If your website is providing an OpenId only authentication method (e.g. SO), what would be a best practice for handling a user whose openId account is lost or stolen or whatever...effectively preventing them from using your site.
If the user had associated two open ids to their account then they could use the other login etc but in the case where they haven't, they can no longer use your site.
Having a user prove his account for a manual open id change just opens your process up to social engineering (the core of the problem, i guess!)
The answer to this is the same as "What if I lost my password" for password-auth sites or "what if I can't access my email account" for sites that send password reminders over email. The most common approach seems to be the "security question," which is really just another (often less secure) password. The other is "contact tech support", which, yes, is vulnerable to social engineering.
The most robust solution I've heard to this is some sort of two-out-of-three system, where the user can say "oh, I lost my OTP token but I still have my phone and passphrase", but seriously, that's enough of a pain that only specialist providers will want to implement and maintain it.
Related
I've read about security best practices saying that inactive user accounts should be disabled and even deleted to avoid security issues like unauthorized use. I can see that being true for regular username and password authentication sites, however my application was built to work only with Facebook groups and as such the only way to login or create a new account is to use the Facebook login.
The argument can be said that someone malicious could take control of one of my users' Facebook accounts and then use it access my application. Although that is true if they have control of a Facebook account my application would never know it's a malicious person so I don't see that as a valid criteria to use in determining if the account should be disabled.
Furthermore if a user is inactive and wants to become active again since it's Facebook login there really is no reason for them to go through some kind of reactivation process like confirming their email or changing their password.
I must be missing something here because it's certainly mentioned as a best practice to disable accounts but since my only login method is Facebook (OAuth) I can't come up with a valid reason to disable/delete inactive accounts.
Regarding other methods of unauthorized access I have security measures in place so I'd like to keep the answers relevant to the login method.
Please enlighten me if I've missed something.
If you have decided that your application needs to use Facebook authentication, then your system's identities will only be as traceable as Facebook's identity management permits. (And don't expect Facebook to help you by disabling / blocking users at their end ...)
You need to design it accordingly:
Don't make any assumptions that users will behave properly.
Don't rely on login controls to keep out malicious users.
Put in your own (sufficient) defenses against malicious behavior into your own system.
You are correct that disabling an account in your system won't achieve much if you also allow the user to (easily) reenable it. Given that it is easy to create (effectively) untraceable Facebook accounts, the chances are that a typical malicious actor will not just rely on old accounts. They may use a brand new account and connect from an IP address that you have never seen.
There are some things that you could do though. For example, implement mechanisms to do the following:
Make sure that users simply cannot upload dangerous content (e.g. files with trojans, web content with dangerous links or scripts.
Allow administrative locking an existing account or OAuth identity,
Allow blocking of creation of accounts or access in from specified IP addresses or ranges,
Keep an audit trail so that you can watch the history of user behavior.
For a web application, where we need to store and manage users (SSO or openauth or what not is off the table), where we manage important business data, how risky is it to use an email address + password as the sign in?
For the last 15 years or so, encryption and protection techniques have improved, but we continue to use a proprietary user id, akin to using your bank card number for online banking; an id that will not be reused elsewhere. Customers and product owners are pushing to use email address because it is easier to remember.
I am concerned that there are a lot of websites that collect email + password pairs in order to use them to try to hack other sites; presumably asking you to sign up for an account for some humble service or other. What is this activity called?
I'm looking for some article or argument why using email+password for a site with sensitive business/financial information would be dangerous; or why it is not so bad. Again, I realize that provisioning our own accounts is not the ideal thing and am not looking for solutions at outsourcing authentication.
The "risk" of using a single authentication method for signing onto your application is difficult to determine without a risk assessment, and clearly defined system boundaries.
NIST 800-61 and NIST 800-63 gives guidelines on authentication methods for different levels of sensitive systems (in your case, a application). It will give you ideas on how to present your argument, and maybe an alternative solution, i.e., multi-factor authentication if the customer wants to authenticate using an e-mail address. This would mitigate the risk associated with malicious websites which collected e-mail addresses and passwords.
