I am looking for a way to limit access to AWS S3 hosted data in a controlled and at least semi-secure way. I have various resources in a number of S3 buckets, with CloudFront as CDN. I then have a WordPress based website using a theme that allows me to sell "courses". Finally I manage my domains so I can create a sub domain for the content download link, i.e. content.domainname.com.
Ideally I want to limit access to content to a specific set of courses, so only people who have bought the course, and are linking to the content from a web page in that course, can (easily) get at the data.
I know I can use an AWS Web ACL rule to check the referer, to limit downloads to links on my domain. And I think I can expand on that to test more of the URL, so in www.domainname.com/paid/coursename/page.html I could have a rule that tests for the bold portion of the path and refuses otherwise.
However, I also know that referer can be easily spoofed, and more importantly some browsers and internet security software will replace the referer, and I don't want my site security to force customers to change their security settings. So, is there another option, to include some sort of data in the HTTP request, that limits access in a way that is both somewhat secure, but not dependent on a client side settings? Perhaps something like a hash that I could include in the link itself? Or, maybe the WordPress API and AWS Web ACL Rules can communicate is some way so as to validate the logged on user has membership in the course? Grasping at straws here I suspect.
Additionally, there will be a PowerShell script that can be downloaded and run, which will access downloadable content as well. Again, I want to limit access, but in this case I need to be able to maintain the criteria on AWS as I have subscription and non subscription versions of the courses, and the PS script should only download for customers on subscription. So, I could provide the PS script with something like a customer ID, then maintain a list of customer IDs that are currently on subscription so the Web ACL rule could filter. But again, I suspect that HTTP header won't get the job done, because it could be changed by internet security at the customer location. But now I am limited by what PowerShell can do with regards to HTTP requests.
I know, rather an open ended question, but hopefully someone can at least point me in the right direction. It sure seems like both needs are something that AWS should be able to do, I am just so out of my depth here I don't know where to start, and AWS documentation requires that you have some clue to get you going.
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Looking for some strategy here. We have a secure (subscription-based) website that points to another website for streaming video. Currently, a savvy user could potentially share the link to the streaming page thus bypassing the login. Looking for ideas on how to:
Prevent sharing the link
Cloak the link...or
Make the link from the origin page point to a dynamically-generated URL that can only be visited once.
Thanks in advance!
Unless there is a form of streaming the video from the third party to your application (by streaming I actually mean sending the video in chunks of data to your backend, assembling them back together, and serving the actual assembled video as if it was hosted directly on the same host as the web application, I have personally done this using Amazon S3 for my open-source subscription-based CMS called phpReel) I don't think you can securely do this.
If you do want to go down this route please note that it might get expensive if you have a lot of active subscriptions but if you are interested you could check out these files as they showcase how I have done it for phpReel. I am afraid though that you might need a developer for this job.
On a more optimistic note, may I ask what service do you actually use to stream your videos? For example, Vimeo with the cheapest paid plan offers an option that restricts access to your video outside a specific domain name. Meaning you can set that your videos must be streamed only on domain.com, and thus they will be accessible there and only there.
I want to be able to add domains to Firebase hosting with the API instead of the web UI, is that possible?
I want to add potentially hundreds of domains, is there a domain limit per project in Firebase?
As far as I can tell from the entire CLI documentation, there isn't any way to do this.
Lets take a step back and consider what the web UI process involves i.e. the generation of a TXT record to add to your DNS records, after verifying the presence of said TXT record on the domain, providing A records that you (authorized owner) add to allow redirecting to your firebase hosted site.
In my opinion, this very manual back and forth is necessary as a security measure. The only way it is taken out of the equation via the CLI is by providing a means for you to authenticate ownership of a domain (registered with any one of many domain registrars), and being granted authorization to change your A records. These are both outside the scope of Firebase, and could potentially introduce severe security flaws. Regardless, even if it existed, it would still have to be step-by-step and somewhat manual via CLI rather than the single command it sounds like you're looking for.
It is not possible to add custom domains automatically through an API at this time.
Nor would it allow you to create a reseller or multi-tenant project (i.e. connect a large number of domains or subdomains dynamically) since you cannot connect more than about 36 domains connected to one project.
It's possible to add domains using Firebase Hosting Rest Api. I am not sure why they didn't put it on their official website but I checked today and it works. https://developers.google.com/resources/api-libraries/documentation/firebasehosting/v1beta1/java/latest/com/google/api/services/firebasehosting/v1beta1/FirebaseHosting.Sites.Domains.html
Answer that I've received from Firebase support:
There is no API yet that would allow you to add custom domains, it was
requested as a feature before but unfortunately we have no more
information on that - so for now, only the Console UI allows you to do
it.
