Recently I had to make an application that later on had to be uploaded to multiple web-servers. Doing this I realized that when storing the admin pass and username's into a json file does not need a db connection so it works all the time. Also when saving the configuration inside json I can just copy my application to web-server and then just go to the browser to do the configuration.
When using a database for this I have to configure this hard coded. Than the db connection would be declared inside a connect.php or config.php. When uploading the application I can't use it because there is no db connection. And I cant set A db connection from within the application itself because I can't login even if I could it would be like a car-key inside a closed car.
My dilemma: Is this the right way, is this save, is this efficient and above all how did you guys do this.
What is the best way to store admin login and configuiration data
The usual solution is to move the password out of source-code into a configuration file. Then leave administration and securing that configuration file up to your system administrators. That way developers do not need to know anything about the production passwords, and there is no record of the password in your source-control.
In other words, it is perfectly normal to have a config.php containing a define("DB_PASS", "topSecret");
Provided access to the config.php file is correctly administered, this method is secure.
Lynks is correct that this is common and is better than having the password in your source control, however if this is a production system that you are designing, I strongly recommend using a different mechanism for user authentication.
Most databases will allow you to use local system users and groups, or external LDAPs to manage your user credentials. Most application servers will have mechanisms for this as well, this is not a new problem. Some systems will allow you to create secure keys (like SSH keys) for trusted users to allow password-less login.
Having passwords in clear anywhere on a production systems is a BAD IDEA, at least use a lossy hashing method to scramble it. Remember as soon as you are dealing with passwords it is YOUR responsibility as a designer and developer to make your best effort to keep it safe. Please evaluate all your options before deciding on the easy solution that could cost you and your customer serious embarrassment later. What technologies are you using? Maybe we can help you find the options available to you.
Remember, nothing lives in total isolation. For example even if this is not a critical system, a lot of places will use a certain pattern for passwords which will give potential hackers a clue for hacking other accounts. If you manage passwords for multiple users, some users use the same password for a lot of things.
This post is not meant as a lecture but a plea for you to make sure you explore all avenues available to you to keep you reputation and your customer safe. Think of it as a challenge, or puzzle and have fun tackling it.
I have 4 new data entry users who are using a particular GUI to create/update/delete entries in our main database. The "GUI" client allows them to see database records on a map and make modifications there, which is fine and preferred way of doing it.
But lately lot of guys have been accessing local database directly using PGAdmin and running bulk queries (i.e. update, insert, delete,etc) which introduces lot of problems like people updating lot of records without knowing or making mistakes while setting values. It also effects our logging procedures as we are calculating averages and time stamps for reporting purposes which are quite crucial to us.
So is there a way to prevent users from using PGAdmin (please remember lot of these guys are working from home and we do not have access to their machines) and running SQL queries directly in the database.
We still have to give them access to certain tables and allow them to execute sql as long as it's coming through a certain client but deny access to same user when he/she tries to execute a query directly in the db.
The only sane way to control access to your database is converting your db access methods to 3-tier structure. You should build a middleware (maybe some rest API or something alike) and use this API from your app. Database should be hidden behind this middleware, so no direct access is possible. From DB point of view, there are no ways to tell if one database connection is from your app, or from some other tool (pgadmin, simple psql or some custom build client). Your database should be accessible only from trusted hosts and clients should not have access to those hosts.
This is only possible if you use a trick (which might get exploited, too, but maybe your users are not smart enought).
In your client app set some harmless parameter like geqo_pool_size=1001 (if it is 1000 normally).
Now write a trigger that checks if this parameter is set and outputs "No access through PGAdmin" if this parameter is not set like from your app (and the username is not your admin username).
Alternatives: Create a temporary table and check for its existance.
I believe you should block direct access to the database, and set an application to which your clients (humans and software ones) will be able to connect.
Let this application filter and pass only allowed commands.
A great care should be taken in the filtering - I would carefully think whether raw SQL would be allowed at all. Personally, I would design some simplified API, which would make me sure that a hypothetical client-attacker (In God we trust, all others we monitor) would not find a way to sneak with some dangerous modification.
I suppose that from security standpoint your current approach is very unsafe.
You should study advanced pg_hba.conf settings.
this file is the key point for use authorization. Basic settings imply only simple authentification methods like passwords and lists of IP, but you can have some more advanced solution.
