What are the various ways to autenticate a json page? this is to prevent others from looking at the response data? I'm using asp.net for the output of json
Same as for any other kind of page, really. HTTP basic, HTTP digest, cookie session ID, explicit session ID parameter, username+password parameters on every request.
Personally I'm a fan of dead simple basic auth with my json requests - its easy to set up and fairly secure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication which would be controlled by something like http://username:password#myawesomesite.com/json_request.json
Beyond that there's a lot you can do to complicate the issue with handshakes and oauth. JSON is really just the end result data - how that data is requested is entirely up to you.
The question you have asked is wrongly asked. You want to authenticate a Json page , it should have been "autheticate a json based request" or encrypt your json based response.
Is that what you are trying to say?
Related
We recently ran an Appscan aganist an application and on a few pages the report shows:
The following changes were applied to the original request:
Set HTTP header to 'http://bogus.referer.ibm.com'
Reasoning:
The same request was sent twice in different sessions and the same response was received.
This shows that none of the parameters are dynamic (session identifiers are sent only in
cookies) and therefore that the application is vulnerable to this issue.
I'm a bit confused on how to handle this, should i just look at the Request.UrlReferrer and make sure it's the same host as what's in the URL or is there a better way to handle this?
Thanks.
The Referrer header can be spoofed quite easily. You need to use CSRF tokens (I recommend the Synchronizer Token Pattern) that will prove the origination of the request. There is an awesome resource at OWASP that you should definitely read. Good luck!
I am implementing an REST server.
I am going to receive the username, requestid and password for each request from user.
I have two choice, i can ask for users to pass those three parameters in http body or in http header.
Which will be better way of implementation and why?
Thanks in advance.
Header!
If I understand your question, you have something that you are going to pass with every single request. That means if you want to support safe requests like GET and HEAD, you only have two choices: The HTTP headers or the URL (typically via query parameters).
Since it includes authentication information, you should avoid putting it in the URL. Other than that, you say it is encrypted and an added layer of protection would be to do it over SSL but the header and body are equally safe/vulnerable, so it makes no difference from a security standpoint.
Putting it in the header also decouples it from the application state and also from the media type, which is a good thing. If you want to support JSON, XML and XHTML forms it makes no difference to your authentication parameters.
I need to authenticate a client when he sends a request to an API. The client has an API-token and I was thinking about using the standard Authorization header for sending the token to the server.
Normally this header is used for Basic and Digest authentication. But I don't know if I'm allowed to customize the value of this header and use a custom authentication scheme, e.g:
Authorization: Token 1af538baa9045a84c0e889f672baf83ff24
Would you recommend this or not? Or is there a better approach for sending the token?
You can create your own custom auth schemas that use the Authorization: header - for example, this is how OAuth works.
As a general rule, if servers or proxies don't understand the values of standard headers, they will leave them alone and ignore them. It is creating your own header keys that can often produce unexpected results - many proxies will strip headers with names they don't recognise.
Having said that, it is possibly a better idea to use cookies to transmit the token, rather than the Authorization: header, for the simple reason that cookies were explicitly designed to carry custom values, whereas the specification for HTTP's built in auth methods does not really say either way - if you want to see exactly what it does say, have a look here.
The other point about this is that many HTTP client libraries have built-in support for Digest and Basic auth but may make life more difficult when trying to set a raw value in the header field, whereas they will all provide easy support for cookies and will allow more or less any value within them.
In the case of CROSS ORIGIN request read this:
I faced this situation and at first I chose to use the Authorization Header and later removed it after facing the following issue.
Authorization Header is considered a custom header. So if a cross-domain request is made with the Autorization Header set, the browser first sends a preflight request. A preflight request is an HTTP request by the OPTIONS method, this request strips all the parameters from the request. Your server needs to respond with Access-Control-Allow-Headers Header having the value of your custom header (Authorization header).
So for each request the client (browser) sends, an additional HTTP request(OPTIONS) was being sent by the browser. This deteriorated the performance of my API.
You should check if adding this degrades your performance. As a workaround I am sending tokens in http parameters, which I know is not the best way of doing it but I couldn't compromise with the performance.
This is a bit dated but there may be others looking for answers to the same question. You should think about what protection spaces make sense for your APIs. For example, you may want to identify and authenticate client application access to your APIs to restrict their use to known, registered client applications. In this case, you can use the Basic authentication scheme with the client identifier as the user-id and client shared secret as the password. You don't need proprietary authentication schemes just clearly identify the one(s) to be used by clients for each protection space. I prefer only one for each protection space but the HTTP standards allow both multiple authentication schemes on each WWW-Authenticate header response and multiple WWW-Authenticate headers in each response; this will be confusing for API clients which options to use. Be consistent and clear then your APIs will be used.
I would recommend not to use HTTP authentication with custom scheme names. If you feel that you have something of generic use, you can define a new scheme, though. See http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth-latest.html#rfc.section.2.3 for details.
Kindly try below on postman :-
In header section example work for me..
Authorization : JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.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.BkyB0LjKB4FIsCtnM5FcpcBLvKed_j7rCCxZddwiYnU
I have an ASP.NET web service running that accepts both HTTP POST and SOAP requests. Are there any disadvantages to using a simple HTTP POST to get the data from the WS instead of using SOAP over HTTP?
I can't think of anything else other than the support for transmission of complex data types, and I don't think I'll need that in this project.
Thanks,
Teja.
The clue is in the question...
using a simple HTTP POST to get the data
A POST is not a GET, a GET is a GET.
If you're the only person operating on the WS then it's not a problem as long as you are handling your incoming connections properly. If it is open to outsiders then I would recommend sticking to conventions, they are there to save us from ourselves :)
I have a program that is supposed to interact with a web server and retrieve a file containing structured data using http and cgi. I have a couple questions:
The cgi script on the server needs to specify a body right? What should the content-type be?
Should I be using POST or GET?
Could anyone tell me a good resource for reading about HTTP?
If you just want to retrieve the resource, I’d use GET. And with GET you don’t need a Content-Type since a GET request has no body. And as of HTTP, I’d suggest you to read the HTTP 1.1 specification.
The content-type specified by the server will depend on what type of data you plan to return. As Jim said if it's JSON you can use 'application/json'. The obvious payload for the request would be whatever data you're sending to the client.
From the servers prospective it shouldn't matter that much. In general if you're not expecting a lot of information from the client I'd set up the server to respond to GET requests as opposed to POST requests. An advantage I like is simply being able to specify what I want in the url (this can't be done if it's expecting a POST request).
I would point you to the rfc for HTTP...probably the best source for information..maybe not the most user friendly way to get your answers but it should have all the answers you need. link text
For (1) the Content-Type depends on the structured data. If it's XML you can use application/xml, JSON can be application/json, etc. Content-Type is set by the server. Your client would ask for that type of content using the Accept header. (Try to use existing data format standards and content types if you can.)
For (2) GET is best (you aren't sending up any data to the server).
I found RESTful Web Services by Richardson and Ruby a very interesting introduction to HTTP. It takes a very strict, but very helpful, view of HTTP.