Keep in mind, password policy can also be managed to mitigate the risk behind a single authentication method using an e-mail and a compromised password associated with that e-mail.
All in all, it's not the ID that is important, but the authentication method and policies in place to mitigate the risks.
Using email + password as credentials is the widely accepted method of allowing users to log into sites on the web.
The advantage of using email is that everyone remembers their email address, whereas people will have difficulty in remembering which username or user ID they first signed up with if this is not their email address.
Username should not be considered private. This is the job of the password. Encourage your users to use a password manager such as LastPass where it can generate a 20 character completely random password (128 bits - uncrackable) which is different per site. LastPass will remember the username if this is not their email, so that solves this problem, however not using email can bring other problems such as username enumeration. If any signup function asks for a user to specify their username and you say that it is already in use, an attacker can use this to narrow the list of users in order to prepare for a password guessing attack. If you ask for email as step one of password reminder or signup forms, the system can send an email with a password reset link if already registered, or send an email with a link to the next step in the registration process if not.
In the end it all comes down to the value of the data your application is protecting. Adding two factor authentication is always a good step and can protect against password guessing and password reuse.
SSO or openauth or what not is off the table
Why is the case? Can't you use OAuth with claims based authorisation? You can still secure your application and make sure only the correct business users have access - it would just be that another entity is managing access for you.
I am concerned that there are a lot of websites that collect email + password pairs in order to use them to try to hack other sites; presumably asking you to sign up for an account for some humble service or other. What is this activity called?
Credential harvesting?
This might be more of an industry question rather than a specifically technical one, but the answer must consider the technical feasibility. I've tried to make the question as pointed as possible. I am working on a new web application that must protect social security numbers, bank account transactions, etc. Security is essential, as is the appearance of security. The company I work for, however, is small. Does it make sense to rely on third-party issuers (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo), which are certainly popular but as social media do not convey the seriousness of, say, the banking industry? Or can I realistically expect to implement OAuth/Owin/Katana as securely as these third parties? Is there another option that is both reliable and popular, without being driven by social media? Or does it make the most sense to implement security myself? I do not have a heavy security background, but am willing to learn it if forms authentication makes the most sense for my situation.
Your question is not specific enough to give you concrete advise. But creating your own security is never a good idea.
Whether you should use social media identity providers depends on how much you need to be certain of the user's identity. If the user has to enter all that information him/herself, then you only need to make sure that only that account has access. A social media account will work fine in this case. You can't be sure that the user is who he says he is, but that does not matter as he can only see information he entered himself.
If however this SSO and bank transaction info is coming from another source, you'll need a identity provider that gives you more guarantees about the user's identity (for example the bank's logon server)
I wish there was a central, fully customizable, open source, universal login system that allowed you to login and manage all of your online accounts (maybe there is?)...
I just found RPXNow today after starting to build a Sinatra app to login to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, OpenID, and EventBrite, and it looks like it might save some time.
But I keep wondering, not being an authentication guru, why couldn't I just have a sleek login page saying "Enter username and password, and check your login service", and then in the background either scrape the login page from say EventBrite and programmatically submit the form with Mechanize, or use an API if there was one? It would be so much cleaner and such a better user experience if they didn't have to go through popups and redirects and they could use any previously existing accounts.
My question is:
What are the reasons why I shouldn't do something like that?
I don't know much about the serious details of cookies/sessions/security, so if you could be descriptive or point me to some helpful links that would be awesome. Thanks!
Edit:
I'm familiar with OpenID and the APIs. I was really wondering about the security/legal/confidentiality side of things. I understand the confidentiality part totally, don't know if there's anything legally written down about this, but assuming it's under ssl, and I don't store any of the data (will store the cookies and tokens), what are the security implications?
