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I have a hapijs application and checking some logs I have found some entries for automated site scanners and hits to entries to /admin.php and similar.
I found this great article How to Block Automated Scanners from Scanning your Site and I thought it was great.
I am looking for guidance on what the best strategy would be to create honey pots for a hapijs / nodejs app to identify suspicious requests, log them, and possibly ban the IPs temporarily.
Do you have any general or specific (to node and hapi) recommendations on how to implement this?
My thoughts include:
Create the honeypot route with a non-obvious name
Add a robots.txt to disallow search engines on that route
Create the content of the route (see the article and discussions for some of the recommendations)
Write to a special log or tag the log entries for easy tracking and later analysis
Possibly create some logic that if traffic from this IP address receives more traffic than certain threshold (5 times of honeypot route access will ban the IP for X hours or permanently)
A few questions I have:
How can you ban an IP address using hapi.js?
Are there any other recommendations to identify automated scanners?
Do you have specific suggestions for implementing a honeypot?
Thanks!
Let me start with saying that this Idea sounds really cool but I'm not if it is much practical.
First the chances of blocking legit bots/users is small but still exisits.
Even if you ignore true mistakes the option for abuse and denial of service is quite big. Once I know your blocking users who enter this route I can try cause legit users touch it (with an iframe / img / redirect) and cause them to be banned from the site.
Than it's effectiveness is small. sure your going to stop all automated bots that scan your sites (I'm sure the first thing they do is check the Disallow info and this is the first thing you do in a pentest). But only unsophisticated attacks are going to be blocked cause anyone actively targeting you will blacklist the endpoint and get a different IP.
So I'm not saying you shouldn't do it but I am saying you should think to see if the pros outwaite the cons here.
How to actually get it done is actually quite simple. And it seem like your looking for a very unique case of rate limiting I wouldn't do it directly in your hapi app since you want the ban to be shared between instances and you probably want them to be persistent across restarts (You can do it from your app but it's too much logic for something that is already solved).
The article you mentioned actually suggests using fail2ban which is a great solution for rate limiting. you'll need to make sure your app logs to afile it can read and write a filter and jail conf specifically for your app but it should work with hapi with no issues.
Specifically for hapi I maintain an npm module for rate limiting called ralphi it has a hapi plugin but unless you need a proper rate limiting (which you should have for logins, sessions and other tokens) fail2ban might be a better option in this case.
In general Honey pots are not hard to implement but as with any secuiry related solution you should consider who is your potential attacker and what are you trying to protect.
Also in general Honey pots are mostly used to notify about an existing breach or an imminent breach. Though they can be used to also trigger a lockdown your main take from them is to get visibility once a breach happend but before the attacker had to much time to abuse the system (You don't want to discover the breach two months later when your site has been defaced and all valuable data was already taken)
A few ideas for honey pots can be -
Have an 'admin' user with relatively average password (random 8 chars) but no privileges at all when this user successfully loges in notify the real admin.
Notice that your not locking the attacker on first attempt to login even if you know he is doing something wrong (he will get a different ip and use another account). But if he actually managed to loggin, maybe there's an error in your login logic ? maybe password reset is broken ? maybe rate limiting isn't working ? So much more info to follow through.
now that you know you have a semi competent attacker maybe try and see what is he trying to do, maybe you'll know who he is or what his end goal is (Highly valuable since he probably going to try again).
Find sensitive places you don't want users to play with and plant some canary tokens in. This can be just a file that sites with all your other uploads on the system, It can be an AWS creds on your dev machine, it can be a link that goes from your admin panel that says "technical documentation" the idea is that regular users should not care or have any access to this files but attackers will find them too tempting to ignore. the moment they touch one you know this area has been compromised and you need to start blocking and investigating
Just remember before implementing any security in try to think who you expect is going to attack you honey pots are probably one of the last security mesaures you should consider and there are a lot more common and basic security issues that need to be addressed first (There are endless amount of lists about node.js security best practices and OWASP Top 10 defacto standard for general web apps security)
For the sake of simplicity I want to use admin links like this for a site:
http://sitename.com/somegibberish.php?othergibberish=...
So the actual URL and the parameter would be some completely random string which only I would know.
