I have a server that use Basic authorization scheme, when user tries to access restricted content, the browser will pop-up a login/pass dialog which I saw will further transmit authorization type header to server.
I want to implement a classic (pure html) page with login/pass edit boxes and a send button but keep intact the auth scheme on server (is some embedded very limited server, without php, etc.), so the form must send that headers too.
Is it possible? Or did I missed something in my understanding so far?
Thanks very much in advance,
Related
I've just started working on an aspx web from login page for AspNet.Identity.
I have my fields, username and password (textmode="Password") and a submit button (asp:button) as usual with my code behind to do login, etc.
My question is, when my user clicks submit, how is the password sent to the server? Do I need to be on SSL to ensure that the password isn't sent in cleartext?
Edit
StackOverflow's login page isn't over HTTPS - how do they (and other sites that don't use HTTPS) manage password transmission?
One can say that all data submitted from the browser is sent in cleartext (that is, neither browser itself encrypt it, nor when data arrives to your server-side script it requires decryption). All the encryption (if any) is performed at the protocol level.
Plain HTTP doesn't encrypt any information sent over it, which allows for simple inspection (man-in-the-middle attack, eavesdropping). On the other hand, HTTPS creates a secure channel over an otherwise insecure network and protects from said attacks reasonably well.
One caveat to that is using GET to send data to the server. This information can easily end up in server logs.
Depending on the form method GET or POST values are sent to the server.
By default in asp.net the form method is POST so it is send in the body of the request.
If the form method is GET then it sent in the url.
Edit 1
When you use HTTPS the channel is secured. But some time it can be slower than HTTP because HTTPS requires an initial handshake which can be very slow.
Some useful links
Difference between http and https
HTTP vs HTTPS performance
Main problem is that if anyone is able to listen to the traffic from your client to your server, then they will also be able to manipulate what your server sends to client. This issue invalidates all attempts to do some javascript magic to hide it out will be lost effort.
In other words, there is for the time being only SSL to help you out.
I was using Fiddler see on-the-field how web sites use cookies in their login systems. Although I have some HTTP knowledge, I'm just just learning about cookies and how they are used within sites.
Initially I assumed that when submitting the form I'd see no cookies sent, and that the response would contain some cookie info that would then be saved by the browser.
In fact, just the opposite seems to be the case. It is the request that's sending in info, and the server returns nothing.
When fiddling about the issue, I noticed that even with a browser cleaned of cookies, the client seems to always be sending a RequestVerificationToken to the server, even when just looking around withot being signed in.
Why is this so?
Thanks
Cookies are set by the server with the Set-Cookie HTTP response header, and they can also be set through JavaScript.
A cookie has a path. If the path of a cookie matches the path of the document that is being requested, then the browser will include all such cookies in the Cookie HTTP request header.
You must make sure to be careful when setting or modifying cookies in order to avoid XSS attacks against your users. As such, it might be useful to include a hidden and unique secret within your login forms, and use such secret prior to setting any cookies. Alternatively, you can simply check that HTTP Referer header matches your site. Otherwise, a malicious site can copy your form fields, and create a login form to your site on their site, and do form.submit(), effectively logging out your user, or performing a brute-force attack on your site through unsuspecting users that happen to be visiting the malicious web-site.
The RequestVerificationToken that you mention has nothing to do with HTTP Cookies, it sounds like an implementation detail that some sites written in some specific site-scripting language use to protect their cookie-setting-pages against XSS attacks.
When you hit a page on a website, usually the response(the page that you landed on) contains instructions from the server in the http response to set some cookies.
Websites may use these to track information about your behavior or save your preferences for future or short term.
Website may do so on your first visit to any page or on you visit to a particular page.
The browser would then send all cookies that have been set with subsequent request to that domain.
Think about it, HTTP is stateless. You landed on Home Page and clicked set by background to blue. Then you went to a gallery page. The next request goes to your server but the server does not have any idea about your background color preference.
Now if the request contained a cookie telling the server about your preference, the website would serve you your right preference.
Now this is one way. Another way is a session. Think of cookies as information stored on client side. But what if server needs to store some temporary info about you on server side. Info that is maybe too sensitive to be exposed in cookies, which are local and easily intercepted.
Now you would ask, but HTTP is stateless. Correct. But Server could keep info about you in a map, whose is the session id. this session id is set on the client side as a cookie or resent with every request in parameters. Now server is only getting the key but can lookup information about you, like whether you are logged in successfully, what is your role in the system etc.
Wow, that a lot of text, but I hope it helped. If not feel free to ask more.
I have scenario where My webpage is requested by another website. That website will have Hyperlink to my webpage.
I Need to check whether request is coming from valid website or not. I have done this by checking URL Referer of that website, and working fine.
Another way to validate this request is to validate client certificate(x.509).
I want to know which is the best/secure way to validate referer website? Is there any other way to validate referer site excepting url referer and certificate validation?
Thanks
Fenil
The client certificate would identify the person clicking on the link, but not the referring page, so it should be ruled out.
