Currently my web tools front end is running in OFBiz and is accessible from the whole wide world (www) just like the ecommerce store.
I don’t like that a bit. Although it is protected by strong password.
Can I restrict that app access to certain IP addresses or from local host only?
It would be best if that application can run on different port altogether or listening on 127.0.0.1 interface only. Or both :)
Any experience with this, please?
Kind Regards,
Boris
I'm new to Ofbiz and working within (mostly) the opentaps context. From what I see I'm not sure you can achieve this but perhaps it's possible to change the mount-point of the webapp for added security such that it's not obviously accesible through the default OOTB name.
I'll reply later on in the future when I have looked into this myself. +1 for the question btw.
Related
I'm hoping to get some kind of idea if what I have in mind is even possible or if I'm looking in the wrong place.
Basically, my company provides a website which users are able to access online with credentials we sell and provide them. We have another potential customer who would like to access this website. Sadly this customer is very stuck in the past, and they don't allow their users any internet access at all.
For a number of reasons, I don't want them to host their own version of this website. However, I considered that we might configure a web proxy on their network (which is given internet access) which reverse forwards connections to our website. Is this even possible? And should it be attempted? Or are there better ways to achieve this?
Yes it's possible, you can install on their intranet a simple proxy script for example
https://github.com/Athlon1600/php-proxy-app
and modify the index.php and allow from there only a single host to your website.
I don't know what technology you can use on their Intranet network but virtually for every web language, such software is available.
Here is some discussion related to the "Access the sites blocked over the network" that is just for Gmail but it will definitely help you too:
https://superuser.com/questions/453825/how-to-bypass-web-url-filtering-service-to-access-blocked-websites-proxy
For bypassing the firewall and getting access to the blocked sites:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-get-into-blocked-websites-in-school-with-freeproxy/
Is ngrok a safe tool to use? I was reading a tutorial which recommended to use ngrok test API responses that I make to outside services that need to connect to my endpoints also.
There is no source code available for Version 2.0, considering it started as an open source project in 2014. I am suspect of any code that opens a tunnel to my localhost from the cloud. Pretty scary stuff especially without source code!
It opens up a tunnel to your dev machine, which is partially secured by obscurity (a hard to guess subdomain), and can be further secured by requiring a password. But you're still opening yourself up to ngrok itself, and the company is completely opaque (no address, no employees, no business name, no LinkedIn presence; all I can find is that it has 1-10 employees and is private; not even sure what country its based in). On top of that the code is not open-sourced. No reason to think they're not legit, but not a lot of information available to build trust.
You may be able to use ngrok and other local tunnel services with more security by encrypting the traffic. See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/177280/end-to-end-encryption-for-localtunnel-ngrok-setup/177357#177357 for more information.
I found good rating, but vacuous information here:
http://www.scamadviser.com/is-ngrok.com-a-fake-site.html
The kicker for me is
https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/05/secure-localhost-tunnels-with-ngrok/
where the Atlassian folks recommend it highly.
I think I am going to use it.
If anyone is concerning compromising their development environment, you can use Docker. There are many ngrok/docker projects but here is the one I chose: https://github.com/gtriggiano/ngrok-tunnel
for macOS, use "TARGET_HOST=docker.for.mac.localhost"
They now offer a service where you locally run only ssh, no need to run any of their code on your machine.
You run something like ssh -R 80:localhost:8501 tunnel.us.ngrok.com http. This connects to one of their hosts and forwards connections they receive back to your machine and the service you run on localhost:8501.
This seems secure to me, the only thing is that you don't know what information they collect and who is connecting to your exposed service. They print all connections, but it's their binary that does this and someone might well listen in without you noticing. You can check connections on your end, but you cannot be sure who it is that connects.
Ngrok is a convenient and highly secure utility for creating tunnels to locally hosted applications via a reverse proxy. This is a utility for publishing locally hosted applications on the web. style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Simply put, any locally hosted application provides a publicly accessible web URL to the . H. Either a Spring Boot or Nodejs based web application, or a webhook for a chat application, etc.
