How to Prevent Hotlinking by Using AWS WAF - amazon-waf

There is an AWS document that explains how to do it for oneself, i.e. how to allow only one's pages to hotlink and reject all others: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-prevent-hotlinking-by-using-aws-waf-amazon-cloudfront-and-referer-checking/
I'd like to know if WAF is the right choice for my use case, which is a bit different from the one above.
At the company I work for, we intend to sell data through a JS widget.
We'd like to restrict access to those data so that only authorized REFERERs are able to show our data to their users, while rejecting all other REFERERs.
The possibility of spoofing the REFERER is not an important threat for us.
We expect to grow our customer base to some hundreds.
The reason I'm asking this question is due to noticing that there are some strict limits on WAF: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/limits.html, according to which I understand that for our use case, WAF wouldn't scale nicely.

WAF is not the right tool for that job.
First, even if there are max 10 rules, each with max 10 conditions, each with max 10 filters, there is a strong max of 100 string conditions per AWS account.
Second, conditions and filters do not compose nicely for our use case. Conditions of a rule get composed with an AND and filters of a condition get composed with an OR. For example, a rule like r(x) := (x=a + x=b + x=c) * (x=d + x=e) would give r(d) = false without ever getting to test x=d.

Related

How to Implement Patterns to Match Brute Force Login and Port Scanning Attacks using Flink CEP

I have a use case where a large no of logs will be consumed to the apache flink CEP. My use case is to find the brute force attack and port scanning attack. The challenge here is that while in ordinary CEP we compare the value against a constant like "event" = login. In this case the Criteria is different as in the case of brute force attack we have the criteria as follows.
username is constant and event="login failure" (Delimiter the event happens 5 times within 5 minutes).
It means the logs with the login failure event is received for the same username 5 times within 5 minutes
And for port Scanning we have the following criteira.
ip address is constant and dest port is variable (Delimiter is the event happens 10 times within 1 minute). It means the logs with constant ip address is received for the 10 different ports within 1 minute.
With Flink, when you want to process the events for something like one username or one ip address in isolation, the way to do this is to partition the stream by a key, using keyBy(). The training materials in the Flink docs have a section on Keyed Streams that explains this part of the DataStream API in more detail. keyBy() is the roughly same concept as a GROUP BY in SQL, if that helps.
With CEP, if you first key the stream, then the pattern will be matched separately for each distinct value of the key, which is what you want.
However, rather than CEP, I would instead recommend Flink SQL, perhaps in combination with MATCH_RECOGNIZE, for this use case. MATCH_RECOGNIZE is a higher-level API, built on top of CEP, and it's easier to work with. In combination with SQL, the result is quite powerful.
You'll find some Flink SQL training materials and examples (including examples that use MATCH_RECOGNIZE) in Ververica's github account.
Update
To be clear, I wouldn't use MATCH_RECOGNIZE for these specific rules; neither it nor CEP is needed for this use case. I mentioned it in case you have other rules where it would be helpful. (My reason for not recommending CEP in this case is that implementing the distinct constraint might be messy.)
For example, for the port scanning case you can do something like this:
SELECT e1.ip, COUNT(DISTINCT e2.port)
FROM events e1, events e2
WHERE e1.ip = e2.ip AND timestampDiff(MINUTE, e1.ts, e2.ts) < 1
GROUP BY e1.ip HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT e2.port) >= 10;
The login case is similar, but easier.
Note that when working with streaming SQL, you should give some thought to state retention.
Further update
This query is likely to return a given IP address many times, but it's not desirable to generate multiple alerts.
This could be handled by inserting matching IP addresses into an Alert table, and only generate alerts for IPs that aren't already there.
Or the output of the SQL query could be processed by a de-duplicator implemented using the DataStream API, similar to the example in the Flink docs. If you only want to suppress duplicate alerts for some period of time, use a KeyedProcessFunction instead of a RichFlatMapFunction, and use a Timer to clear the state when it's time to re-enable alerts for a given IP.
Yet another update (concerning CEP and distinctness)
Implementing this with CEP should be possible. You'll want to key the stream by the IP address, and have a pattern that has to match within one minute.
The pattern can be roughly like this:
Pattern<Event, ?> pattern = Pattern
.<Event>begin("distinctPorts")
.where(iterative condition 1)
.oneOrMore()
.followedBy("end")
.where(iterative condition 2)
.within(1 minute)
The first iterative condition returns true if the event being added to the pattern has a distinct port from all of the previously matching events. Somewhat similar to the example here, in the docs.
The second iterative condition returns true if size("distinctPorts") >= 9 and this event also has yet another distinct port.
See this Flink Forward talk (youtube video) for a somewhat similar example at the end of the talk.
If you try this and get stuck, please ask a new question, showing us what you've tried and where you're stuck.

