We develop a web application.
There is a user login and a user area for the customers of a certain company.
And there is an agent/office login and area for some employees of the company who manage user account handling and so on.
The office agent has to login with his username and password.
But additionally, for security reasons, we will limit the agent/office login and area for specific IP addresses (as seen in other applications).
But we would like to have a "fallback" for certain situations where, for example, a web developer of the application needs access to the office area and has not one of the special IP addresses.
Until now we had not many ideas.
We thought of providing access when there is a very special user-agent string with a hash value.
Has anybody implemented such security mechanisms and can inform me about it?
Thanks alot in advance
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Given the increasing concerns in data privacy, is it possible to build a web app that provides a driven user experience (aka different outcomes on different users based on their specific profiles) without sending any personal information that can be tracked, hijacked or forced by any entity on the web app's servers ?
The question is somewhat vague, but due to the fact that HTTP is stateless, you'll need users to send some kind of information, at the very least user registration and login data to identify them and store their identity in some kind of storage (ex. cookie).
If you dont want the users to post any data, you wont be able to personalize the experience, just provide the same experience to everyone every time they enter your website.
I think you can do this, but you will need to identify users at the start, and then unidentify them later - for example, get them to register with an email address, confirm that address, then create an identifier derived from that address (e.g. a hash or random number), switch to using it as a user name and delete the email address. Then you will be at a point where they can log into an account, but you hold no personal identifiers on them.
I'm looking for information about authentication but I'm very newbie so I don't know any system.
My requeriments are: An user only can authenticate from one computer/mobile device/tablet.
I'm thinking about a monitoring system of MAC address and when the user connect using other device I can see this like an alert.
What other methods are there? Certificates?.
Repeat, I'm very newbie with this.
PD: My app has been development with framework Symfony2
So first of all MAC address is a network local address, which means that after it goes trough router/switch the MAC address changes, so you cannot relay on this. Even if you wanted to lookup interface MAC addres with your client software MAC's can be changed.
Secondly Certificates give you certain properties like nonrepudiation (you can calculate digital signatures on operations that users do and then the could not deny doing something in your application). But Public Key Infrastructure is really hard to manage! You would need your Certificate Authority to give valid certificates, You would need to monitor and update Certificate Revocation Lists to deny stolen/invalid/forged certificates from being treated as valid and authentic.
If it is not a security centric application and after you analyzed your options I would suggest simple form authentication (username/password/captcha). And write mechanizm that would periodicly (i.e. every second) send an AJAX request refreshing user status, thus you could recognize if user closed browser or has opened window. And in your authentication process you could check for other ACTIVE sessions for given username and deny login or act in some other fashion. If you need more informations about authentication I would recomend looking through security patterns
I realize that mac addresses or machine ids aren't transferred over the internet, however, I would like to lock down our subscription-based website security so that only specific computers can register and have access to its resources.
Large organizations will subscribe to our service and will undoubtedly have more than one ip for their organization. As well, we'd like to give the ability for their qualified employees to access the website on devices outside of their physical organization (for road-trip presentations, etc.).
Is there a sure-fire way to achieve this end (beyond the username/password assigned to each account)? If not, what would be the most effective approach?
Instead of restricting access via IP, you want to use something that's actually secure.
Username and password over an HTTPS connection should at least be unsniffable, but you might want to look in to client SSL certificates. They can be configured in Apache or other web server software. If username/password authentication is not enough, this is the next (and perhaps final) step up.
UPDATE:
That said, what many application providers will do is provide a method for subscribers to implement an ACL for their accounts. You can even force people to consider their ACL before allowing them to access your services. Think of it this way:
An account is set up in your system allowing login from anywhere. Upon creation, the ACL is UNSET.
User logs in and is immediately directed to an ACL setup page, where they must provide either an IP address or range or subnet associated with their account. You can be clever and pre-populate things with their existing IP address or subnet, perhaps even looking things up at ARIN to see if their IP is in a network assigned to the company name on their account.
Once the ACL is set (or they have, despite your warnings, confirmed that they want to keep their ACL open), they can access your services.
If they try log in from elsewhere, they (and you) are notified via email (or SMS or whatever) of an attempted breach.
If they no longer have access to their ACL-listed IPs (i.e. IP renumbering due to a new upstream Internet provider and bad planning), they can call your phone support who will validate them by other means. FAX confirmation perhaps, because that's SO secure...