As for the referrer, it does work, but with a couple of caveats:
1 - it's not secure (for big values of "secure"). The http_referrer is an optional field that the browser inserts in the request for your site. So it's controlled at the client's side and can be easily forged. So, if the level of security you want is "make sure that somebody has not posted my link on another page, where unaware users may click on it" then you're quite fine with checking the referrer. If you're relying on this for anything more (like making sure the incoming person is authorized to do something on your site) then you probably want a form of user authentication
2- some software that may be installed on your users' computers (like "Norton Internet Security") masks the http_referrer out of privacy concerns, so some of your users may not have a http_referrer.
I have a code which generates iframe which user can embed on his site.
I want to show my iframe only on particular sites.
How can I do this?
For example:
I can give a unique key to user and use this key on server side.
But another user can get this key an use it.
Is there simple solution?
The referrer solution is not robust in any way. Referrer is something "said" by the browser it can be manually overridden as said above, moreover anyone could simply use a proxy and reintegrate the iframe.
So, basically, it depends on how much code can be put on the "Trusted server".
If you can, use one time tokens. Trusted server gets a list of tokens from server having the iframe. The url served by the trusted server contains the token which will be invalidated upon serving the content of the iframe. This does mean that there is a "write" for each read. And tokens will take some space.
You can use the referrer response-header as described in the HTTP standard.
Though expert users (the übergeeks/browsermodders) know how to omit this. You should may not do this for security reasons.
I would like to create web application with admin/checkout sections being secured. Assuming I have SSL set up for subdomain.mydomain.com I would like to make sure that all that top-secret stuff ;) like checkout pages and admin section is transferred securely. Would it be ok to structure my application as below?
subdomain.mydomain.com
adminSectionFolder
adminPage1.php
adminPage2.php
checkoutPagesFolder
checkoutPage1.php
checkoutPage2.php
checkoutPage3.php
homepage.php
loginPage.php
someOtherPage.php
someNonSecureFolder
nonSecurePage1.php
nonSecurePage2.php
nonSecurePage3.php
imagesFolder
image1.jpg
image2.jpg
image3.jpg
Users would access my web application via http as there is no need for SSL for homepage and similar. Checkout/admin pages would have to be accessed via https though (that I would ensure via .htaccess redirects). I would also like to have login form on every page of the site, including non-secure pages. Now my questions are:
if I have form on non-secure page e.g http://subdomain.mydomain.com/homepage.php and that form sends data to https://subdomain.mydomain.com/loginPage.php, is data being send encrypted as if it were sent from https://subdomain.mydomain.com/homepage.php? I do realize users will not see padlock, but browser still should encrypt it, is it right?
EDIT: my apologies.. above in bold I originally typed http but meant https, my bad
2.If on secure page loginPage.php (or any other accessed via https for that instance) I created session, session ID would be assigned, and in case of my web app. something like username of the logged in user. Would I be able to access these session variable from http://subdomain.mydomain.com/homepage.php to for example display greeting message? If session ID is stored in cookies then it would be trouble I assume, but could someone clarify how it should be done? It seems important to have username and password send over SSL.
3.Related to above question I think.. would it actually make any sense to have login secured via SSL so usenrame/password would be transferred securely, and then session ID being transferred with no SSL? I mean wouldnt it be the same really if someone caught username and password being transferred, or caught session ID? Please let me know if I make sense here cause it feels like I'm missing something important.
EDIT: I came up with idea but again please let me know if that would work. Having above, so assuming that sharing session between http and https is as secure as login in user via plain http (not https), I guess on all non secure pages, like homepage etc. I could check if user is already logged in, and if so from php redirect to https version of same page. So user fills in login form from homepage.php, over ssl details are send to backend so probably https://.../homepage.php. Trying to access http://.../someOtherPage.php script would always check if session is created and if so redirect user to https version of this page so https://.../someOtherPage.php. Would that work?
4.To avoid browser popping message "this page contains non secure items..." my links to css, images and all assets, e.g. in case of http://subdomain.mydomain.com/checkoutPage1.php should be absolute so "/images/image1.jpg" or relative so "../images/image1.jpg"? I guess one of those would have to work :)
wow that's long post, thanks for your patience if you got that far and any answers :) oh yeh and I use php/apache on shared hosting
If the SSL termination is on the webserver itself, then you'll probably need to configure seperate document roots for the secure and non-secure parts - while you could specify that these both reference the same physical directory, you're going to get tied in knots switching between the parts. Similarly if your SSL termination is before the webserver you've got no systematic separation of the secure and non-secure parts.
Its a lot tidier to separate out the secure and non-secure parts into seperate trees - note that if you have non-SSL content on a secure page, the users will get warning messages.
Regards your specific questions
NO - whether data is encrypted depends on where it is GOING TO, not where it is coming from
YES - but only if you DO NOT set the secure_only cookie flag - note that if you follow my recommendations above, you also need to ensure that the cookie path is set to '/'
the page which processes the username and password MUST be secure. If not then you are exposing your clients authentication details (most people use the same password for all the sites they visit) and anyone running a network sniffer or proxy would have access.
Your EDIT left me a bit confused. SSL is computationally expensive and slow - so you want to minimise its use - but you need to balance this with your users perception of security - don't keep switching from SSL to non-SSL, and although its perfectly secure for users to enter their details on a page served up by non-SSL which sends to a SSL page, the users may not understand this distinction.
See the first part of my answer above.
C.