Selenium Webdriver - How to avoid data duplication

Suppose I have normal "Add Users" module that I want to automate using Java scripting, how I can avoid data duplication to avoid error message such as "User already exist"?
There are numerous ways in which this can be automated. You are receiving 'User already exists' due to fact that you're (probably) running your 'Add Users' test cases using static variables.
Note: For the following examples I will consider a basic registration flow/scenario of a new user: name, email, password being the required fields.
Note-002: My language of choice will be JavaScript. You should be able to reproduce the concept with Java with ease.
1.) Pre-pending/Post-pending a unique identifier to the information you're submitting (e.g.: Date() returns the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 => it will always be unique when running your test case)
var timestamp = Number(new Date());
var email = 'test.e2e' + timestamp + '#<yourMainDomainHere>'
Note: Usually, the name & password don't need to be unique, so you can actually use hardcoaded values without any issues.
2.) The same thing can also be achieved using the Math.random() (for JS), which returns a value between 0 and 1 (0.8018194703223693), 18 digits long.
var almostUnique = Math.random();
// You can go ahead and gen only the decimals
almostUnique = almostUnique.toString().split('.')[1];
var email = 'test.e2e' + almostUnique + '#<yourMainDomainHere>'
!!! Warning: While Math.random() is not actually unique, in hundreds of regression runs of 200 functional test cases, I didn't have the chance of seeing a duplicate.
3.) (Not so elegant | Harder exponentially harder to implement) If you have access to your web-apps backend API and through it you can execute different actions in the DB, then you can actually write yourself some scripts that will run after your registration test cases, like a cleanup suite.
These scripts will have to remove the previously added user from your database.
Hope this helps!
You don't mention what language you are coding in, but use whatever language you use's random function to generate random numbers and/or text for the user id. It won't guarantee that there will not be a duplicate, but the nature of testing is such that you should be able to handle both situations anyway. If this is not clear or I don't understand your question correctly, you'll need to provide a lot more information: what you've tried, what language you use, etc.

How to make datastore keys mapreduce-friendly(-er)?

Edit: See my answer. Problem was in our code. MR works fine, it may have a status reporting problem, but at least the input readers work fine.
I ran an experiment several times now and I am now sure that mapreduce (or DatastoreInputReader) has odd behavior. I suspect this might have something to do with key ranges and splitting them, but that is just my guess.
Anyway, here's the setup we have:
we have an NDB model called "AdGroup", when creating new entities
of this model - we use the same id returned from AdWords (it's an
integer), but we use it as string: AdGroup(id=str(adgroupId))
we have 1,163,871 of these entities in our datastore (that's what
the "Datastore Admin" page tells us - I know it's not entirely
accurate number, but we don't create/delete adgroups very often, so
we can say for sure, that the number is 1.1 million or more).
mapreduce is started (from another pipeline) like this:
yield mapreduce_pipeline.MapreducePipeline(
job_name='AdGroup-process',
mapper_spec='process.adgroup_mapper',
reducer_spec='process.adgroup_reducer',
input_reader_spec='mapreduce.input_readers.DatastoreInputReader',
mapper_params={
'entity_kind': 'model.AdGroup',
'shard_count': 120,
'processing_rate': 500,
'batch_size': 20,
},
)
So, I've tried to run this mapreduce several times today without changing anything in the code and without making changes to the datastore. Every time I ran it, mapper-calls counter had a different value ranging from 450,000 to 550,000.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but considering that I use the very basic DatastoreInputReader - mapper-calls should be equal to the number of entities. So it should be 1.1 million or more.
Note: the reason why I noticed this issue in the first place is because our marketing guys started complaining that "it's been 4 days after we added new adgroups and they still don't show up in your app!".
Right now, I can think of only one workaround - write all keys of all adgroups into a blobstore file (one per line) and then use BlobstoreLineInputReader. The writing to blob part would have to be written in a way that does not utilize DatastoreInputReader, of course. Should I go with this for now, or can you suggest something better?
Note: I have also tried using DatastoreKeyInputReader with the same code - the results were similar - mapper-calls were between 450,000 and 550,000.
So, finally questions. Is it important how you generate ids for your entities? Is it better to use int ids instead of str ids? In general, what can I do to make it easier for mapreduce to find all of my entities mapping them?
PS: I'm still in the process of experimenting with this, I might add more details later.
After further investigation we have found that the error was actually in our code. So, mapreduce actually works as expected (mapper is called for every single datastore entity).
Our code was calling some google services functions that were sometimes failing (the wonderful cryptic ApplicationError messages). Due to these failures, MR tasks were being retried. However, we have set a limit on taskqueue retries. MR did not detect nor report this in any way - MR was still showing "success" in the status page for all shards. That is why we thought that everything is fine with our code and that there is something wrong with the input reader.

App engine datastore inconsistent?