I know security through obscurity is generally a bad idea, but is it a realistic threat someone can find out the URL? Don't take the employees of the hosting company and eavesdroppers on the line into account, because it is a toy site, not something important and the hosting company doesn't give me secure FTP anyway, so I'm only concerned about normal visitors.
Is there a way of someone finding this URL? It wouldn't be anywhere on the web, so Google won't now it about either. I hope, at least. :)
Any other hole in my scheme which I don't see?
Well, if you could guarantee only you would ever know it, it would work. Unfortunately, even ignoring malicious men in the middle, there are many ways it can leak out...
It will appear in the access logs of your provider, which might end up on Google (and are certainly read by the hosting admins)
It's in your browsing history. Plugins, extensions etc have access to this, and often use upload it elsewhere (i.e. StumbleUpon).
Any proxy servers along the line see it clearly
It could turn up as a Referer to another site
some completely random string
which only I would know.
Sounds like a password to me. :-)
If you're going to have to remember a secret string I would suggest doing usernames and passwords "properly" as HTTP servers will have been written to not leak password information; the same is not true of URLs.
This may only be a toy site but why not practice setting up security properly as it won't matter if you get it wrong. So hopefully, if you do have a site which you need to secure in future you'll have already made all your mistakes.
I know security through obscurity is
generally a very bad idea,
Fixed it for you.
The danger here is that you might get in the habit of "oh, it worked for Toy such-and-such site, so I won't bother implementing real security on this other site."
You would do a disservice to yourself (and any clients/users of your system) if you ignore Kerckhoff's Principle.
That being said, rolling your own security system is a bad idea. Smarter people have already created security libraries in the other major languages, and even smarter people have reviewed and tweaked those libraries. Use them.
It could appear on the web via a "Referer leak". Say your page links to my page at http://entrian.com/, and I publish my web server referer logs on the web. There'll be an entry saying that http://entrian.com/ was accessed from http://sitename.com/somegibberish.php?othergibberish=...
As long as the "login-URL" never posted anywhere, there shouldn't be any way for search engines to find it. And if it's just a small, personal toy-site with no personal or really important content, I see this as a fast and decent-working solution regarding security compared to implementing some form of proper login/authorization system.
If the site is getting a big number of users and lots of content, or simply becomes more than a "toy site", I'd advice you to do it the proper way
I don't know what your toy admin page would display, but keep in mind that when loading external images or linking to somewhere else, your referrer is going to publicize your URL.
If you change http into https, then at least the url will not be visible to anyone sniffing on the network.
(the caveat here is that you also need to consider that very obscure login system can leave interesting traces to be found in the network traces (MITM), somewhere on the site/target for enabling priv.elevation, or on the system you use to log in if that one is no longer secure and some prefer admin login looking no different from a standard user login to avoid that)
You could require that some action be taken # of times and with some number of seconds of delays between the times. After this action,delay,action,delay,action pattern was noticed, the admin interface would become available for login. And the urls used in the interface could be randomized each time with a single use url generated after that pattern. Further, you could only expose this interface through some tunnel and only for a minute on a port encoded by the delays.
If you could do all that in a manner that didn't stand out in the logs, that'd be "clever" but you could also open up new holes by writing all that code and it goes against "keep it simple stupid".
The talk of internet town today is the SNAFU that led to dozens of Facebook users being led by Google search to an article on ReadWriteWeb about the Facebook-AOL deal. What ensued in the comments tread is quickly becoming the stuff of internet legend.
However, behind the hilarity is a scary fact that this might be how users browse to all sites, including their banking and other more important sites. A quick search for "my bank website login" and quickly click the first result. Once they are there, the user is willing to submit their credentials even though the site looks nothing like the site they tried to reach. (This is evidenced by the fact that user's comments are connected to their facebook accounts via facebook-connect)
Preventing this scenario is pretty much out of our control and educating our users on the basics of internet browsing may be just as impossible. So how then can we ensure that users know they are on the correct web site before trying to log in? Is something like Bank of America's SiteKey sufficient, or is that another cop-out that shifts responsibility back on the user?
The Internet and web browsers used to have a couple of cool features that might actually have some applicability there.
One was something called "domain names." Instead entering the website name over on the right site of your toolbar, there was another, larger text field on the left where you could enter it. Rather than searching a proprietary Google database running on vast farms of Magic 8-Balls, this arcane "address" field consulted an authoritative registry of "domain names", and would lead you to the right site every time. Sadly, it sometimes required you to enter up to 8 extra characters! This burden was too much for most users to shoulder, and this cumbersome feature has been abandoned.
