I'm thinking about my website architecture that's using https.. I now have a CDN server hosting images , css and more static files.
The website itself is using HTTPS for securing sensitive costumer data. Will using the static images , loaded by for example 'http://cdn.example.com/images/test.jpg' on a website 'https://www.example.com' popup a "Loading insecure data" message?
So loading external NOT SECURED data on a SECURED website.
Will this be causing a popup warning "Loading insecure data, continue?"?
Thx!
Yes.
If a page is loaded over HTTPS then every resource it uses should also be loaded over HTTPS.
Otherwise a man-in-the-middle could replace images with misleading ones (or ones that exploit buffer overflow issues in browsers to execute code) and scripts with ones that do different things (such as leak data to the third party).
You have to load every resource over https to get rid of that warning. You can either move the resources to your server that supports encryption, or link to an external resource over https.
If you really want to load http content in https, you can follow this method using a backend handler in charge of downloading and exposing the required content with self forged links including a hash. The security issue is then fixed and you get the content accessible through https.
Dealing with HTTP content in HTTPS pages
I did this recently.
I have a raspberry pi loaded with nginx, and PHP.
I us Https to handle requests from the web to the PHP code which in turn sends http requests to my local network to assemble the page. Works well.
Related
I have an HTML5 app written in static html/js/css (it's actually written in Dart, but compiles down to javascript). I'm serving the application files via CDN, with the REST api hosted on a separate domain. The app uses client-side routing, so as the user goes about using the app, the url might change to be something like http://www.myapp.com/categories. The problem is, if the user refreshes the page, it results in a 404.
Are there any CDN's that would allow me to create a rule that, if the user requests a page that is a valid client-side route, it would just return the (in my case) client.html page?
More detailed explanation/example
The static files for my web app are stored on S3 and served via Amazon's CloudFront CDN. There is a single HTML file that bootstraps the application, client.html. This is the default file served when visiting the domain root, so if you go to www.mysite.com the browser is actually served www.mysite.com/client.html.
The web app uses client-side routing. Once the app loads and the user starts navigating, the URL is updated. These urls don't actually exist on the CDN. For example, if the user wanted to browse widgets, she would click a button, client-side routing would display the "widgets" view, and the browser's url would update to www.mysite.com/widgets/browse. On the CDN, /widgets/browse doesn't actually exist, so if the user hits the refresh button on the browser, they get a 404.
My question is whether or not any CDNs support looking at the request URI and rewriting it. So, I could see a request for /widgets/browse and rewrite it to /client.html. That way, the application would be served instead of returning a 404.
I realize there are other solutions to this problem, namely placing a server in front of the CDN, but it's less ideal.
I do this using CloudFront, but I use my own server running Apache to accomplish this. I realize you're using a server with Amazon, but since you didn't specify that you're restricted to that, I figured I'd answer with how to accomplish what you're looking to do anyway.
It's pretty simple. Any time you query something that isn't already in the cache on CloudFront, or exists in the Cache but is expired, CloudFront goes back to your web server asking it to serve up the content. At this point, you have total control over the request. I use the mod_rewrite in Apache to capture the request, then determine what content I'm going to serve depending on the request. In fact, there isn't a single file (spare one php script) on my server, yet cloudfront believes there are thousands. Pretty sure url rewriting is standard on most web servers, I can only confirm on lighttp and apache from my own experience though.
More Info
All you're doing here is just telling your server to rewrite incoming requests in order to satisfy them. This would not be considered a proxy or anything of the sort.
The flow of content between your app and your server, with cloudfront in between is like this:
appRequest->cloudFront
if cloudFront has file, return data to user without asking your server
for the file.
If cloudFront DOESN'T have the file (or it has expired), go back to
the origin server and ask it for a new copy to cache.
So basically, what is happening in your situation is this:
A)app->ask cloudfront for url cloud front doesn't have
B)cloudfront
then asks your source server for the file
C)file doesn't exist there,
so the server tells cloudFront to go fly a kite
D)cloudFront comes back empty handed and makes your app 404
E)app crashes and
burns, users run away and use something else.
So, all you're doing with mod_rewrite is telling your server how it can re-interpret certain formatted requests and act accordingly. You could point all .jpg requests to point to singleImage.jpg, then have your app ask for:
www.mydomain.com/image3.jpg
www.mydomain.com/naughtystuff.jpg
Neither of those images even have to exist on your server. Apache would just honor the request by sending back singleImage.jpg. But as far as cloudfront or your app is concerned, those are two different files residing at two different unique places on the server.
