How can I reduce the size of a cookie value? - asp-classic

I need to know the best way to reduce the size of data to be stored in cookie.

You could store a unique identifier or token as the cookie's value and then store all the data you want associated with it on the server side in the database.
User shows up with token abcdefg. You query the db and get all your info for token abcdefg.

Also depends on the kind of data you want to store. You can express a subset of known, possibly applicable property values as 2 to the power of n, e.g.
Car Wash Properties:
Basic Air Dry 1
Hand wipe with chamois 2
Steam clean wheels 4
Steam clean engine 8
Hot Wax 16
Interior vacuum 32
Tire treatment 64
such that Basic Air Dry + Interior vacuum = 33. All you'd need to store is the value 33.

Related

Redis error : Timeout performing EVAL (5000ms) with asp.net session state

Getting frequent issues as below after migrating session state to redis
Timeout performing EVAL(5000ms), inst: 0,qs:5,in:65536,serverEndpoint: Unspecified/xxxxx, mgr 10 of 10 available, clientName:xxxx, IOCP:(Busy=0,Free=200,Min=100,Max=200),WORKER:(Busy=11,Free=189,Min=100,Max=200), v:2.0.519.65453
The inst, qs, in, busy, free value changes with each error.
We are using on prem Redis instance with Tier 1-1GB and no replication memory allocated.
With each person logging in we see 2 keys added(Internal, Data) and our data size overall is 2MB each. We have 70 keys approx. Keys are very small but 3 have very big values which makes up approx 1.7MB of 2 of which 1 itself may be of 1MB and other 2 make up. 7MB and rest 67 keys/values 0.3 mb
I have seen this issue generally occurs when trying to fetch one of those 3 bigger key values.
Is there any restriction in value size of a key?
Or could it be some other issue?

What is the range of id for open groups (not the channel) in Telegram?

Created an open group whose id is -1001492565750, somewhere I read that -100 is the id of the group entity, real id is 1 492 565 750, maybe someone knows the exact range, decided to check the id of its various groups and I got about 1 340 000 000 to 1 590 000 000.
Telegram ID's can be bigger than 2^31 - 1.
(2.147.483.647)
From the Telegram Bot API 5.1 Change log:
March 9, 2021
⚠️ WARNING! ⚠️
After one of the upcoming Bot API updates, some user identifiers will become bigger than 2^31 - 1 and it will be no longer possible to store them in a signed 32-bit integer type. User identifiers will have up to 52 significant bits, so a 64-bit integer or double-precision float type would still be safe for storing them.
Please make sure that your code can correctly handle such user identifiers.

Firebase Analytics key and value limitation to 24 and 36 character

Why do google has limitations in keys and values to 24 and 36 characters? What is the best implementation to overcome it.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/android/com/google/firebase/analytics/FirebaseAnalytics.Param
Thanks!
Now you can log firebase analytics Event param name up to 40 characters and value up to 100 characters
See documentation here:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/cpp/group/parameter-names
The main reason for the value size limits is to ensure minimal impact on the device battery, low device storage requirement, low network bandwidth usage and make the data more manageable for the infrastructure and BigQuery.
We might consider increasing the value limits if there is valid reasons to do so. What is the case where you need longer values?

