I want to put a button on a third party website. The website will be open and public facing, which when clicked, would navigate to a page on my website.
The href in the button would include an id - a salted hash - that would be used to identify the source of the button click ie. the third party. So the button would have the form of where the id is the salted hash.
I want to then use the salted hash to retrieve database credentials for the third party to be able to use in the webpages.
So , I have 2 questions around this given the security implications which I am unsure of but a bit nervous about.
Is this way of doing this secure and good practise or am I opening myself up to hacking?
Is there an alternate way of doing this without getting the third party to enter in the usual username/password type credentials?
Any help, comments - most appreciated!
Many thanks
Neville
Your example seems to be quite a complex way of doing something simple. The security of this approach depends on the sensitivity of data you want to hold in the database and share with the user once they are redirected to your site. If this is public data, then it would be ok. Just do whatever is needed. If this is some kind of sensitive data - well, you want to authenticate the users at bare minimum.
Please note, having a salted hash/unsalted hash/secret/UUID/digest/whatever attached on some button somewhere on a page makes it publicly available and makes it impossible to be used as a security feature. There is little value in using a salted hash too. Go for some random value like an UUID version 4.
Why you want to extract credentials to the id and connect to the database is also a question. You usually want to have all the database connections open and lying in some connection pool to be able to fetch them quickly on demand. Opening a connection takes a long time so everything we can speed up by caching is of great value.
Related
I'm looking for some information about a problem that I never thought about, and that I can't find much on the internet (or I'm looking wrong).
Here it is, for a dashboard project in my company, I need to be able to set up a system to store one account per client, or I just have to click on the account in question to connect, like twitter, google or instagram for example.
After the person has added his account, it appears in a list that can switch whenever he wants. Only I don't really see how to set this up, storing the login information in the localStorage? or the jwt token? I confess that I can't find a correct and secure solution as it should be, that's why I'd like to know if some people would have already done that, or if I can be oriented on an interesting solution?
Thanks a lot!
(Sorry for my english, i'm french and it's not perfect ^^)
Do not use localStorage. LocalStorage is not secure at all and can easily be hijacked through any js code running. If you need to store sensitive information, you should always use a server side session.
When a user logs into your website, create a session identifier for them and store it in a cryptographically signed cookie. If you're using a web framework, look up “how to create a user session using cookies” and follow that guide.
Make sure that whatever cookie library your web framework uses is setting the httpOnly cookie flag. This flag makes it impossible for a browser to read any cookies, which is required in order to safely use server-side sessions with cookies. Read Jeff Atwood's article for more information. He's the man.
Make sure that your cookie library also sets the SameSite=strict cookie flag (to prevent CSRF attacks), as well as the secure=true flag (to ensure cookies can only be set over an encrypted connection).
Each time a user makes a request to your site, use their session ID (extracted from the cookie they send to you) to retrieve their account details from either a database or a cache (depending on how large your website is)
Once you have the user's account info pulled up and verified, feel free to pull any associated sensitive data along with it
I'd like to create visualforce page that inserts a record into salesforce account object. However, I expect some of the page users won't have salesforce accounts. Can they still access it? If not, what are the alternatives that can be used to visualforce page in this case? (Please don't consider Web to Lead Forms).
Thanks,
Yes, it's possible. Go read about Salesforce Sites. For a start:
http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Websites
http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/An_Introduction_to_Force.com_Sites
(of course it's also possible to write that page in say Java/.NET/PHP and use integration via SOAP or REST to talk to Salesforce... but these 2 main links will keep the whole solution within SF so no need to need to learn new language, have extra maintenance effort etc)
Sites are VF pages that expose a bit of your company's data without need to log in. You can use them to input data too, just remember that in theory anybody could learn the link and spam you (not too different from web2lead, inbound email handlers etc). You specify security in a way similar to Profiles, the records will have "Created By = {site name} Guest User".
I don't think there's anything out of the box to restrict visibility, they're open to whole world. So if you would want something similar to login IP ranges (so only sales reps from your office's network can enter data) - you might have to write some logic in the controller.
What's the best practice or the common way of keeping (or not keeping) Evernote users in your application's database?
Should I create my own membership system and create a connection to Evernote accounts?
