Currently I'm developing a Node.js webserver-app that I then want to make available for download and use. This app should feature accounts, so that you can log in with your account on the website created by the server.
Since that would require a password, I also have to think about security obviously. But now, I don't really know how I should protect the password while sending and receiving it.
For storage, I was about to simply create a hash of the password and store that hash somewhere, but what about the transfer?
I was thinking about SSL/https, but this would require a SSL certificate, and even if I got it for free somewhere, I couldn't share it in an open-source app(?).
I could also somehow hash the password in the website, and then just send the hash to the server, but I think this wouldn't be the highest standard of security as well, would it? Considering that no SSL would cause more disadvantages than just worse/none encryption.
Any ideas?
I was thinking about SSL/https, but this would require a SSL certificate, and even if I got it for free somewhere, I couldn't share it in an open-source app(?).
Use SSL/TLS. Even if it's an open source app, it doesn't mean that you need to share your private key too. This would undermine the whole concept.
Open source means that you share the code with some license. What the licensor does with it is not your consern as long as they conform to the license. If they want to use their own instance of your software under their own domain, they will have to create their own certificate (under their domain).
I could also somehow hash the password in the website, and then just send the hash to the server, but I think this wouldn't be the highest standard of security as well, would it? Considering that no SSL would cause more disadvantages than just worse/none encryption.
This is no solution, because you now changed the thing you want to protect to something else. The model doesn't change just because you hash it on the client. Now you need to protect the hash on the transport channel which is actually the same problem as you would have had before with sending a password.
Currently I'm developing a Node.js webserver-app that I then want to make available for download and use. This app should feature accounts, so that you can log in with your account on the website created by the server.
Federated accounts
If you want federated accounts across multiple instances of your app which are hosted by different parties.
You could look into OpenID as an identity provider for all instances of your app. You would then either require that users use a known OpenID provider or you setup your own default provider. You could release the code for your provider as open source, but it wouldn't be necessary for the app to function.
If the OpenID interface is not enough, there is always a way to establish a pairing between instances of your app. You would have to build an interface where different instances may share data.
Unconnected instances
If this is only about securing the communication without SSL/TLS, then I must say, this is impossible in the general sense.
You could however let every student register in person and use that password on client and server to derive a shared secret key (i.e. for AES). Then you could use CryptoJS to encrypt everything with AES and send it using AJAX. The problems are of course that (1) there must be a person that handles the registration and (2) this is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, because JavaScript crypto is bad.
Good thing is that Let’s Encrypt will be online soon. It will enable a semi-automated way to request free certificates for your domain. It will be so easy that you can do this as part of the normal NPM install workflow.
http://letsencrypt.org works great for this and is now available (I understand I am a little late to this one.)
You can check out https://github.com/DylanPiercey/auto-sni for automated Letsencrypt certificates.
Related
I've read several Stack Overflow threads, I still can't decide what is the best option for my case. And the most secure one.
Here is the story. My webapp is to help users automatically get an overview of some of their data available in some third-party website. I need to store for each user some third-party credentials. Each night or so, my server will connect to the third-party services on the users' behalf and retrieve the required data.
Most of those third-party sites do not implement any API or OAuth mechanism, so I was thinking to do some web scraping.
I've read in many places that storing the credentials in the DB is not a good idea - especially because my app needs access to the password (so it has to be encrypted in such a way I can easily reuse it).
So, I have two options left:
Whenever I access (via webscraping) the third-party service, I store on the server the cookies issued by that service, for future reuse. I encrypt them and keep them encrypted in a DB, and decrypt them only when I need them. The problem is that the cookie can be denied or expired after a while, and so the automatic process wouldn't work any more.
I store the credentials in the environment variables. I will be on Node.js and Heroku. That's an idea I found in another SO thread. But I'm wondering about the security of this idea. Is it really safe? No one can access them but me? And what about if I reach many users. Like 1000 users, with 10 services. That's 10000 credentials to store in the env variables. That doesn't seem like a good idea.
I found two interesting questions on Stack Overflow but they don't fit 100% with my use case.
Security model: log in to third-party site with user's credentials (that gave me the idea in point 1)
Rails storing third party credentials.. Anyone know best practice? (gave me the idea in point 2).
I add another answer because maybe this one will do the trick for you.
You said the main goal of your website is to have an overview of third party applications. But what if instead of updating this overview every night, you update it when the user logs in ? It changes everything, because you could use the user's password (of your website) as master password to encrypt (using AES) all the others.