Entire range - Reverse MD5 lookup

I am learning about encryption methods and I have a question about MD5.
I have seen there are several websites that have 'rainbow tables' that will give you reverse MD5 lookup, but, they can't lookup all the combinations possible.
For knowledge's sake, my question is this :
Hypothetically, if a group of people were to consider an upper limit (eg. 5 or 6 characters) and decide to map out the entire MD5 hash for all the values inside that range, storing the results in a database to use for reverse lookup.
1. Do you think such a thing is probable.
2. If you can speculate, what kind of scale of resources would this mean?
3. To your knowledge have there been any public or private attempts to do this?
I am not referring to tables that have select entries based on a dictionary, but mapping the entire range upto a certain number of characters.
(I have refered to This question already.)
It is possible. For a small number of characters, it has already been done. In the near future, it will be easy for larger numbers of characters. MD5 isn't getting any stronger.
That's a function of time. To reverse the entire 6-or-fewer-character alphanumeric space would require computing 62^6 entries. That's 56 trillion MD5s. That's doable by a determined small group or easy for a government, right now. In the future, it will be doable on a home computer. Remember, though, that as the number of allowable characters or the maximum length increases, the difficulty increase is exponential.
People already have done it. But, honestly, it doesn't matter - because anyone with half an ounce of sense uses a random salt. If you precompute the entire MD5 space and reverse it, that doesn't mean jack dandy if someone is using key strengthening or a good salt! Read up on salting.
5 or 6 characters is easy. 6 bytes is doable (that's 248 combinations), even with limited hardware.
Namely, a simple Core2 CPU from Intel will be able to hash one password in about 150 clock cycles (assuming you use a SSE2 implementation, which will hash four passwords in parallel in 600 clock cycles). With a 2.4 GHz quad core CPU (that's my PC, not exactly the newest machine available), I can then try about 226 passwords per second. For that kind of job, a massively parallel architecture is fine, hence it makes sense to use a GPU. For maybe 200$, you can buy a NVidia video card which will be about four times faster (i.e. 228 passwords per second). 6 alphanumeric characters (uppercase, lowercase and digits) are close to 236 combinations; trying them all is then a matter of 2(36-28) seconds, which is less than five minutes. With 6 random bytes, it will need 220 seconds, i.e. a bit less than a fortnight.
That's for the CPU cost. If you want to speed up the actual attack, you store the hash results: thus you will not need to recompute all those hashed passwords every time you attack a password (but you still have to do it once). 236 hash results (16 bytes each) mean 1 terabyte. You can buy a harddisk that big for 100$. 248 hash results imply 4096 times that storage space; in plain harddisks this will cost as much as a house: a bit expensive for the average bored student, but affordable for most kinds of governmental or criminal organizations.
Rainbow tables are an optimization trick for the storage. In rough terms, you store only one every t hash results, in exchange of having to do t lookups and t2 hash computations for every attack. E.g., you choose t=1000, you only have to buy four harddisks instead of four thousands, but you will need to make 1000 lookups and a million hashes every time you want to crack a password (this will need a dozen seconds at most, if you do it right).
Hence you have two costs:
The CPU cost is about computing hashes for the complete password space; with a table (rainbow or not) you have to do it once, and then can reuse that computational effort for every attacked password.
The storage cost is about storing the hash results in order to easily attack several passwords. Harddisks are not very expensive, as shown above. Rainbow tables help you lower storage costs.
Salting defeats cost sharing through precomputed tables (whether they are rainbow tables or just plain tables has no effect here: tables are about reusing precomputed values for several attacked passwords, and salts prevent such recycling).
The CPU cost can be increased by defining that the hash procedure is not just a single hash computation; for instance, you can define the "password hash" as applying MD5 over the concatenation of 10000 copies of the password. This will make each attacker guess one
thousand times more expensive. It also makes legitimate password validation one thousands times more expensive, but most users will not mind (the user has just typed his password; he cannot really see whether the password verification took 10ms or 10µs).
Modern Unix-like systems (e.g. Linux) use "MD5" passwords which actually combine salting and iterated hashing, as described above. (Actually, a modern Linux system may use another hash function, such as SHA-256, but that does not change things much here.) So precomputed tables will not help, and the on-the-fly password cracking is expensive. A password with 6 alphanumeric characters can still be cracked within a few days, because 6 characters are kind of weak anyway. Also, many longer passwords are crackable because it turns out that human begins are bad are remembering passwords; hence they will not choose just any random sequence of characters, they will select passwords which have some "meaning". This reduces the space of possible passwords.
It's called a rainbow table, and it's easily defeated with salting.
Yes, it is not only probable, but it's probably been done before.
It depends on whether they are mapping the entire possible range or just a range of ASCII characters. Let's say you need 128 bits + 6 bytes to store each match. That's 22 bytes. You'd need:
6.32 GB to store all lowercase alphabetic combinations [a-z]
405 GB to for all alphabetic combinations [a-zA-Z]
1.13 TB for all alphanumeric combinations [a-zA-Z0-9]
5.24 TB for all combinations that consists of letters, numbers and 18 symbols.
As you see, it increases exponentially, but even at 5.24 TB that's nothing to agencies like, say, the NSA or the CIA. They probably have done it.
As everyone else said, salting can easily defeat rainbow tables and that's almost as important as hashing. Read this: Just hashing is far from enough - How to position against dictionary and rainbow attacks

please advice whether about our case of using encryption

Our client wants to give us a database. The original database has a phone number column. He doesn't want to give us a phone number. Somehow i'm not sure why - it is decided that client will give us encrypted phone numbers with encrypted with 128bit AES key.
We will tell the client which phone number is to be shortlisted for some purpose but we will never know what is the actual phone number .. we'll just know the encrypted numbers.
Here are things I don't understand:
is using 128bit AES key encryption suitable for this purpose ?
should the client preserve the AES key used to convert the numbers or
should the client instead of
preserving the key create a database
mapping the orignal numbers with
encrypted numbers
should the same key be used to convert all numbers or different
if randomly generated keys are used to encrypt numbers isn't it
possible that for two phone numbers
the encrypted text may be same ?
IMO this is the wrong approach. Instead of encrypting the phone number, which still leaves a chance of you decrypting it (e.g. because someone leaks the key), the client should just replace them with an ID that points to a table with the real telephone numbers; of course, this lookup table stays with him, you never get it.
I.E.
Original table:
Name | Phone
-------+---------
Erich | 555-4245
Max | 1234-567
You get:
Name | Phone
-------+---------
Erich | 1
Max | 2
Only your client has:
ID | Phone
---+---------
1 | 555-4245
2 | 1234-567
Addressing your concerns in order:
It may be, it may not be. You haven't really mentioned what the purpose is at all, in fact:
Why the need for encryption?
Who is it being protected from?
What's the value (or liability to you, if lost) of the data?
How motivated are the hypothetical attackers assumed to be?
What performance loss is acceptable for the security gain?
What hardware do you have available?
Who has what physical/logical access to various parts of the system?
And so on, and so forth. Without knowing the situation, it's not possible to say whether this is an appropriate encryption scheme. (Though it is likely to be a solid choice).
Surely that's for the client to decide? I will say, though, that the latter case seems to defeat the purpose of encryption entirely.
The same key ought to be used to convert all numbers, unless you fancy juggling keys around to try and remember which one to use to decrypt which phone numbers. If the security system is well designed, this wouldn't give any extra security and would just be a bizarre headache.
By definitiong of encryption, no. It's always a reversable mapping which means there's no loss of information such as you would get with a hash. And consequently, every instance of ciphertext has a single unique plaintext that will encrypt to it (with a given key).
Though all in all this doesn't sound like it's needed. It sounds to me like someone's been making decisions based on appearances rather than technical merit - "We encrypt your phone numbers with the same 128-bit encryption used in browsers" sounds good but is it actually needed?

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