I have a .db file that I think is a Sybase database file that I have been tasked with extracting data from. Looking at the file in notepad shows that the data in not encrypted (I can read text strings from it) but I don't have the username/password to convince the Sybase tools to read it.
Are there any tools/procedure that just skip the credentials check?
(BTW the client owns the data so it's all legit)
I'd be surprised if it were that easy to get around Sybase security ... but one never knows. Have you tried the default username (dba) and password (sql)? You'd be surprised how many people are too lethargic to change it!
Assuming this is a Sybase SQL Anywhere or Sybase IQ database, there are no tools that Sybase supplies that can access the data without supplying a valid user name / password. If there are any third party tools that can do this (I don't know of any), we certainly don't sanction them.
Full disclosure: I work for Sybase in SQL Anywhere engineering.
under ASE (Adaptive Server Entreprise), default userID: "sa", pass:""
Related
how can I make a login form that will remember the user so that he does not have to log in next time.
Some more information would be nice but if you want to use a database for this then you would have to create a entry for the user information last entered.
And then on reopening the programm you would check if there are any entrys and if yes load it.
But I think that writing the login information to a file on you pc would be a lot easier. So you run the steps from above just writing to a file instead of a database.
I am not sure how you would make this secure because you can't really encrypt the password because you would need a password or key of some type and that password or key would be easy to find in the source code especially in python. It would be harder to find in other compiler based programming languages but also somewhere. And if you would use a database you would have a password for that but that would also lay on the hardrive if not encrypted otherwise but there we are where we started.
So as mentioned above a database would be quite useless for a task like this because it doesn't improve anything and is a hassle for beginners to setup.
Hi security aware people,
I have recently scanned my application with a tool for static code analysis and one of the high severity findings is a hardcoded username and password for creating a connection:
dm.getConnection(databaseUrl,"server","revres");
Why does the scanner think this is a risk for the application? I can see some downsides such as not being able to change the password easily if it's compromised. Theoretically someone could reverse-engineer the binaries to learn the credentials. But I don't see the advantage of storing the credentials in a config file, where they are easy to locate and read, unless they are encrypted. And if I encrypt them, I will be solving the same problem with the encryption key...
Are there any more risks that I cannot see? Or should I use a completely different approach?
Thank you very much.
A fixed password embedded in the code will be the same for every installation, and accessible by anyone with access to the source code or binary (including the installation media).
A password read from a file can be different for each installation, and known only to those who can read the password file.
Typically, your installer will generate a unique password per site, and write that securely to the file to be read by your application. (By "securely", I mean using O_CREAT|O_EXCL to prevent symlink attacks, and with a correct selection of file location and permissions before anyone else can open it).
This is an interesting one, I can give you examples for a .Net application (as you haven't specified running environment / technologies used). Although my guess is Java? I hope this is still relevant and helps you.
My main advice would be to read this article and go from there: Protecting Connection information - MSDN
Here is a page that describes working with encrypted configuration files here
I've seen this solved both using encrypted configuration files and windows authentication. I think that running your application as a user that will be granted access to the relevant stored procedures etc (as little as possible, e.g. Principle of Least Privilege) and furthermore folder access etc is a good route.
I would recommend using both techniques because then you can give relevant local folder access to the pool for IIS and split out your user access in SQL etc. This also makes for better auditing!
This depends on your application needs though. The main reason to make this configurable via a config file or environmental user account I would say is so that when you come to publish your application to production, your developers do not need access to the production user account information and instead can just work with Local / System test / UAT credentials instead.
And of course they are not stored in plain text in your source control checkin then either, which if you host in a private distributed network like GIT could mean that this could be compromised and a hacker would gain access to the credentials.
I think it depends on how accessible / secure your source code or compiled code is. Developers usually have copies of the code on their dev boxes, which are usually not nearly as secure as production servers, and so are much more easily hacked. Generally, a test user / pw is configured on the dev box, and in production, the "real" pw is stored in much more secure config files. Yes, if someone hacked into the server they could easily get the credentials, but that is much more difficult than getting into a dev box in most cases. But like I said it depends. If there is only one dev, and they have a super secure machine they work with, and the repo for their code is also super secure, then there is no effective difference.