Another thing you used to see in browsers was something called a "bookmark." Etymologists are still trying to determine where the term "bookmark" originated. They suspect it has something to do with paper with funny squiggles on it. Anyway, these bookmarks allowed users to create a button that would take them directly to the web site of interest. Of course, creating a bookmark was a tedious, intimidating process, sometimes requiring as many as two menu clicks—or worse yet, use of the Ctrl-key!
Ah, the wonders of the ancients.
The site could "personalize" itself by showing some personal information,
easy recognizable by the user, on every page.
There are plenty of ways to implement it. The obvious one:
under first visit, the site requires user to upload some avatar,
and adds user's id to the cookies. After that, every time the user browses
the site, the avatar is shown.
When I set up my online bank account, it asked me to choose from a selection of images. The image I chose is now shown to me every time I login. This assures me that I am on the right website.
EDIT: i just read the link about the BoA SiteKey, this is apparently the same thing (it sounded from the name like a challenge-response dongle)
I suppose the best answer would be a hardware device which required a code from the bank and the user and authenticated both. But any of these things assume that people are actually thinking about the problem, which of course they don't. This was going on before internet banking was common - I had a friend who had her wallet stolen back in the 90s, and theif phoned her pretending to be her bank and persuaded her to reveal her PIN...
When the user first visits the site and logs in, he can share some personal information (even something very trivial) that imposter sites couldn't possible know - high school mascot, first street lived on, etc.
If there's ever any question of site authenticity, the site could share this information back to the user.
Like on TV shows/movies with the evil twin. The good twin always wins trust by sharing a secret that only the person who's trying to figure out who the good twin is would know.
You cannot prevent phishing per-se but you can take several steps each of which do a little bit to mitigate the problem.
1) If you have something like site-key or a sign-in seal, please ensure that these cannot be iframed on a malicious website. Just javascript framebusting may not be enough as IE has security="restricted".
2) Be very consistent about how you ask for user credentials - serve the login form over SSL (not just post-back over SSL). Do not ask for login on several places or sites. Encourage third parties who want to work with user data stored on your site to use OAuth (instead of taking your user's password).
3) You should never ask for information via email (with or without link).
4) Have a security page where you talk about these issues.
5) Send notification on changes to registered phone, email, etc.
Apart from above, monitor user account activity - such as changes to contact information, security Q&A, access, etc (noting time, ip, and there are several subtle techniques).
I am the webmaster for a small, growing industrial association. Soon, I will have to implement a restricted, members-only section for the website.
The problem is that our organization membership both includes big companies as well as amateur “clubs” (it's a relatively new industry…).
It is clear that those clubs will share the login ID they will use to log onto our website. The problem is to detect whether one of their members will share the login credentials with people who would not normally supposed to be accessing the website (there is no objection for such a club to have all it’s members get on the website).
I have thought about logging along with each sign-on the IP address as well as the OS and the browser used; if the OS/Browser stays constant and there are no more than, say, 10 different IP addresses, the account is clearly used by very few different computers.
But if there are 50 OS/Browser combination and 150 different IPs, the credentials have obviously been disseminated far, and there would be then cause for action, such as modifying the password.
Of course, it is extremely annoying when your password is being unilaterally changed. So, for this problem, I thought about allowing the “clubs” to manage their own list of sub-accounts, and therefore if abuse is suspected, the user responsible would be easily pinned-down, and this “sub-member” alone would face the annoyance of a password change.
Question:
What potential problems would anyone see with such an approach?
Any particular reason why you can't force each club member to register (just straight-up, not necessarily as a sub or a similar complex structure)? Perhaps give each club some sort of code to use just when the users register so you can automatically create their accounts and affiliate them with a club, but you then have direct accounting of each member without an onerous process that the club has to manage themselves. Then it's much easier to determine if a given account is being spread around (disparate IP accesses in given periods of time).
Clearly then you can also set a limit on the number of affiliated accounts per club, should you want to do so. This is basically what you've suggested, I suppose, but I would try to keep any onerous management tasks out of the hands of your users if at all possible. If you can manage club-affiliated signups, you should, rather than forcing someone at the club to manage them for you.
