We are planning to use mobile sign for one of our application. But as far as I know there are some limitations for signing documents. The vendor we are working has a limitation that you should enter a pin code for every single document and it's attachments. This means if there is a document with 3 attachments, user should enter 4 pin codes in order to complete the mobile sign. This is NOT acceptable, so I wonder how mobile sign works around the globe? I mean other vendors also have the same limitation? Does mobile sign use messaging infrastructure? Would you please give me some information about Mobile Sign?
Thanks in advance.
Best Regards.
Let me explain how mobile signatures work. Based on the process you may infer some conclusion.
Technically the mobile signature is created by a security module when a request for it reaches the device (SIM card,) and after introducing the request to the user with a few explanation prompts, the device asks for a secret code that only the correct user should know. Usually this is in form of a PIN. If the access control secret was entered correctly, the device is approved with access to secret data containing for example RSA private key, which is then used to do the signature or other operations that the request wanted.
The PKI system associates the public key counterpart of the secret key held at the secure device with a set of attributes contained in a structure called digital certificate. The choice of the registration procedure details during the definition of the attributes included in this digital certificate can be used to produce different levels of identity assurance. Anything from anonymous but specific to high-standard real-word identity. By doing a signature, the secure device owner can claim that identity.
Thus, the mobile signature is a unique feature for:
Proving your real-world identity to third parties without
face-to-face communications.
Making a legally-binding commitment by sending a confirmed message to
another party.
Solve security problems of the online world with identity
confirmation (an anonymous but specific identity is often equally
good as a high-standards identity).
Related
Recently I came across an old project for Nokia Asha with app tracking in it.
For every screen accessed by the user a Http request would be made to report to the analytics service and one of the parameters sent was the IMEI in the mobile device.
As far as I know, retrieving information like the IMEI on Windows Phone and iPhone is not permitted but on Android it's still an available function but requires the permission to read the state and identity of the phone which I've been told scare some users.
From what I'm seeing, using this kind of information is being discouraged in which case what alternatives are being more encouraged to implement to identify a device when it comes to analytics services or similar?
You can use a random ID to identify each client.
Odds: With a 64-bit random ID (using, say, nextLong()), the odds of accidental collision are exceedingly small. You'd need 4 billion clients to get the probability of the first accidental collision up to 1/2. This is plenty good enough for analytics.
Implementation: The server can use Java's SecureRandom to generate the ID and put it in a cookie on the HTTP reply if the HTTP request doesn't already have one. Either way, the analytics would associate that request with that cookie.
If the client is a native app rather than a web app, it will need to store the cookie and attach it to future HTTP requests.
Alternatives: If users need to log in to your app, then you can associate usage with their login ID. Otherwise, generate a token.
There are many reasons to not ask the user for their cellphone number including privacy, reliability, and annoying people. Many potential users will drop out rather than enter their cellphone number, while others will enter something like all ones. A random ID will be more unique.
If you need to do account validation via SMS, then you'll have to ask for a phone number. In that case you'll need a privacy policy, a data retention policy and plan, encrypted storage, you'll have to explain it to users, and cope with a substantial fraction of dropouts.
Even if you don't retain the phone numbers, you could construct a one-way secure hash from it to use for the client ID, but phone numbers get recycled so over the long term, random IDs will be more unique than verified phone numbers.
I have an application that uses email addresses for user authentication.
I know that some universities use Shibboleth for user authentication, and I was wondering what the process is for being able to read emails from the university database that is used for Shibboleth. Note that I do not care about authentication through Shibboleth, I only need to be able to read the email addresses.
Is it general for all universities that use Shibboleth, or is each a unique case?
Any links to documentation on how to do this process would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Shibboleth can be configured (IdP-side) to release user attributes along with authentication data, for example the user's email address. Client-side, assuming you're going though shibd, you'll need a setting in your attribute-map.xml that says "map attribute with OID x.y.z.a to environment variable USERMAIL" and then you get the result in that environment variable. The example config should already contain it.
This would be the same for everybody insofar as the OID for "email" is always the same, but you'd have to negotiate with the IdPs (universities) or their federations so that they will actually release that attribute to you.
Shibboleth is used by many institutions, but by no means all. Many use Athens, proxies or IP recognition, among other things.
As far as I am aware, a user's email address is not tied directly to the Shib system. When a user tries to access a Shibboleth-protected resource they are taken to their institution's login page to authenticate themselves. They might enter their email address to authenticate or they might enter a username, they might be auto logged-in based on their IP address, or something else.
The institution does send back an affiliation through Shib data transfer upon successful login, something like student#brown.ac.uk but this is not necessarily the email address the user used to login. I guess they could send that but it has not been used in system's I've worked on.
Shibboleth is commonly used to check that the user is from an institution that has purchased access to a protected resource rather than identifying a particular user from that institution so the user's email isn't needed.
