serialization rules. This is problematic, as the ResourceResolver service (and therefore also the service object representing it) holds potentially sensitive information, which should not get disclosed. For example:
- The user id
- The search paths to resolve relative paths
- The
propertyMap.
Especially sensitive is the propertyMap (see the API documentation of getPropertyMap), as it’s an internal data structure, which can be used for many purposes - for example caching objects which share the same lifecycle as the ResourceResolver. Serializing these can leak implementation details and potentially have a security impact, as data is exposed which should not be readable and accessable to an enduser. For that reason ResourceResolvers should not be serialized into JSON.
Adobe plans to disable the serialization of ResourceResolvers in a 2-step approach:
- Starting with AEM as a Cloud Service release 14697, whenever a
ResourceResolveris serialized AEM will log a warn message. All customers are encouraged to check their application logs for these log statements and adapt their codebase accordingly. - At a later point Adobe will disable the serialization of ResourceResolvers as JSON.
Implementation implementation
The WARN message is logged both in AEM as a Cloud Service and local AEM SDK instances, and it looks like this:
[127.0.0.1 [1705061734620] GET /content/../page.model.json HTTP/1.1] org.apache.sling.models.jacksonexporter.impl.JacksonExporter A ResourceResolver is serialized with all its private fields containing implementation details you should not disclose. Please review your Sling Model implementation(s) and remove all public accessors to a ResourceResolver.
This log message means that during the process of serializing the /content/…/page into JSON a ResourceResolver is serialized already. By requesting /content/../page.model.json you can check where exactly the fields of the ResourceResolver are showing up, and use that to identify the Sling Model class which is actually triggering this behavior.
Requested Action requested-action
Adobe requests all their customers to check their application logs and code bases to see if they are affected by this problem, and change the custom application where necessary, so that this WARN message no longer shows up.
It is assumed that in most cases these required changes are straight forward, as the ResourceResolver objects are not required in the JSON output at all, as the information contained there is normally not required by frontend applications. That means, in most cases it should be sufficient to exclude the ResourceResolver object from being considered by Jackson (see the rules).
In case a Sling Model is affected by this problem but not changed, the epxlicit disabling of serizalization of the ResourceResolver object (as executed by Adobe as the 2nd step) will enforce a change in the JSON output.