Also, while some sort of heuristic based on IP and credentials is probably fine, I would stay away from incorporating user-agent, or at least caring too much about it. Seeing a few different UAs from the same IP - depending on your expected userbase, I suppose - isn't really that unusual. I use several browsers in the course of my day due to website bugs, etc. and unless someone is using a machine as a proxy, it's not evidence of anything nefarious.
I'm planning to add some vote up/vote down buttons to a website I run. This seems easy enough but I want to stop people voting multiple times. One solution would be to make them register before allowing them to vote but I'd prefer not to have to force them to register.
Is there are a reasonably straightforward way of doing this? Checking the IP address doesn't seem like a good solution, since it's possible that multiple users may come from the same IP address.
Cookies might be the answer, but a savvy user could delete the cookie. Any better ideas?
Sorry I don't have a useful answer, I just want to share my experience.
About 8 years ago I worked for a site that ran online polls. We once got hacked by some bots voting on some of our questions several hundred votes a minute.
I had to implement some emergency checks: IP address, cookies, and I really don't remember what else.
At the end of the day we decided to take the polls down. Those damn robots just didn't care. IP adresses were spoofed, cookies were being deleted, etc.
If you really really need the polls to be unhackeable I don't see any other way that requiring registration and using captchas to avoid bots signing up for new accounts.
And the sad thing is that this was just an entertainment site with polls on what's your favorite color and things like that.
The only thing we didn't tried was using captchas because they didn't exist at the time. That might have reduced non-human cheating a good deal.
Don't take this as any kind of expert advice on the matter, because that was the only time I had anything to do with online polls, but I remembered my story and wanted to share.
I think it really comes down to the nature of your website, and how accurate your results needed to be.
Using a cookie seems like the best option, but it depends on the target audience of your website. Would they be tech-savvy enough to try and beat the system to allow them to vote multiple times? If not, the risk should be fairly low and this would seem like the best approach.
Checking against an IP address, as you said, may be too restrictive. But if it's critical for all votes to be from unique individuals, this might be the better approach even if it means some legitimate voters won't get to vote.
I thought of another option, but I'm not sure if it's possible or feasible. If you could combine the IP address approach with a hardware based check (e.g. MAC address of NIC) this would eliminate the IP address approach being too restrictive due to NAT within a LAN. But it wouldn't help the situation where you have a computer in an Internet cafe used by different individuals.
You should also use captcha (for non registered accounts) to reduce the likelihood of voting bots. If someone wants to maliciously cast multiple votes, making it more difficult for them to automate the voting process through bots will help to hopefully reduce the occurrence of such behaviour.
So, you want to have each unique person have only one vote on each item. When a person tries to vote who has already voted before, you want to detect this. This means that you have to identify the person. There are no tricks to get around that.
Now, since persons can log in from any computer, identifying the computer doesn't help. This rules out IP checks and cookies, as well as anything else based on the user's hardware.
How to identify a person? You can't. You can only force them to identify themselves, by providing unique credentials, like a social security number (I think this is often used in Korea), a passport number, or similar. This, of course, doesn't help if you don't check it, since anyone can make up a 10 digit number with little chance of collision.
Even having the user register doesn't really help per se -- they can just register another account.
I wonder if you could make it a multi-step process, to make it more difficult for BOTs.
Registering, or some similar task, gets you Cookie-A, and then when you vote you get Cookie-B, but if you have Cookie-B and don't have a suitable matching Cookie-A your vote doesn't count. If you try to re-register on the same machine that can be detected by you already having Cookie-A. Going through the steps too fast is treated as a BOT.
We had a psychometric test, with many questions, and users had to make thoughtful answers. An answer in sub-N seconds was someone just pressing buttons to get through it. We never told them that their answer was too quick, we just marked the data as "suspect".
So anyone trying to go straight to the Vote Button won't work. They would have to do Step-A, then Step-b then Step-C in order.
To re-vote I would have to clear cookies, re-register, read the blurb-page (whatever) and finally re-vote, all in the right order, and not too fast.
Requiring JavaScript to be enabled may help, as may a Captcha system. Captcha could have some sort of delay - "Please watch as the two words appear" so that there are two words, shown one after another, but "real words" so that they can be easily memorised, and then typed in. Any response that is "too fast" is not valid.