If you do that, the communications between your server and the clients have to be encrypted with SSL pinning, because an attacker could perform a MITM, get the master password and all the others stored in the DB... (Even if in practice it's very hard because you need to hack the client AND the server)
Storing a lot of data that changes and grows in environment variables will never be practical, no matter if it's secure or not so this is pretty much out of the question, unless if you have a small fixed number of users.
Not storing credentials in the database is a very good advice, but the cookies are credentials and even if you store them encrypted, your app needs to be able to encrypt it to use it. (This is unlike the situation with verifying passwords of your users when you don't need to ever encrypt them, you only need to see if the provided passwords hash to the same values that you have stored).
This is a hard problem because to make it work you need to have some form of credentials (whether those are passwords or cookies) stored and ready to be used unencrypted (even if they are stored encrypted, you need to store the keys to encrypt it as well).
Also, what you are trying to do can be illegal. Mayke sure that you follow the TOC of every service that you're using or otherwise you may face legal trouble.
Plan for the attacker gaining admin access to the server. Your site will be very attractive to attackers, kind of a one-stop-shop for user credentials so you will need very good security of the login credentials.
There are more than two options for storing the credentials:
Use an HSM for the storage or individual credential encryption keys.
Keep the credentials on another dedicated server with no Internet access, 2-factor authentication and limit admin personal. Rate limit the access to this server and add rate alarms. Access this server on a per user credential basis over a non-Internet connection. The credentials will only be available to the Internet connected server in memory as used, not at-rest in a file.
Storing users credentials in a reversible way looks like a terrible idea anyway. But if you really want to store them, I suggest you to use the environment variables solution. But you can improve it. To limit the amount of data you store and don't have 1000000 variables as you said, you can just store an AES encryption key, store all credentials in a DB encrypted with this key, and you just have to get this key (which is in memory) and decrypt the DB. But there is another problem with this solution. As I said, this is stored in RAM memory, so it's not persistent, imagine your server has to reboot for X or Y reason... You will lose the AES key and also the credentials of your users... Moreover, if the attacker performs a memory dump, he will have access to the AES key...
I think the better idea is to store the cookies (in an encrypted way) and when this one expires, you alert the user (by mail, phone, notifications, ...) and ask him to fill his credentials again. But it's not a perfect solution ! Indeed the cookies are a type of credentials and shouldn't be stored either...
In the book Programming Grails, Burt Beckwith gives some really good insights about how to develop Grails applications which follows OWASP Top 10 recommendations in chapter 9.
Punctually,I'm trying to implement the recommendation for Insecure Cryptographic Store. That reads as follows
Do not store passwords in config files, or even in files on the filesystem. Instead, create
a web page that you use to initialize the system where people trusted with passwords
enter the passwords (using SSL!) when the application starts up. Ideally, you shouldn’t
trust any one person with all of the information to start the system. For example, to use
JCE encryption, you will need to load a java.security.KeyStore , and this requires a
password, and you use this to create a javax.crypto.SecretKey , which also requires a
password. Use different passwords. If two people know the key store password and two
other people know the key password (it’s a good idea to have backup users in case
someone isn’t available), then no one person can decrypt the data or be coerced into
giving someone else access.
I want to secure the Amazon AWS[1] Access Credentials that will be used by the application in order to use the KMS[2] API call to secure encrypt and decrypt information.
I would like and example about how this can be achieved. My initial idea is to use a Service in the Singleton scope which holds the credentials and those credentials are setted by a Controller which is responsible of loading the KeyStore and the SecretKey used to decrypt a previusly encrypted and store AWS Access Credentials.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services
[2]http://aws.amazon.com/en/kms/
This is a very general question, not sure if its a duplicate as I have not really found my answer yet.
My company is very concerned about security of data, means, we are very particular about hosting our app and also our database. We are dealing with quite sensitive information such as medical data. We previously used AWS, means using a raw instance with no SSL at all. We migrated our web app to Heroku, as its purchased by cloudforce and we do not really need to take care about security, pen-testing all these stuff.
Then, we used heroku's SSL endpoints with a goDaddy SSL Cert which we think it might further enhance the security of the site.
I can say I am super noob in web security but are these measures enough?
If you are dealing with medical data, the measures you describe are not enough by themselves.
An SSL certificate will ensure your data is protected (encrypted) when it goes over the wire. A certificate will also identify the server to your users (mitigating man-in-the-middle attacks).
But when dealing with sensitive data, you'd also have to make sure your data is protected at rest (encrypted in the database or encrypting the database files themselves). You also have to take measures to prevent unauthorized access. This means that your users need to authenticate themselves and you have to give them access or prevent them from having access based on who they are or what role they are in (RBAC).