A user-managed ACL is not a "sure-fire" way, but it may be sufficiently effective for your needs, and it will certainly instill a sense in your customers that you have their best interests at heart.
There is no sure-fire way. That's in the nature of networks. You accept data from a remote machine and you have to trust it at least to some extend.
Take the simple username/password approach. If the usename and the passwords match, you have to trust, that they where entered by the person that the username and password was intended for. This does not fundamentally change if you require more data to be send by the client.
We want to implement SSO functionality in our organization, but we're not really sure what our options are, and what the benefits / disadvantages for the different solutions might be.
-We have multiple old ASP(Active Server Pages) sites which should use SSO
-We have multiple ASP.net web-Applications which should use SSO
-We want Sharepoint to use the SSO
-CRM (Biztalk?) integration (Additional information about the user, such as Address, company, etc )
Since we're primarly .net, c#, Microsoft oriented, my first idea was to use Active Directory.
I've also noticed that there is something called ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode), and ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services), but I can't really say I understand when/where these should be used.
Here is a brief overview of the different web-applications
-"My Personal Page" : User log's into an application where they can modify their personal information along with their company-information and their employees. (Asp.Net)
-E-learning application (ASP)
-CMS system for web-publishing (ASP.Net)
-Sharepoint sites
I haven't really been able to find any articles that can tell me "AD is a great choice! , you can use it everywhere", so If anyone has got any experience /feedback to give me on this, it would be really helpful.
Also: How should rights/roles be managed ? Should all access/rights/roles for each application be stored in AD, or should this be stored in the applications themselves.
IE : AD stores the roles:
"Cms" <-allowed to login to the cms system
"Cms.Article.AddAllowed" <-allowed to add article
"Cms.Article.DeleteAllowed" <-allowed to delete article
Or should this information be split up, so that AD holds information about which applications the user is allowed to log into, while the application itself holds information about what the user is allowed to do within the application when logged in
AD rights:
"Cms" <-Allowed to login to the cms system
Cms rights:
"Article.AddAllowed" <-allowed to add article
"Article.DeleteAllowed" <-allowed to delete article
So, when the user logs in, they are first authenticated against AD, and if that goes ok, the rights for the Cms application is fetched from a rights-table in the cms system ?
What are my options ? What other solutions other than AD do I have ?
Thank you for any feedback, its much appreciated !
We have done something similar in my organization. Here is the overall flow:
User requests web page
User is redirect to login screen along with SAML request
User authenticates against Active Directory
User is passed back to request web page with SAML response
User group/rights information is retrieved from database
If user requests page from another website same process occurs however if the user still has a session or selected the "remember me" feature then user does not have authenticate and gets logged in directly.
We use Sharepoint, but have not setup SSO yet. I believe Sharepoint gets the rights of the user from its own backend database/system. We also have a homegrown system to update user's groups/rights. I know Sharepoint can use web services so you could possible update Sharepoint when using a centralized user management system (of course you'd have to build that). The main thing is finding out where Sharepoint gets its information about the user and how you can tie your existing system to it...
I wouldn't rely on Active Directory to store group/rights information. It a pain to deal with compared to a database and is not flexible. It's fine for authentication and password management you just have to tie the user on Active Directory to your database system.
As far as I know, Active Directory is only practical for users within your domain. You would need an administrator to manage all those users and to add new users.
I've been working on a project myself where I wanted users to sign in, just to know their identity. I did not even care about their access rights but just wanted an identity on every visitor, something more reliable than an IP address, cookie, session key or whatever else. So I first asked my administrators if I could use Active Directory for this project. Sure, I could. But the webhost wasn't connected to our company domain so I would end up with only one user. Yeah, my administrator is a bit sarcastic sometimes.
So I started to explore SSO options. OpenID like this site is a good option and you could even implement your own OpenID server and require all visitors to sign on there first. It's a very powerful technique and you have less worries about managing users in your project. (Because the OpenID provider takes care of this.)
However, I ended up using CardSpace instead. :-) With CardSpace, every user can create their own user-token and store it on their own system. To log on, the website just asks for the card and the user just clicks on it. Those cards can be migrated to other systems but tend to be tied to a single computer and user, most of the time. (Although users can share a card!)