At some point people will just become annoyed and not bother though.
Obviously you need to identify the user so he can only vote once. But identify the user does'nt mean you have to pop up a login screen. As said above you can ask for the email
address, ans use it as an identfier.
No one mention the way stackoverflow works, if the user has something to win (here reptutation) when becoming a register user and if the login process is as simple as giving an email address, then that's a win-win situation in wich the user is happy to login and vote, and you're happy to have him registered and voting things (and only once per question).
Jeff Atwood wrote an article about the "login barrier", wich may give you clues.
I once created a voting system for a contest. I was restricted from limiting votes by IP due to the fact that multiple people would be legitimately voting from the same IPs. As such, I went with the email confirmation method, requiring each voter to input an email address which a confirmation link was sent to, which, once clicked, would activate their vote and prevent additional votes using that address.
It did not work well. People created hundreds of false email addresses on various free sites.
What did work in the runoff vote, somewhat surprisingly, was adding the email address/vote pairs to a database but not immediately sending the confirmation emails out. Instead, I had a cron job send the batch of them every 15 minutes or so. This adds an additional complication for people registering many addresses, as they have to either leave them all open or remember the login info for each of them at some point in the future.
Of course, still easily bypassed for someone motivated enough, but it seemed to work well in this case.
I've never used a system like this, but try to identify a user by their browser's fingerprint. This jQuery plugin combines screen size, color depth, user timezone, and installed plugins to create a unique ID of a user. Definitely not foolproof, but it's a different approach.
There's no accurate way to avoid multiple votes from the same user, even if they don't delete cookies, they can use another browser, or another computer.
I think you should register user before he up / down vote. You can get a little piece of information from the user to get registered, so he does not bored or break his registeration. Afterwards he can update his account if he wants. IMHO this is the best solution.
As has been said there is no 'perfect' solution.
As an attempt at an imperfect solution, how about storing a hash of the IP address and the User agent.
This would mean that different users from a given IP, which have different browser user agents, can still vote.
Use a cookie-based approach, it is accurate enough for most entertainment-grade polls on the web. Stay away from IP restrictions. This would mean that only one person from larger companies gets to vote and that only one person in a family gets to vote.
Also a possibility:
let the user vote and fill out his emailaddress.
The user receives a confirmationemail with a link he needs to click in order to confirm his vote.
But this way, the user also has quite some overhead.
Or do this in combination with registered userss (who will not be forced to confirm)
I know that this is an old thread. In any case I suggest to use evercookie (http://samy.pl/evercookie/) to track a user that have already voted!
It's matter of how many identities a single person can control. The more harder you make for a single person to control multiple identities the more secure your poll will be.
For entertainment grade polls where the results doesn't matter, single cookie approach is enough. Very easy to circumvent if the user opens icognito windows.
Better protection can be obtained if you put a registration barrier, you can use OAuth based logins for seamless authentication, it would take some effort to switch accounts for more votes. But this doesn't stop the desperate ones to vote multiple times.
Even better if you send confirmation code in SMS. Though people may own multiple phone numbers, it's not common to have a considerable number of phone numbers to execute a fraud. But this approach costs money for you and can be abused by DoSing the server to exhaust all the SMSes.
If you want goverment-grade polls, where the votes can decide an election.
Then you should have the voters show up in the registration office to apply for the poll and let them choose one from the prepared PIN envelopes, which contains a long hash they can enter when casting the vote.
So unless the organizers commit a fraud then voters can't. This also ensures anonymity.
An old question but for to touch on new ways - these days there are many Poll services out there who work tirelessly to implement numerous measures to avoid dupe votes, and constantly tweak their systems to counter new ways people introduce to circumvent etc. Doing this yourself is a job in itself.
They even offer branding. And large corporations use them, so it's not like your company will look bad for outsourcing a poll.
If you need to do it yourself.
As has been said, registration is the only sure fire way. If it's really important to avoid dupe votes (i.e. it's not just fave colour or something trivial/fun) then you can also limit voting to a link you send to their email they registered with.
While still not fool proof (nothing is) at least you force them to have a genuine email address which they have access to.
This isn't too much trouble for users voting, but makes it fiddly to make many dupe votes - registering, waiting for email, using the link, etc.
You already named all usable solutions. ;) It's your task to decide now.
I'd recommend combining an IP and cookie check.