ASP.NET MVC Bad Practices: Optional Submodel With Required Property

The model class has a required property and is the type of an optional member of a parent model type and therefore may be susceptible to under-posting attacks.

If a model class has required property and is the type of an optional member of a parent model class, it may be susceptible to under-posting attacks if an attacker communicates a request that contains less data than is expected.

The ASP.NET MVC framework will try to bind request parameters to model properties, including submodels.

If a submodel is optional -- that is, the parent model has a property without the [Required] attribute -- and if an attacker does not communicate that submodel, then the parent property will have a null value and the required fields of the child model will not be asserted by model validation. This is one form of an under-posting attack.

Consider the following the model class definitions:

public class ChildModel
{
    public ChildModel()
    {
    }

    [Required]
    public String RequiredProperty { get; set; }
}

public class ParentModel
{
    public ParentModel()
    {
    }

    public ChildModel Child { get; set; }
}

If an attacker does not communicate a value for the ParentModel.Child property, then the ChildModel.RequiredProperty property will have a [Required] which is not asserted. This may produce unexpected and undesirable results.