What I do is to ask the credentials to end user initially and then encrypt and store them in a file. This way, I don't know their connection details and passwords as a dev. The key is a hashed binary and I store it by poking ekstra bytes in between. One who wants to crack it should find out the algorithm used, key and vector lengths, their location and the start-end positions of the byte sequence keeping the values. A genius, who would also reverse engineer my code to get all this information would break into it (but it might be easier to directly crack the end user's credentials).
This might be a question for Superuser but I would prefer a programmatic way to handle this if a tool doesn't already exist.
Basically I'm trying to find a method of generating a consistent, hardware/software installation specific password/key that can be used for file based encryption. By file based encryption, I mean decrypt a file. I want that file to only decrypt with a password that isn't stored anywhere, and can be consistently re-created from looking at the machine hardware/software.
Problem with digging into this is the starting point is "Linux file encryption" which is well covered by whole disk encryption. e.g. TruCrypt, etc... Disk encryption is overkill.
Any pointers, programmatic or otherwise are welcome. Thank you!
a password that isn't stored anywhere, and can be consistently re-created from looking at the machine hardware/software.
To say that your hardware and/or software will never change is usually an invalid assumption. How do you know that your next system patch won't change whatever "key" you are using to generate your password?
You might be better off with a system like Stanford PwdHash (there are also command-line tools available) that will generate a password based on a different but known password and a salt (typically, the domain name, but you can put whatever you want in that field).
I have created a process where a (registered) user can upload (after client-side and server-side validation) a (zipped with a very uncommon extension) access database to my server through an asp.net webform, that will sit in a nice secure location until a scheduled SSIS package comes along at night, to flow relevant data from the access db to the sql server.
After that, my access db is deleted. There will be no other execution of that db. Access is not installed on the server.
I've done research, of course, but am I introducing a vulnerability (script inside the access db for instance?) that SSIS might trigger?
Thank you in advance.
SSIS likely uses ODBC or OLEDB to get to the data in the Access/Jet/ACE database, so there is nothing there to execute any code -- ODBC and OLEDB know nothing about anything but data and all the dangerous functions that could be executed in SQL statements are blocked.
So, without Access installed, no, there's no real danger here. If you're concerned that there is, you could process the file with DAO before you open it and delete everything in the QueryDefs collection and in the Modules document collection. Or, you could use a buffer database where you import nothing but the data tables, and then pass that to SSIS.
But I don't really think SSIS is looking at anything but the data tables to begin with.
BTW, there has never once been any virus or exploit that has been propagated via Access, so the concerns over Access vulnerabilities are vastly overblown (with massive inconveniance to end users as a result, with blocked macros, sandbox mode and from A2007 on, the need to define Trusted Locations).
I'd agree with David (although using the word "never" is always dangerous!). One extra thing you might consider is having the person who zips up the database prior to uploading apply encryption to the zip file with a password specific to each user.
The actual encryption doesn't necessarily have to be particularly strong, even, although it would help if your communications were being hacked: the point is that it serves to identify the person who originated the Access upload. If the SSIS process tries to open it with each known password in turn and fails with all of them then the package can be considered to have been introduced into the system by some unauthorised person and therefore be suspect.
This is less to prevent malicious code and more to prevent malicious data being entered into your system.
hth
Mike
So I have a web application that integrates with several other APIs and services which require authentication. My question is, is it safe to store my authentication credentials in plain text in my source code?
What can I do to store these credentials securely?
I think this is a common problem, so I'd like to see a solution which secures credentials in the answers.
In response to comment: I frequently use PHP, Java, and RoR
I'd like to see some more votes for an answer on this question.
Here's what we do with our passwords.