Hope this clears it up.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
I think you are using the URL structure in a wrong way. the path which is defined by forward slashes is supposed to bring you to a specific resource, in your example client.html. However, for routing beyond that point (within that resource) you should make use of the # - as is done in many javascript frameworks. This should tell your router what the state of the resource (your html page or app) is. if there are other resources referenced, e.g. images, then you should provide different paths for them which would go through the CDN.
I've used the following information to get mod_pagespeed to inject the GA scripts into my pages:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-insert-ga
Unfortunately we have a reverse proxy setup where the browser requests the page over HTTPS but the server injects the content as HTTP.
Here is the Chrome browser error:
[blocked] The page at 'https://*' was loaded over HTTPS, but ran
insecure content from 'http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js': this
content should also be loaded over HTTPS.
I need this module to use the correct protocol when injecting the script i.e. https:// www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (Sorry for the broken URL I can't post more than 2 links)
We don't have an answer yet, but you can track progress of this bug here: https://code.google.com/p/modpagespeed/issues/detail?id=877
You are going to run into this issue a lot. Try fixing the proxy/server so it correctly identifies the end-user connection as SSL. Most Load Balancers inject a header and have an apache mod to read the header for you.
we have nearly 13 domains within our company and we would like to serve images from one application in order to leverage caching.
for example, we will have c1.example.com and we will put all of our product images under this application. but here I have some doubts;
1- how can I force client browser's to cache the image and do not request it again?
2- when I reference those images on my application, I will use following html markup;
<img scr="http://c1.example.com/core/img1.png" />
but this causes a problem when I run the website under https. It gives warning about the page. It should have been used https//c1.example.com/core/img1.png when I run my apps under https. what should I do here? should I always use https? or is there a way to switch between auto?
I will run my apps under IIS 7.
Yes you need to serve all resources over https when the html-page is served over https. Thats the whole point of using https.
If the hrefs are hardcoded in the html one solution could be to use a Response Filter that will parse all content sent to the client and replace http with https when necessary. A simple Regular Expression should do the trick. There are plenty of articles out there about how these filters are working.
About caching you need to send the correct cache-headers and etag. There are several of questions and answers on this on SO like this one IIS7 Cache-Control
You need to use HTTP headers to tell the browser how to cache. It should work by default (assuming you have no query string in your URLs) but if not, here's a knowledge base article about the cache-control header:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247404
I really don't know much about IIS, so I'm not sure if there are any other potential pitfalls. Note that browsers may still send HEAD requests sometimes.
I'd recommend you setup the image server so that HTTP/S is interchangeable, then just serve HTTPS Urls from HTTPS requests.
I read about "HTTP persistent connection" but somehow I don't seem to understand what does persistent mean in this context.
Could you'll elaborate?
It means the server doesn't close the socket once it's finished pushing out the response (so the length of the response has to be otherwise indicated, via headers or chunking), so the client can make other requests on the same socket. A web page often requests several other pieces (images, CSS, scripts, ...) on the same server as the page itself, so reusing the socket for some of those further requests to the same server can reduce overall latency compared to closing the original socket and opening new ones for all the follow-on requests.
All the discussion till now has been from the browser side of things. The browser first request the actual page, and it parses the page and finds out all other resources that it needs before it can render that page. The browser requests these resources and other dependent resources one by one. So maintaining a persistent connection is very efficient here, as the overhead of creating and destroying connections is avoided.
Now from web server side of things, a persistent connection would be one that allows it to "push" content to the web browser. Now HTTP doesn't support this. So, there are few workarounds with javascript where the page is basically refreshed after a while.
You can see this being trick being used by many web based email providers which continuously keep checking in the background for new mails. This gives a feeling that when a new mails arrives, the server "pushes" the new mail notification to the web browser. But in fact, its actually the web browser which keeps on checking the server for any new mail.
Also another point that I would like to state is that we actually don't see any page refresh that's because of another trick which allows only specific parts of the page to be refreshed by the request. (HINT: AJAX)
I think this is a switching for http or https for website browser. If you have old https:// and you are now using http for browser .htaccess file then this problem should created via yoast plugins one page crawl page. don't worry about it is not important error. For hackers this is a way to hack your website if your ssl connection is empty they should attach there page or domain to your ssl connection
e.b http://www.example.com and when you brows https://www.example.com in browser there are some other link with open your site domain.