Should I store Evernote user data (or only part of it) in my own app and let the user log in only with Evernote?
Summary: you must protect their data but how you protect it is up to you. Use the integer edam_userId to identify data.
I think the API License agreement covers protection in the terms:
you agree that when using the API you will not, directly or indirectly, take or enable another to take any of the following actions:...
1.8.4 circumvent or modify any Keys or other security mechanism employed by Evernote or the API;
If you cache people's data and your server-based app lacks security to prevent people looking at other's data, then I think you're pretty clearly violating that clause. I think it's quite elegantly written!
Couple that with the responsibility clause 1.2
You are fully responsible for all activities that occur using your Keys, regardless of whether such activities are undertaken by you or a third party.
So if you don't protect someone's cached data and another user is able to get at it, you're explicitly liable.
Having cleared up the question of your obligations to (as you'd expect) protect people's data, the question is how do you store it?
Clause 4.3 covers identifiers pretty directly although it's a bit out of date now that we are all forced to use oAuth - there are no passwords ever entered into anything other a web view. However, mobile or desktop client apps must provide a mechanism for the user to log out, which must completely remove the username and password from your application and its persistent storage.
For a web app, you can't even save the username: If your Application runs as an Internet service on a multi-user server, you must not ask for, view, store or cache the sign-in name or password of Evernote user accounts.
The good news is that you can rely on the edam_userId value which comes back to you in the oAuth token credentials response, as discussed here.
When you look at the Data Model, you can see the unique id under the User and going into the User struct, see the reassuring definition The unique numeric identifier for the account, which will not change for the lifetime of the account.
Thinking about the consequences, as you can't get the user id until you have logged into the service, if you want to provide a local login for people you will have to link your local credentials to the user id. That may irk some people if they have to enter a username twice but can't be helped.
You can allow users to log-in via OAuth. Here's a guide on how that process works.
But you'll probably also want to store a minimal amount of user data, at least a unique identifier, in your database so you can do things like create relationships between the user and their notebooks and tags. Refer to the Evernote data model for those relationships. If you're using rails, this will also help you take advantage of rails conventions.
I am working on a WP7 application. This WP7 application will interact with some web services that I have created. I do not want other applications interacting with these web services. The reason why is because I do not want them stealing my data. With that in mind, here is what I'm currently doing:
Connecting to web services via HTTPS
Making my users initially login to the application
Passing the users username / password with each web service interaction
At this time, I don't see what is stopping a malicious developer from creating a username / password combo and using that account in their application to interact with my web services. How do I really lock this thing down?
Thanks!
As a start towards a more secure system you should stop storing the password and sending it over the wire with each request (even if you're using SSL).
If you must pass it with each request, store a salted hash of the password and use that instead.
I'm using a multi layered approach to this problem. I recommend thinking creatively and using a variety of methods to validate that requests are coming from devices you expect requests to come from.
Alternatively, if there is any merit in your scenario, open up your api to 3rd party developers and make this work toward your objectives.
If you do decide to store a key in your app, don't store RAW text but instead declare a byte array of the UTF8 values, this won't be as easy to read.
You can then handshake with your service using a salted hash of the key the first time the app is run, the service hands out another key for the device to actually use day-to-day.
The phone should have an almost accurate time, so you can recalculate the key each day or hour. You can also revoke the key at the server end for just that device.
This API will be useful in ensuring you can blacklist a device permanently.
DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue(“DeviceUniqueId”).ToByte();
I've not looked into symmetric encryption by you might even be able to use the above unique ID as a private key.
I think the key to success is that first hand-shake, and ensuring that is not snooped. If it's a really important system, then don't use any of these ideas since rolling your own encryption is always flimsy to anyone with serious intent - use well-known methods and read up.
Luke
You could introduce an "Authorized Application ID" feature where the application sends its name or identifier within each HTTP request body. Then on the server side you can verify the application's identity (e.g. store the authorized app ID's in a table). The application ID would be encrypted within the HTTP(S) body.
This would also give you the option of pushing out new application ID's in updated versions of the WP7 application if you wanted to get rid of an older application ID. You'd also be able support new applications on difference devices or platforms in the future.