This is so weird...
First of all this query works in the datastore viewer, ie. it returns the correct row.
SELECT * FROM Level where short_id = 'Ec71eN'
But if I run this
Level.all().filter("short_id = ", 'Ec71eN').get()
it returns None, if I run this:
db.GqlQuery("SELECT * FROM Level where short_id = '%s'" % 'Ec71eN').get()
it also returns None. If I run this:
level = Level.get_by_id(189009)
it returns the correct row (189009 is the id for the correct row)
Puzzling? What can be wrong here? I have never seen anything like this before, it has worked correctly for at least a couple of weeks in production... I think I have at least two cases now where it dosent work starting today.
UPDATE: This can not be a eventually consistent problem since the row was 7 hours old when I tried the above. I had two rows with same symptoms, strangely booth generated by the same users. They where booth "fixed" after I did a manual fecth of their ids by uploading special case code like:
if short_id==CASE_1_SHORT_ID:
level = Level.get_by_id(CASE_1_ID)
After that the query worked as usual.
Are you using the HRD? Nothing's wrong. You know it's supposed to be eventually consistent right?
Query operations are eventually consistent.
Get-by-id operations are fully consistent.
What you describe is correct datastore behavior. It's a bit odd that the datastore viewer operation returns the correct result, but it might have hit a separate tablet on the datastore operation.
Given that it was created 7 hours ago, the 'eventual consistency' generally should take seconds to minutes.
If eventual consistency IS the problem, run the same query method a bunch of times and see if returns the same result. If it continuously returns the same result with the same method, then it is more than likely not an eventual consistency problem. You should switch to the NDB API for querying data as well - it's 1000 times better and Guido worked on it - so you know it's good. Does NDB show the same inconsistency?

What's your experience developing on Google App Engine?

Is GQL easy to learn for someone who knows SQL? How is Django/Python? Does App Engine really make scaling easy? Is there any built-in protection against "GQL Injections"? And so on...
I'd love to hear the not-so-obvious ups and downs of using app engine.
Cheers!
My experience with google app engine has been great, and the 1000 result limit has been removed, here is a link to the release notes:
app-engine release notes
No more 1000 result limit - That's
right: with addition of Cursors and
the culmination of many smaller
Datastore stability and performance
improvements over the last few months,
we're now confident enough to remove
the maximum result limit altogether.
Whether you're doing a fetch,
iterating, or using a Cursor, there's
no limits on the number of results.
The most glaring and frustrating issue is the datastore api, which looks great and is very well thought out and easy to work with if you are used to SQL, but has a 1000 row limit across all query resultsets, and you can't access counts or offsets beyond that. I've run into weirder issues, with not actually being able to add or access data for a model once it goes beyond 1000 rows.
See the Stack Overflow discussion about the 1000 row limit
Aral Balkan wrote a really good summary of this and other problems
Having said that, app engine is a really great tool to have at ones disposal, and I really enjoy working with it. It's perfect for deploying micro web services (eg: json api's) to use in other apps.
GQL is extremely simple - it's a subset of the SQL 'SELECT' statement, nothing more. It's only a convenience layer over the top of the lower-level APIs, though, and all the parsing is done in Python.
Instead, I recommend using the Query API, which is procedural, requires no run-time parsing, and makes 'GQL injection' vulnerabilities totally impossible (though they are impossible in properly written GQL anyway). The Query API is very simple: Call .all() on a Model class, or call db.Query(modelname). The Query object has .filter(field_and_operator, value), .order(field_and_direction) and .ancestor(entity) methods, in addition to all the facilities GQL objects have (.get(), .fetch(), .count()), etc.) Each of the Query methods returns the Query object itself for convenience, so you can chain them:
results = MyModel.all().filter("foo =", 5).order("-bar").fetch(10)
Is equivalent to:
results = MyModel.gql("WHERE foo = 5 ORDER BY bar DESC LIMIT 10").fetch()
A major downside when working with AppEngine was the 1k query limit, which has been mentioned in the comments already. What I haven't seen mentioned though is the fact that there is a built-in sortable order, with which you can work around this issue.
From the appengine cookbook:
def deepFetch(queryGen,key=None,batchSize = 100):
"""Iterator that yields an entity in batches.
Args:
queryGen: should return a Query object
key: used to .filter() for __key__
batchSize: how many entities to retrieve in one datastore call
Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/d887ll (AppEngine cookbook).
"""
from google.appengine.ext import db
# AppEngine will not fetch more than 1000 results
batchSize = min(batchSize,1000)
query = None
done = False
count = 0
if key:
key = db.Key(key)
while not done:
print count
query = queryGen()
if key:
query.filter("__key__ > ",key)
results = query.fetch(batchSize)
for result in results:
count += 1
yield result
if batchSize > len(results):
done = True
else:
key = results[-1].key()
The above code together with Remote API (see this article) allows you to retrieve as many entities as you need.
You can use the above code like this:
def allMyModel():
q = MyModel.all()
myModels = deepFetch(allMyModel)
At first I had the same experience as others who transitioned from SQL to GQL -- kind of weird to not be able to do JOINs, count more than 1000 rows, etc. Now that I've worked with it for a few months I absolutely love the app engine. I'm porting all of my old projects onto it.
I use it to host several high-traffic web applications (at peak time one of them gets 50k hits a minute.)
Google App Engine doesn't use an actual database, and apparently uses some sort of distributed hash map. This will lend itself to some different behaviors that people who are accustomed to SQL just aren't going to see at first. So for example getting a COUNT of items in regular SQL is expected to be a fast operation, but with GQL it's just not going to work the same way.
Here are some more issues:
http://blog.burnayev.com/2008/04/gql-limitations.html
In my personal experience, it's an adjustment, but the learning curve is fine.

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