R – Images from Database in Asp.Net MVC

I think you are attacking it from the wrong angle by trying to encode all posted data.

Note that a "<" could also come from other outside sources, like a database field, a configuration, a file, a feed and so on.

Furthermore, "<" is not inherently dangerous. It's only dangerous in a specific context: when writing strings that haven't been encoded to HTML output (because of XSS).

In other contexts different sub-strings are dangerous, for example, if you write an user-provided URL into a link, the sub-string "javascript:" may be dangerous. The single quote character on the other hand is dangerous when interpolating strings in SQL queries, but perfectly safe if it is a part of a name submitted from a form or read from a database field.

The bottom line is: you can't filter random input for dangerous characters, because any character may be dangerous under the right circumstances. You should encode at the point where some specific characters may become dangerous because they cross into a different sub-language where they have special meaning. When you write a string to HTML, you should encode characters that have special meaning in HTML, using Server.HtmlEncode. If you pass a string to a dynamic SQL statement, you should encode different characters (or better, let the framework do it for you by using prepared statements or the like)..

When you are sure you HTML-encode everywhere you pass strings to HTML, then set ValidateRequest="false" in the <%@ Page ... %> directive in your .aspx file(s).

In .NET 4 you may need to do a little more. Sometimes it's necessary to also add <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> to web.config (reference).

To fix the OutOfMemory error, you should do something like this:

BitmapFactory.Options options = new BitmapFactory.Options();
options.inSampleSize = 8;
Bitmap preview_bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is, null, options);

This inSampleSize option reduces memory consumption.

Here's a complete method. First it reads image size without decoding the content itself. Then it finds the best inSampleSize value, it should be a power of 2, and finally the image is decoded.

// Decodes image and scales it to reduce memory consumption
private Bitmap decodeFile(File f) {
    try {
        // Decode image size
        BitmapFactory.Options o = new BitmapFactory.Options();
        o.inJustDecodeBounds = true;
        BitmapFactory.decodeStream(new FileInputStream(f), null, o);

        // The new size we want to scale to
        final int REQUIRED_SIZE=70;

        // Find the correct scale value. It should be the power of 2.
        int scale = 1;
        while(o.outWidth / scale / 2 >= REQUIRED_SIZE && 
              o.outHeight / scale / 2 >= REQUIRED_SIZE) {
            scale *= 2;
        }

        // Decode with inSampleSize
        BitmapFactory.Options o2 = new BitmapFactory.Options();
        o2.inSampleSize = scale;
        return BitmapFactory.decodeStream(new FileInputStream(f), null, o2);
    } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {}
    return null;
}