GSSAPI
kerberos
SSPI
Radius server
any pam method
So your official client can use a more advanced method, like somthing with a third tier API, some really complex authentification mechanism. Then without using the application it will at least becomes difficult to redo these tasks. If the kerberos key is encrypted in your client, for example.
What you want to do is to REVOKE your users write access, then create a new role with write access, then as this role you CREATE FUNCTION defined as SECURITY DEFINER, which updates the table in a way you allow with integrity checks, then GRANT EXECUTE access to this function for your users.
There is an answer on this topic on ServerFault which references the following blog entry with detailed description.
I believe that using middleware as other answers suggest is an unnecessary overkill in your situation. The above solution does not require for the users to change the way they access the database, just restricts their right to modify the data only through the predefined server side methods.
I'd like to keep the real names, emails, and any other personal identifiable information out of my primary application database, and in another database/encrypted file. And I'm curious on if there's a best practices solution for this or if I'm totally over looking something.
Some thoughts I had were the following:
User logs in with a username and password that are both hashed in the primary database
This server then makes some sort of secure call to the member database with the user's id
And in return the member database returns the name, email, address etc.
I'm wondering if this is the right approach, and if so where the keys are stored and authenticated etc..
It's an interesting question, I think, but it needs some more context. That is, you need to be clear about who you are wishing to anonymise them against. That is, who is the threat, here? Do you want the information hidden from only the public? Clearly, that's trivial, just don't show it (don't link it). Do you want the information hidden from someone who gains access to your database? How hidden? How will they get access to your db? Can they, if they gain access to the not-anonymous one, get access to the other? OpenID may also be of interest to you (externalise the authentication, you just do role management).
I'd suggest sit down and plan that out a bit.
You don't want to introduce complexity (multiple db's, linking, etc) if they're all just on the same server anyway, and hence accessible to any successful attacker.
I'd think the number 1 solution to keeping things anonymous is to never actually collect any information yourself. It's more of a model thing (i.e. the details of your app matter).
My previous job involved maintenance and programming for a very large database with massive amounts of data. Users viewed this data primarily through an intranet web interface. Instead of having a table of user accounts, each user account was a real first-class account in the RDBMS, which permitted them to connect with their own query tools, etc., as well as permitting us to control access through the RDBMS itself instead of using our own application logic.
Is this a good setup, assuming you're not on the public intranet and dealing with potentially millions of (potentially malicious) users or something? Or is it always better to define your own means of handling user accounts, your own permissions, your own application security logic, and only hand out RDBMS accounts to power users with special needs?
I don't agree that using the database for user access control is as dangerous others are making it out to be. I come from the Oracle Forms Development realm, where this type of user access control is the norm. Just like any design decision, it has it's advantages and disadvantages.
One of the advantages is that I could control select/insert/update/delete privileges for EACH table from a single setting in the database. On one system we had 4 different applications (managed by different teams and in different languages) hitting the same database tables. We were able to declare that only users with the Manager role were able to insert/update/delete data in a specific table. If we didn't manage it through the database, then each application team would have to correctly implement (duplicate) that logic throughout their application. If one application got it wrong, then the other apps would suffer. Plus you would have duplicate code to manage if you ever wanted to change the permissions on a single resource.
Another advantage is that we did not need to worry about storing user passwords in a database table (and all the restrictions that come with it).
I don't agree that "Database user accounts are inherently more dangerous than anything in an account defined by your application". The privileges required to change database-specific privileges are normally MUCH tougher than the privileges required to update/delete a single row in a "PERSONS" table.
And "scaling" was not a problem because we assigned privileges to Oracle roles and then assigned roles to users. With a single Oracle statement we could change the privilege for millions of users (not that we had that many users).
Application authorization is not a trivial problem. Many custom solutions have holes that hackers can easily exploit. The big names like Oracle have put a lot of thought and code into providing a robust application authorization system. I agree that using Oracle security doesn't work for every application. But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it in favor of a custom solution.
Edit: I should clarify that despite anything in the OP, what you're doing is logically defining an application even if no code exists. Otherwise it's just a public database with all the dangers that entails by itself.
Maybe I'll get flamed to death for this post, but I think this is an extraordinarily dangerous anti-pattern in security and design terms.
A user object should be defined by the system it's running in. If you're actually defining these in another application (the database) you have a loss of control.
It makes no sense from a design point of view because if you wanted to extend those accounts with any kind of data at all (email address, employee number, MyTheme...) you're not going to be able to extend the DB user and you're going to need to build that users table anyway.