Google for any of the terms in this answer will give you lots more information.
It indeed is a general question, so only a general answer can be provided. Furthermore, it all depends on how you define "enough".
Of course using SSL give you the advantages of it, you are better of with it than without.
But make sure that you understand what SSL does and does not do. A limited list:
SSL does encrypt the communication between client en server.
SSL does conform the identity of the server (if he manage to keep his private key secure).
SSL does not prevent any acces to your endpoint
SSL does not conform in any way the identity of a user.
I've setup a Windows Azure database with the data accessible via oData. I'm trying to work out how to secure the connection between a WP7 device and the database. By secure I mean I only want users of the app to be able to access the data from within the app.
I've considered SSL but it's quite expensive for me - is there another way of securing this connection?
Thanks!
There are multiple definitions of "secure". You will need authentication, so Azure only lets the correct users access the data. This is usually handled by a user name and password supplied by the WP7 app.
The WP7 app needs to ensure it is talking to the correct server. SSL handles this using a digital certificate. There are other mechanisms but using something based on a public/private key pair is best because you can validate you are connecting to the correct server without being able to impersonate that server. However, the RSA algorithm used in most cases is computationally expensive.
The data sent between the WP7 app and Azure also needs to be confidential, including the user's password. This is normally handled by encryption. You an choose computationally less expensive algorithm or only encrypt certain data.
The data sent between the WP7 app and Azure also needs some form of tamper detection. Otherwise someone could corrupt the data sent or received. Maybe this is something you can accept for the app but it needs to be a way that an attack cannot easily reproduce. As Shanin's Maxim says, the attacker knows the system.
The problem is that SSL gives you all of these. Yes, it can be expensive but it is one of the best general purpose solutions available. You can change the cipher suites offered by Azure using using Group Policy, code or PowerShell.
If you do not want to use SSL, you need to know what you can sacrifice. In general I would not recommend doing your own encryption mechanism or protocol because us mere humans tend to screw it up.
As part of strengthening session authentication security for a site that I am building, I am trying to compile a list of the best ways to register a user's computer as a second tier of validation - that is in addition to the standard username/password login, of course. Typical ways of registering a user's computer are by setting a cookie and or IP address validation. As prevalent as mobile computing is, IP mapping is less and less a reliable identifier. Security settings and internet security & system optimization software can make it difficult to keep a cookie in place for very long.
Are there any other methods that can be used for establishing a more reliable computer registration that doesn't require the user to add exceptions to the various cookie deleting software?
If you're looking to do device authentication, you may want to consider mutually authenticated SSL. Here, you'd deploy a client identity certificate to each endpoint you'd want to authenticate. Then, you set the server up to require client authentication, so that a client would need to present a valid identity certificate in order to form the SSL tunnel.
This, of course, is not a perfect solution. In reality, this presents much of the same weaknesses as other solutions (to various degrees) Once your client identity certificates go to your clients, they are out of your control; should a client give their certificate to anyone else, you lost the device authentication that you have based on it. SSL identity certificates are generally stored in a keystore on the client which is encrypted with a password or other credential needed to unlock them. While a client certificate could still be compromised, it's somewhat stronger that just a cookie or something like that (assuming you don't have a client that is trying to give away its credential). In addition, you'd want to come up with some validation routine that a client would need to go though in order to get a credential in the first place (how do I know that this is a client device that I want to remember/register?).
Remember, these types of approaches only do device authentication, not users. There are more in-depth schemes already developed for device authentication than what I've mentioned; for example, 802.1x is a network protocol where an endpoint needs to present a client-side certificate to the network switch to get on a LAN. This is out-of-scope for a web application scenario, like what you've described, but the idea is the same (put a cryptographic credential on the client and validate it to establish the connection).
This, like all other security matters really, is a risk decision. What are you trying to accomplish with such a countermeasure? What are the threats you're trying to prevent and what are the consequences if someone does log in on an unregistered device? Only your situation can answer those questions and let you see the real risk, if you need/should mitigate it, and, if so, how strong of a solution do you need to get the risk level down to an acceptable level?
the best ways to register a user's computer as a second tier of
validation
From my point of view this approach does not offer much in the aspect of authentication.
You are not authenticating a user and have no idea who is using the PC that you would accept as being registered.
The way you describe it, this step should be a configuration rule in the firewall to accept connections from specific IPs only.
IMO the filtering of the PCs is the responsibility of a firewall and it would be much better handled by the firewall than any application level filtering.
Just think that you would have the overhead in your application to examine each request and decide whether to accept it or not.
Better leave this preprocessing overhead to the firewall. That's why it is there.