Solution for this always use your full address for website: to protect hackers against your website use ssl and https:/ page for your website.
Then this problem have never scene in any test site or page.
I'm working on a web site which contains sections that need to be secured by SSL.
I have the site configured so that it runs fine when it's always in SSL, I see the SSL padlock in IE7/IE8/FireFox/Safari/Chrome
To implement the SSL switching, I created a class that implemented IHTTPModule and wired up HTTPApplication.PreRequestHandlerExecute.
I go through some custom logic to determine whether or not my request should use SSL, and then I redirect. I have to deal with two scenarios:
Currently in SSL and request doesn't require SSL
Currently not in SSL but request requires SSL
I end up doing the followng (where ctx is HttpContext.Current and pathAndQuery is ctx.Request.Url.PathAndQuery)
// SSL required and current connection is not SSL
if (requestRequiresSSL & !ctx.Request.IsSecureConnection)
ctx.Response.Redirect("https://www.myurl.com" + pathAndQuery);
// SSL not required but current connection is SSL
if (!requestRequiresSSL & ctx.Request.IsSecureConnection)
ctx.Response.Redirect("http://www.myurl.com" + pathAndQuery);
The switching back and forth now works fine. However, when I go into SSL mode, FireFox and IE8 warns me that my request isn't entirely encrypted.
It looks like my module is short circuiting my request somehow, would appreciate any thoughts.
I would suspect, that when you determine which resources require encryption, and which not, you do not include the images, or some header and footers as well, or even CSS files, if you use any.
As you always throw away SSL for such a content, it may happen that part of the page (main html) requires SSL, but the consequential request for an image on this page does not.
The browser is warning you, that some parts of the page were not delivered using SSL.
I will check if the request is for HTML, and only then drop the SSL if needed. Otherwise, keep it the way it is (most probably images and such are referenced with relative paths, than a full blown url).
I.e., if you have:
<html>
<body>
Some content...
<img src="images/someimage.jpg">
</body>
</html>
and you request this page using SSL, but your evaluation of requestRequiresSSL does not take into account the images as secured resources, it will form a http, not https request, and you will see the warning.
Make sure when you request a resource and evaluate requestRequiresSSL, to check the referrer and if this is an image:
// SSL not required but current connection is SSL
if (!requestRequiresSSL && ctx.Request.IsSecureConnection && !isHtmlContent)
ctx.Response.Redirect("http://www.myurl.com" + pathAndQuery);
Just figure out how to determine isHtmlContent (if you do not serve images from a database, etc., but from a disk location), just check the the resource filename (.aspx, .asmx, .ashx, .html, etc.).
That way, if the connection is encrypted, but the resource itself is not html, and no set for "encryption", you are not going to drop the encryption.
I highly recommend using this (free / open source) component to do what you're trying:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/web-security/WebPageSecurity_v2.aspx
Any content that is not normally handled by .Net (such as regular html and most graphic files) will not execute the httpmodule because it doesn't go through .net
Your best bet is to just handle this at the IIS level. See the following for info on how to configure your server.
http://www.jameskovacs.com/blog/HowToAutoRedirectToASSLsecuredSiteInIIS.aspx
I highly recommend you this product:
http://www.e2xpert.com/web/Http-Https-Switch.aspx
It is professional and easy to use. It comes with a powerful configuration tool, by which just one click can finish the entire configuration for you.
Just use SSL throughout your site, for all pages and for all images/scripts/stylesheets. That just makes everything oh-so-simple. IE and Firefox will no longer complain, you will no longer have crazy modules trying to guess whether any given request should be redirected, etc.
For the average user it's nearly impossible for them to make a informed decision when the only thing Firefox vaguely tells them is, "Parts of the page you are viewing were not encrypted before being transmitted over the Internet." This is about as helpful as the "somethings wrong" engine light and in fact is telling them after their information has been transferred.
The least this message should be accompanied with is a list providing the URL, type of content (images, javascript, css) and what it means to the user. BTW I get this message when using GMail.
Until that happens, as others stated your code should work once you determine the unsecured elements. Then you can use Firebug (http://getfirebug.com) to check the content being delivered over the connection.