$db['hostname'] = 'somehost.com'
$db['port'] = 1234;
$config = array();
include '/etc/webapp/db/config.php';
$db['username'] = $config['db']['username'];
$db['password'] = $config['db']['password'];
No one but webserver user has access to /etc/webapp/db/config.php, this way you are protecting the username and password from developers.
The only reason to NOT store the PW in the code is simply because of the configuration issue (i.e. need to change the password and don't want to rebuild/compile the application).
But is the source a "safe" place for "security sensitive" content (like passwords, keys, algorithms). Of course it is.
Obviously security sensitive information needs to be properly secured, but that's a basic truth regardless of the file used. Whether it's a config file, a registry setting, or a .java file or .class file.
From an architecture point of view, it's a bad idea for the reason mentioned above, just like you shouldn't "hard code" any "external" dependencies in your code if you can avoid it.
But sensitive data is sensitive data. Embedding a PW in to a source code file makes that file more sensitive than other source code files, and if that's your practice, I'd consider all source code as sensitive as the password.
It is not to be recommended.
An encrypted web.config would be a more suitable place (but note can't be used with a web farm)
It appears the answer is the following:
Don't put credentials in source code but...
Put credentials in a configuration file
Sanitize log files
Set proper permissions/ownership on configs
Probably more depending on platform...
No, it is not.
Plus, you might want to change your password one day, and probably having yo change the source code may not be the best option.
No. Sometimes it is unavoidable. Better approach is to have an architecture set up where the service will implicitly trust your running code based on another trust. (Such as trusting the machine the code is running on, or trusting the application server that is running the software)
If neither of these are available, it would be perfectly acceptable to write your own trust mechanism, though I would keep it completely separate from the application code. Also, would recommend researching ways to keep passwords out of the hands of predators, even when stored on local machine - remembering that you can't protect anything if someone has control of the physical machine it is on.
If you control the Web server, and maintain it for security updates, then in the source (preferably in a configuration module) or in a configuration file that the source uses is probably best.
If you do not control the Web server (say, you are on a shared or even dedicated server provided by a hosting company), then encryption won't help you very much; if the application can decrypt the credentials on a given host, than the host can be used to decrypt the credentials without your intervention (think root or Administrator looking at the source code, and adapting the decryption routine so that it can be used to read the configuration). This is even more of a possibility if you are using unobfuscated managed code (e.g., JVM or .NET) or a Web scripting language that resides in plaintext on the server (like PHP).
As is usually the case, there is a tradeoff between security and accessibility. I'd think about what threats are the ones you are trying to guard against and come up with a means to protect against the situations that you need. If you're working with data that needs to be secure, you should probably be redacting the database fairly regularly and moving data offline to a firewalled and well-protected database server as soon as it becomes stale on the site. This would include data like social security numbers, billing information, etc., which can be referenced. This would also mean that you'd ideally want to control the servers on your own network which provide billing services or secure data storage.
I prefer to keep them in a separate config file, located somewhere outside the web server's document root.
While this doesn't protect against an attacker subverting my code in such a way that it can be coerced into telling them the password, it does still have an advantage over putting the passwords directly into the code (or any other web-accessible file) in that it eliminates concern over a web server misconfiguration (or bug/exploit) allowing an attacker to download the password-containing file directly.
One approach is to encrypt The passwords before placing the password in config.web
I'm writing this for web service app that receives password, not client:
If you save hashed passsword in source code someone who views the source code won't be able to help himself with that hash.
Your program would receive plain password and hash it and compare both hashes.
That's why we save hashed passwords into databases, not plain text. Because they can't be reversed if someone for example steals db or views it for malicious purposes he won't get all users passwords, only the hashes which are pretty useless to him.
Hashing is 1 way process: it produces same value from same source but you can't compute source value out of hash.
Storing on client: when user enters pass u save it to db/file in plaintext, maybe obfuscate a little but not much u can do to prevent someone who gets a hold of that computer to get that password.
Nobody seems to have mentioned hashing yet - with a strong hash algorithm (ie SHA-2 and not MD5), it should be much safer.