When it comes to the limits, in a project, a custom domain is
attached to a site - there can be 36 sites per project, and for one
site there is no hard limit, but we recommend not exceeding 20 custom
domains. You can experience technical issues with SSL certs when you
exceed 20 domains per site, which we won’t be able to troubleshoot
since the system was not designed for such use cases.
I have a client who has a crimestoppers' website. They want to provide visitors a means to submit anonymous crime tips, which would then be forwarded to a pre-established email address at the local police department.
What is the best / easiest way to accomplish this? The sender's IP address needs to be hidden. My client also needs to be able to pull reports showing how many tips were submitted and forwarded.
Many thanks!
A simple contact form can be used. It's up to the developer's trust to hide the IP. The submitter won't see anything what is being done using PHP.
You can then update a database with the tips being posted before sending the mails.
In terms of development, you can use a plugin such as Contact Form 7 and then use its hooks to save the tips submitted before sending the mails.
While it is rather simple to set up a contact form that submits to an email address (just use the excellent ContactForm7, as rrikesh's answer suggests). However, getting anonymity right (especially against a party that has as much power and resources) is tricky. You need to be clear about the level of anonymity that you can provide. Log files, document metadata or your ISP can easily give a lot of information away.
Here are two project that have different approaches. They're both not ready-made solutions to your question, but still relevant:
PrivacyBox:
This is a web service run by the German Privacy Foundation. It's basically a message relay like the one you want, except that the user has to trust the Foundation, not you. This model highly depends on the institution providing this service. I'm sure there are other, US-based services like this.
Briefkasten:
An open source software tool used by the German newspaper Die ZEIT.
a reasonably secure web application for submitting content anonymously. It allows to upload attachments which are then sanitized of a number of meta-data which could compromise the submitters identity. Next, the sanitized files are encrypted via GPG and sent via email to a pre-configured list of recipients. The original (potentially 'dirty') files are then deleted from the file system of the server. Thus, neither should admins with access to the server be able to access any submissions, nor should any of the recipients have access to the unsanitized raw material.
This is an attempt to automate the crucial steps to strip any identifying data from the submission and encrypt it, so only the intended recipients can access it.
You would have to host this yourself, though. And it's a Python app.
My company creates hardware products that are sold throughout the world. They have an embedded webserver that allows for users to configure the product via a web interface. I wanted to enhance the user experience of this interface and the first step would be to start gathering analytics on how users move throughout the tool.
My question is how I should do this since there won't be a domain and instead some internal IP address that is used to access the product. For example, if their IT team installs the printer on 10.10.10.10, they almost never associate that with an internal server name and users would access the web configuration tool by directly hitting the IP. Even if they did create an internal server name like "config.productname.com", I would have no way of knowing what that would be.
This means I can't create a profile in GA to start accepting this analytic data. Has anyone done something similar in the past or have advice on how to address this issue?
Could the issue be resolved by using SiteCatalyst instead?
SiteCatalyst provides the capability to store visitor information inside any cookie of your choosing, and does not care which domain you place code on. Ultimately all data is sent to a subdomain of 2o7.net, however you can create a CNAME record so your site stores and writes cookies to any domain of your choice.
Within the s_code.js file, there is a variable defined that governs the domain the cookie is set:
s.trackingServer="yourorganizationname.2o7.net";
It would not matter where this implementation was tracking data from, they would all use the exact same cookie location, and be treated as the same visitor no matter which domain they viewed. Just keep in mind this is defined as a third-party cookie, and small portion of browsers reject 3rd-party cookies by default.
You might try Piwik or Open Web Analytics since you can deploy them on your own infrastructure and could modify them to meet your requirements.
If you have a serial number assigned to each device during manufacturing, you may want to use that to distinguish between devices, regardless of which analytics tools you use.
Note that as far as I can tell, Google Analytics doesn't actually care what domain you place the code on; they just use your domain specification to determine what sites the tracking cookies will be delivered to. That may not help you as you probably want the tracking cookies to work, but I point it out in case it turns out to be useful...
Is there a way to see who is currently logged in to a Plone site?
Rationale: I want to make sure not to interfer with users working on content when I restart the instance.
Out-of-the-box, there is no way to see if users are currently using your site, only if they have just been using it. Just tail the instance-Z2.log access logfile.
Note that due to the nature of the HTTP protocol, 'current' users of your site do not maintain a connection, and thus, until they are back again for the next request, there is no accurate way to determine if anyone is using the site.
There are work-arounds, such as using sessions and timeouts, that use recency to estimate how many users are still around. collective.portlet.usertrack is one such approach. Note that such approaches can have a hefty scalability penalty though.
If all you want to do is not inconvenience users during a restart, use a caching frontend and / or a load balancer and more than one instance instead. That way users see cached content or content generated by an instance still up while you restart your first instance.
you can try collective.portlet.usertrack