If I come to your website and give you my gmail password, what guarantee do I have that you won't read all my emails and even send a few of your own? And what if you become a little smarter and say 'people reuse passwords, I might just as well try if this password works for his bank account'.
As a user, I don't trust your site with my password. Period.
The whole point of Open Id and OAuth (that's what RPX uses) is to get around the above issue. I can give your website restricted, revocable and configurable access to my facebook account, all without giving your website my facebook password.
The UI is confusing, I agree. But with time people will understand what its all about, and it will be a lot better.
As already said above:
The site (or the site owner) accessing your {google|yahoo|etc} account cannot be trusted not to change your password and kick you out of your account.
But I feel there are other good reasons:
Many people use the same password on more than one site ore account (some could have the same password on gmail and paypal) and the site owner could abuse that
The site owner doesn't want to be held liable for other site owners abusing your account
The site owner could not be able to store your username and password in secure fashion. The site needs to be able to access them automatically. So on the server hosting there is stored everything needed to access those credentials.
And the hosting usually happens in a shared or virtual server with the hosting company administrators (and sometimes - if the hosting company isn't too conscious - fellow users) able to access them.
Security and Confidentiality. Period.
Even some websites like Facebook discourage using this approach in their TOS i believe. If so, it will be illegal to do so.
I am considering adding OpenID to our customer facing admin and control panel areas...
1 - Associating OpenID's With Existing Accounts
For customers that already have accounts with us, I'm thinking they would need to login using their existing account number that we issue and then I'd have a mechanism to associate their OpenID with that account in their account management area (call it 'OpenID Manager' for the sake of argument).
In the 'OpenID Manager', presuming the user already has an OpenID, would I authenticate the user against their OpenID then associate with our generated account number for future OpenID logins (assuming that they authenticated ok)?
2 - Sensitive Data
Although we don't store full credit card data in our DB there is other data that is sensitive, invoices, domain reg details etc. After reading this article http://idcorner.org/2007/08/22/the-problems-with-openid/ I'm a little cautious about the idea of using OpenID in this way, what's the general consensus with you folks?
It seems to me that a lot of the arguments against OpenID are either made out of ignorance or by people with an axe to grind.
For example, the document you link to complains that identifying yourself with a URI is "dehumanising and more than a little frightening". Is that a legitimate complaint, or something written by somebody desperate to find things to complain about?
The two major things that get brought up are phishing and compromised accounts and these arguments have been rehashed so many times, it's hard to take somebody seriously if they bring them up yet again with no new points to make.
Phishing protection depends on the provider. Some providers offer much better security than typical websites ever would. Some providers just offer the typical username and password. Either way, if an account is compromised, that's something between the user and their provider, it's not your concern. You don't worry that the end-user has a keylogger installed on their computer, do you? That's because their local security isn't your responsibility, even though it might be used to gain access to their account. Likewise with OpenID - its security is not your responsibility.
If you compromise an OpenID, it gives you access to more than a single website. Sure, but the same is true for email. Just say you've forgotten your password, and you get sent a new one. You now have access to every account they've registered with that email address.
OpenID is no worse than the status quo, and it's significantly better in many circumstances, especially for informed users. If you are still wary of it, then just make it optional, so only the informed users use it.
I'd allow the registration of multiple OpenIDs with a particular account. That's a nice feature to have because it allows users to migrate between OpenIDs should the need ever arise.
That said, the idcorner link raises a good point. I think he massively overblows the security issue and makes many idiotic assumptions about how OpenID providers work, but that OpenID really isn't intended to replace all forms of user authentication. It's designed to make it easy for "drive-by" users to interact with a site with some form of basic authentication.
Ever been to somebody's blog, want to post a comment, but first you have to step through a 3-page registration? OpenID solves that problem.
Want to post a quick bug report on a public tracker but need an account first? OpenID to the rescue.
Want to store sensitive proprietary data in a web-accessible way and provide access only to people who are trusted? OpenID is not the solution.