Not sure if this helps at all: http://middleware.internet2.edu/eduperson/docs/internet2-mace-dir-eduperson-200806.html#eduPersonAffiliation
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 am looking for a way for two Google Apps applications to talk to each other and share data between each other. I have the following scenario:
Application A logs user in using Google Apps login
Application B logs user in using Google Apps login
then these applications need to communicate directly to each other (server-to-server) using some APIs
The question is: how do these applications verify that the other one is logged in with the same user to Google? I would imagine something like:
- Application A gets some 'token' from Google and sends it to Application B
- Application B verifies that this token is valid for the same Google account as it is logged in with
Is there a way to accomplish that via Google Federated Login? I am talking about Hybrid protocol here.
Here's a simple way to do it:
You keep everything keyed to the user's Google userid on both applications.
You share the data using HTTP requests that contain the userid.
To prevent leaking of the userids (forbidden by the account API) and to verify the messages really come from the other application, you encrypt the requests with a symmetric cipher such as AES or Blowfish or whatever you like. Both applications have the same key embedded.
You could public key cryptography. With just two applications, it's not worth it in my opinion. If you start having more apps, public key makes sense.
The fine print: encryption does not guarantee integrity or origin without additional measures. You need to take precautions against playback, for example by incorporating a time-stamp or sequence number. You need to take precautions against tampering, e.g. with a checksum. Make sure to use CBC and good initialization vectors. Keep the key secret.
user.user_id() is always the same across all the apps for the same user. So you can simply compare values returned by user.user_id(). Is this what you are looking for?
Note: Every user has the same user ID
for all App Engine applications. If
your app uses the user ID in public
data, such as by including it in a URL
parameter, you should use a hash
algorithm with a "salt" value added to
obscure the ID. Exposing raw IDs could
allow someone to associate a user's
activity in one app with that in
another, or get the user's email
address by coercing the user to sign
in to another app.
From docs
I have an application that runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional PDA devices. The application is installed by browsing a url from the device and downloading a cab.
Users capture information in the application and this is then replicated back to a SQL 2005 server using merge replication and IIS v6.
Although the user needs to log into the application on the device anybody who knows the url could download and install. Also if you know a users password anyone with a device could update that users information.
I would somehow like to authenticate the devices either at the installation or replication stage (or both).
Is it possible to authenticate a device based on serial number or IMEI (mobile phone ID) number?
Is there a way to load a certificate onto the device so only certificated devices are allowed to connect?
I want a system that is not too hard to implement and support. The users must be able to update their own devices and they are not very good at remembering complicate procedures or password.
One possible solution would be to send the unique device id as part of authentication. There's a post on using GetDeviceUniqueID on the Windows Mobile Team Blog.
You could store this unique id when the user first connect to the server and verify it prior to each merge.
This approach helps to ensure that the user logging in is doing so from their own phone. It solves the problem of a remote intruder downloading your program to their own phone and logging into a legitimate users account. Of course, if such an intruder has access to your users phone AND password, all bets are off.
You have conflicting requirements:
The users must be able to update their
own devices and they are not very good
at remembering complicate procedures
or password.
and:
Also if you know a users password
anyone with a device could update that
users information.
If your users can only (barely) be expected to use a password, then you cannot expect to be able to protect in any case against anyone else who has their password.
There's no 'magic' authentication that will tell you a particular user or device is legitimate beyond what you provide.
You can password protect the download, you can load certificates, you can get the PDA information (and even the cellular information), but unless you add another authentication mechanism, at the end of the day all you've got is a password.
The password is your weakest link, and you seem to be indicating that you can't provide more strict access, but you somehow need it?
If you have another authentication channel (phone, email, SMS) then you can provide a more robust, meaningful authentication.
For instance, you could make your program operation dependent on a "public.key" file with a per-user public key that your server requires for use. Once the user logs in to your website, have them give you their phone number (so now you have the phone number and the password) and send an SMS with a link to a temporary download for the key. Make a new key for each user, keep their private key on the server, and encrypt (or at least authenticate) every transaction between the device and server using this key pair.
Now if someone else wants to pretend they are their user, they have to get that file in one of three ways:
They take it directly off the PDA (they also need the password, as the public key should be protected by the user password)
They get the user to request a new SMS link, and somehow get the link without having the phone
They change the phone number and request a new SMS link
In any case, you are validating not only the password, but also an associate phone number. You can make it hard for users to change the phone number (validate against their email as well when they request a phone number change, have them call in, etc).
Of course you can do the same with other channels of communication, but users are getting more and more used to SMS authentication and download, so it isn't too much more hassle.
-Adam
You could generate slightly different cab file for every download. The only difference would be security token your application would use as user/password analogue. That should be a public key for real security.
You could send them SMS with a code each time they access your application.