Database user accounts are inherently more dangerous than anything in an account defined by your application because they could be promoted, deleted, accessed or otherwise manipulated by not only the database and any passing DBA, but anything else connected to the database. You've exposed a critical system element as public.
Scaling is out of the question. Imagine an abstraction where you're going to have tens or hundreds of thousands of users. That's just not going to manageable as DB accounts, but as records in a table it's just data. The age old argument of "well there's onyl ever going to be X users" doesn't hold any water with me because I've seen very limited internal apps become publicly exposed when the business feels it's could add value to the customer or the company just got bought by a giant partner who now needs access. You must plan for reasonable extensibility.
You're not going to be able to share conn pooling, you're not going to be any more secure than if you just created a handful of e.g. role accounts, and you're not necessarily going to be able to affect mass changes when you need to, or backup effectively.
All in there seems to be numerous serious problems to me, and I imagine other more experienced SOers could list more.
I think generally. In your traditional database application they shouldnt be. For all the reason already given. In a traditional database application there is a business layer that handles all the security and this is because there is such a strong line between people who interact with the application, and people who interact with the database.
In this situation is is generally better to manage these users and roles yourself. You can decide what information you need to store about them, and what you log and audit. And most importantly you define access based on pure business rules rather than database rules. Its got nothing to do with which tables they access and everything to do with whether they can insert business action here. However these are not technical issues. These are design issues. If that is what you are required to control then it makes sense to manage your users yourself.
You have described a system where you allow users to query the database directly. In this case why not use DB accounts. They will do the job far better than you will if you attempt to analyse the querys that users write and vet them against some rules that you have designed. That to me sounds like a nightmare system to write and maintain.
Don't lock things down because you can. Explain to those in charge what the security implications are but dont attempt to prevent people from doing things because you can. Especially not when they are used to accessing the data directly.
Our job as developers is to enable people to do what they need to do. And in the situation you have described. Specifically connect to the database and query it with their own tools. Then I think that anything other than database accounts is either going to be insecure, or unneccasarily restrictive.
"each user account was a real first-class account in the RDBMS, which permitted them to connect with their own query tools, etc.,"
not a good idea if the RDBMS contains:
any information covered by HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley or The Official Secrets Act (UK)
credit card information or other customer credit info (POs, lines of credit etc)
personal information (ssn, dob, etc)
competitive, proprietary, or IP information
because when users can use their own non-managed query tools the company has no way of knowing or auditing what information was queried or where the query results were delivered.
oh and what #annakata said.
I would avoid giving any user database access. Later, when this starts causing problems, taking away their access becomes very dificult.
At the very least, give them access to a read-only replica of the database so they can't kill your whole company with a bad query.
A lot of database query tools are very advanced these days, and it can feel a real shame to reimplement the world just to add restrictions. And as long as the database user permissions are properly locked down it might be okay. However in many cases you can't do this, you should be exposing a high-level API to the database to insert objects over many tables properly, without the user needing specific training that they should "just add an address into that table there, why isn't it working?".
If they only want to use the data to generate reports in Excel, etc, then maybe you could use a reporting front end like BIRT instead.
So basically: if the users are knowledgeable about databases, and resources to implement a proper front-end are low, keep on doing this. However is the resource does come up, it is probably time to get people's requirements in for creating a simpler, task-oriented front-end for them.
This is, in a way, similar to: is sql server/AD good for anything
I don't think it's a bad idea to throw your security model, at least a basic one, in the database itself. You can add restrictions in the application layer for cosmetics, but whichever account the user is accessing the database with, be it based on the application or the user, it's best if that account is restricted to only the operations the user is allowed.
I don't speak for all apps, but there are a large number I have seen where capturing the password is as simple as opening the code in notepad, using an included dll to decrypt the configuration file, or finding a backup file (e.g. web.config.bak in asp.net) that can be accessed from the browser.
*not a good idea if the RDBMS contains:
* any information covered by HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley or The Official Secrets Act (UK)
* credit card information or other customer credit info (POs, lines of credit etc)
* personal information (ssn, dob, etc)
* competitive, proprietary, or IP information*
Not true, one can perfectly manage which data a database user can see and which data it can modify. A database (at least Oracle) can also audit all activities, including selects. To have thousands of database users is also perfectly normal.