You may want to look at this
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Jafa/Windows-Phone-7-Trade-Me-Developer-Starter-Kit
I want to write a program that analyzes your fantasy baseball team and notifies you of recommended actions, possibly multiple times per day. The problem is, you aren't playing fantasy baseball on my site, you're playing on yahoo, or cbs, or espn, etc.
On the majority of these sites, fantasy teams and leagues are not public, so you must be logged in and a member of the league to see the teams in the league.
All that I need is the plain html for the team page on each of those sites to be sent to my server, where I can then parse and analyze the file and send user notifications.
The problem is that I need username/password combinations to easily get this data to my server when I need it, and I think there will be a lot of people who wouldn't want to entrust their yahoo/espn/cbs password to me.
I have come up with several possible ways to solve this problem:
The most obvious way is to ask for their credentials for the site on which their team is hosted. Then I could just programmatically log in and request the data I need. I'm guessing a number of people would be comfortable giving me their credentials, and a number of them not so much.
Write a desktop client, which the user then downloads. The client would require their credentials, but it could then basically do exactly the same thing that the server based version would do, log in, request the page, and send the page back to my server. The difference being that their password would never need to leave their desktop. Their computer would need to be on, and this program running for this method to work.
Write browser add-ons that navigate to the page I need, use the cookie that is saved from a previous login to login to the site, and send the page back to my server. This doesn't require my software to ever ask for their password, but if the cookie expires I am hosed, and I don't know much about browser add-ons besides.
I'm sure there are other options, but these are what I've come up with so far.
I have two questions:
1. What are the other possibilities for this type of task?
2. Am I over-estimating people's reluctance to give me their yahoo (for example) password? Is option (1) above the obvious choice?
It was suggested in the comments that I try yahoo pipes, and that looked like a promising suggestion so I explored it a bit. Having looked now at this, I don't think that is an option. So, it looks like I'll be going with option 1.
This is a problem I grappled with a couple of years ago when I wanted to do the same thing. Our site is http://benchcoach.com and the options we were considering were the following:
Original we considered getting the user's credentials and login. We would then log in and scrape their league and team info. The problem there is that after reading several of the various terms of service, this would definitely be violating the terms of service. On top of this, Yahoo! was definitely one of the sites we were considering and their users have email (where we could get access to sensitive data), and Yahoo! wallet. In addition, it would be pretty trivial for Yahoo/ESPN/CBS to block our programmatic logins by IP Address.
The solution we settled on (not 100% happy but it does seem to work) was asking our users to install a bookmarklet (like delicious, digg or reddit) which would post the current html page to our servers, where we could parse the data and load our database. If they were still logged into their Yahoo/ESPN/CBS account, we would direct them directly to the pages, otherwise, those sites would prompt for authentication. Clicking the bookmarklet once more, would post the page to our servers.
The pros of this approach was that we never collected anyone's credentials so any concern of security would have been alleviated. Secondly, it would make it impossible for Yahoo/ESPN/CBS to block access to our service since we would never be connecting directly to their servers but rather the user's browser would be posting the contents of their browser to our server.
The problems with this is that it takes 2 clicks to post a page to our site. For head to head leagues, we needed 3-4 pages so it would take our user 6-8 clicks to sync their league to our servers. We're still looking at options for this.
One important note is that I ran into the product manager of the Yahoo Fantasy Football site at a conference a year ago. We talked about how we were getting the Yahoo data, and he confirmed that getting credentials would violate their TOS and they may stop us. While I don't think they would have, it would have made it hard to invest time and energy to develop this only to have them block our site and pissing of users by closing their accounts.
A potentially more complicated answer could possibly be done with (for example) yahoo pipes.
Hypothetically, you create a pipe which prompts the user for their credentials and provides them with a url which contains their scraped data. They enter this URL in their site, and never have to provide their credentials directly. Even better, for the security-conscious, it would be possible to examine what the pipe was actually doing before entering any information.
The downside would be increased complexity (as well as you'd have to write and maintain the pipe). Having said that, you could provide a link directly to the published pipe from your site, to make things as easy as possible.
Option 1 is the obvious choice. People who trust your site will provide the details. There is no other way you can login to other site while screen scraping.