Rights and Roles are a different matter than Authentication. People always think they're connected while in reality, these are two different things. First, use OpenID or CardSpace or another authentication technique to verify the identity of the user. It doesn't matter how they're identified, you just need an identifier.
Next, you need rights and roles. Roles are basically just user-groups and you can connect an identity to a group. Or to multiple groups. And rights would be linked to roles, not users. But how you're going to divide these roles just depends on the applications. Just remember that someone who is an administrator in your version control system should not be an administrator in your customer database. Roles tend to be application-defined, thus every application could manage their own rights and roles and just needs a way to link these to an identity.
I myself just needed identities so I knew whom to blame when something ended up messed up. Then again, when there's only 5 users, things tend to become quite simple.
First, a little background: We have an intranet site based on WSS 3.0 that is hosted on a server in DOMAIN_A.LOCAL and set up to use Integrated Windows Authentication to authenticate users against Active Directory user accounts of DOMAIN_A.LOCAL.
This setup works just fine for users who are logged into Windows using an AD account from DOMAIN_A.LOCAL, but when users try to access the site from a PC logged into Windows using an AD account from a different domain (i.e. DOMAIN_B.LOCAL) the following problems occur:
The user must manually enter their credentials as DOMAIN_A\UserName rather than just UserName because otherwise, Internet Explorer automatically inserts DOMAIN_B and causes authentication to fail.
Once logged in, if the user does something that requires the browser to pass their authentication through to a client app, such as clicking on a Microsoft Office document in a document library in order to open it for editing, it appears that invalid credentials (presumably DOMAIN_B) are passed automatically, thus forcing the user to manually enter their DOMAIN_A credentials again.
My question, then is this:
Is there any way to implement a "default domain" type of behavior when using Integrated Windows Authentication (as can be done when using Basic clear text authentication) so that if a user on DOMAIN_B does not enter a domain before their user name, DOMAIN_A is inserted automatically for them?
Of course, I realize this deployment may be fatally flawed, so I am also open to suggestions for a different implementation.
In summary, the main problem stems from two different kinds of users needing to access the same content on one SharePoint site. The users in DOMAIN_A all have their own full-time workstations where they log into Windows as themselves. The users in DOMAIN_B unfortunately have to use shared computers that are logged on using generic "kiosk" type accounts that have no permissions in SharePoint -- thus the requirement that the DOMAIN_B users must provide their credentials on demand when accessing a given page in SharePoint. I would like to preserve the convenience of the Integrated Windows Authentication for the "static" users of DOMAIN_A while minimizing the amount of manual authentication that the "kiosk" users in DOMAIN_B have to endure.
DOMAIN_A.LOCAL must trust DOMAIN_B.LOCAL, otherwise users from DOMAIN_B.LOCAL will receivie a credential prompt since their DOMAIN_B.LOCAL account is unknown within DOMAIN_A.LOCAL.
Given that DOMAIN_B.LOCAL is for kisok users, you probably do not want to trust this domain.
You will need to extend the web application into a new zone and either implement forms based authentication, or use Windows Authentication with a reverse proxy such as ISA server.
I was searching the internet for SharePoint user accounts with multiple domains and came across an interesting tool called Microsoft Front End Identity Manager. Have you heard of it?
So… If your using a multi forest deployment where user accounts are distributed across two or more forests. This is often seen when two organizations merge and need to access domains from both organizations. You can use the distinguished name (ms-ds-Source-Object-DN) attribute in the user object to create an association between the user accounts. In this association one account is considered the primary account and the others are the alternates of the primary account. There is a tool called Microsoft Front End Identity Manager to create this relationship between user account objects. One feature of Microsoft Front End Identity Manager is that SharePoint server can maintain a list of alternate accounts by which the profile is identified. When you use either account to find the profile of a user, SharePoint server returns the primary account profile example (domain\username).
Probably not what you want to hear, but you may want to resort to forms based authentication.
Unfortunately if you want to retain the Microsoft Office integration (which is what it seems you want), you will have to stick with Windows Authentication. Using Forms Authentication will remove most of the features you seem keen to preserve, there is more information here.
Ideally you want to use the suggestion that Jason mentioned, which would be some sort of reverse proxy. However there would probably be a cost implication if you don't already have something like ISA server, so in reality it's probably best for the DOMAIN_B's to learn to type DOMAIN_B\ before their username.