It is more difficult to build good secure applications because you have to program this security, a database offers this security and you can configure it in a declarative way, no code required.
I know, I am replying to a very old post, but recently came across same situation in my current project. I was also thinking on similar lines, whether "Application users be Database users?".
This is what I analysed:
Definitely it doesn't make sense to create that big number of application users on database(if your application is going to be used by many users).
Let's say you created X(huge number) of users on database. You are opening a clear gateway to your database.
Let's take a scenario for the solution:
There are two types of application users (Managers and Assistant). Both needs access to database for some transactions.
It's obvious you would create two roles, one for each type(Manager and Assistant) in database. But how about database user to connect from application. If you create one account per user then you would end up linearly creating the accounts on the database.
What I suggest:
Create one database account per Role. (Let's say Manager_Role_Account)
Let your application have business logic to map an application user with corresponding role.(User Tom with Manager role to Manager_Role_Account)
Use the database user(Manager_Role_Account) corresponding to identified role in #2 to connect to database and execute your query.
Hope this makes sense!
Updated: As I said, I came across similar situation in my project (with respect to Postgresql database at back end and a Java Web app at front end), I found something very useful called as Proxy Authentication.
This means that you can login to the database as one user but limit or extend your privileges based on the Proxy user.
I found very good links explaining the same.
For Postgresql below Choice of authentication approach for
financial app on PostgreSQL
For Oracle Proxy Authentication
Hope this helps!
It depends (like most things).
Having multiple database users negates connection pooling, since most libraries handle pooling based on connection strings and user accounts.
On the other hand, it's probably a more secure solution than anything you or I will do from scratch. It leaves security up to the OS and Database server, which I trust much more than myself. However, this is only the case if you go to the effort to configure the database permissions well. If you're using a bunch of OS/db users with the same permissions,it won't help much. You'll still get an audit trail, but that's about it.
All that said, I don't know that I'd feel comfortable letting normal users connect directly to the database with their own tools.
I think it's worth highlighting what other answers have touched upon:
A database can only define restrictions based on the data. Ie restrict select/insert/update/delete on particular tables or columns. I'm sure some databases can do somewhat cleverer things, but they'll never be able to implement business-rule based restrictions like an application can. What if a certain user is allowed to update a column only to certain values (say <1000) or only increase prices, or change either of two columns but not both?
I'd say unless you are absolutely sure you'll never need anything but table/column granularity, this is reason enough by itself.
This is not a good idea for any application where you store data for multiple users in the same table and you don't want one user to be able to read or modify another user's data. How would you restrict access in this case?
I've got an ms-access application that's accessing and ms-sql db through an ODBC connection. I'm trying to force my users to update the data only through the application portion, but I don't care if they read the data directly or through their own custom ms-access db (they use it for creating ad hoc reports).
What I'm looking for is a way to make the data only editable if they are using the compiled .mde file I distribute to them. I know I can make the data read only for the general population, and editable for select users.
Is there a way I can get ms-sql to make the data editable only if they are accessing it through the my canned mde?
Thought, is there a way to get ms-access to log into the database as a different user (or change the login once connected)?
#Jake,
Yes, it's using forms. What I'm looking to do is just have it switch users once when I have my launchpad/mainmenu form pop up.
#Peter,
That is indeed the direction I'm headed. What I haven't determined was how to go about switching to that second ID. I'm not so worried about the password being sniffed, the users are all internal, and on an internal LAN. If they can sniff that password, they can certainly sniff the one for my privileged ID.
#no one in general,
Right now its security by obscurity. I've given the uses a special .mdb for doing reporting that will let them read data, but not update it. They don't know about relinking to the tables through the ODBC connection. A slightly more ms-access/DB literate user could by pass what I've done in seconds - and there a few who imagine themselves to be DBA, so they will figure it out eventually.
There is a way to do this that is effective with internal users, but can be hacked. You create two IDs for each user. One is a reporting ID that has read-only access. This is they ID that the user knows about: Fred / mypassword
The second is an ID that can do updates. That id is Fred_app / mypassword_mangled. They log on to your app with Fred. When your application accesses data, it uses the application id.
This can be sniffed, but for many applications it is sufficient.
Does you app allow for linked table updates or does it go through forms? Sounds like your idea of using a centralized user with distinct roles is the way to go. Yes, you could change users but I that may introduce more coding and once you start adding more and more code other solutions (stored procedures, etc) may sound more inviting.