I want to create a website for myself that no one else will use at the moment.
Do I need to get a domain name to be able to access the website remotely or can I just use the host IP address when I want to go on it?
It depends on what you're looking to do. For example, Ruby on Rails and Sinatra languages can be locally hosted. So you can basically create the website without ever having to 'push' it to a domain. You'll definitely need a domain if you want to access it remotely - the domain name is basically a mask for an IP address anyway, so they're really somewhat the same.
You can also have basic JavaScript (JS) /HTML/CSS sites locally hosted as well. So you don't really need a domain, until you want people to actually start showing up to it remotely.
Hope this helps!
This is a very generic question that popped up in my mind. The reason has been that I came across a website dev server which leaked sensitive information about a database connection due an error. I was stunned at first and now I wonder why someone puts a development server out in the internet and make it accessible to everyone?
For me there is no reason for doing this.
But it certainly did not happen by accident that a company created a subdomain (dev.example.com) and pushed development code to it. So what could be the reason to ignore the fact of high security risk?
A quick search did not bring up any information about this. I'm interested in any further readings about this specific topic.
Thank you in advance
There is no reason for your dev servers to be accessible by the general public.
As a customer I just had an experience with a private chef site where I spent time interacting with their dev server because it managed to get crawled by Bing. Everything was the same as the live site but I got increasingly frustrated because paying a deposit failed to authorise. The customer support team had no idea I was on the wrong site either. The only difference was the URL. My e-mail address is now in their test system sending me spam every night when they do a test run.
Some options for you to consider, assuming you don't want to change the code on the page:
IP Whitelisting is the bare minimum
Have a separate login page that devs can use that redirects to the dev site with the correct auth token - bonus points for telling stray users that this is a test side and the live site is at https://.....
Use a robots.txt to make sure you don't get indexed
Hide it all behind a VNET - this really isn't an issue anymore with VPNs or services like Bastion.
Also consider the following so your devs/testers don't accidentally use the wrong site:
Have a dev css to make it obvious its a test system (this assumes you do visual testing later in your pipeline)
Use a banner to make it clear this is a dev site
Note that this would be a dev server. If you are using ringed/preview/progressive deployment then these should work just as well as the live site because they are the live site.
It's extremely common for a development environment or any "lower level" environment for that matter to be exposed to the pubic internet. Today, especially with more and more companies working in the public cloud and having remote team members, it's extremely more productive to have your development team or UAT done without having the need to set up a VPN connection or a faster more expensive direct connections to the cloud from your company's on premise network.
It's important to mention that exposing to the public internet does not mean that you shouldn't have some kind of HTTP Authentication in these environments that hides the details of your website. You can also use a firewall with an IP address whitelist. This is still very important so you don't expose your product and lose a possible competitive advantage. It's also important because lower level environments tend to be more error prone and important details about the inner workings of your application may accidentally show up.
I'd like to know the best solutions to get a public static dns or IP adress to access a computer on a routed network (for example to access from the internet a PC in my home LAN).
I heard about no-ip and dyndns.
Are they good? which one is the best? Is it really reliable ?
This is a server fault question, but to provide an answer anyway, I use dyndns.org, it works nicely ( most routers even have auto update support built in, and for those that dont there desktop updater works just fine. )
dyndns.org seems to have amazingly reliable uptime, and i cant talk for noip as i have never used it. give them a try and see which one you like more.
There are several free dynamic DNS services like afraid.org, dynu.com etc. You may want to go with one which has an open API so that you can use it from within your application.
May be you can have a look at https://www.good-dns.net/
Very simple to use, provides a URL for automatic IP update, so suitable for dynamic IPs.
There a lot options available - as far as I know dyn.org are not free for while already. And I am using https://myonlineportal.net
But you have to test by yourself and figure out which suit best for you. Sometimes it's just the available domain name.