I am developing an app which I should design a page for users who forget passwords and send email to them the new passwords. I am using ASP.NET Membership and password format should be hashed.
My problem is when sending mail has been failed, password has been changed and wow! no work can be done.
what is your solution?
You should send users an email with a link, where they can confirm password reset (otherwise you could reset passwords to other users by guessing their emails). On the linked page users would then confirm password reset (or even change it themselves).
But it's a better practice not to send passwords in any way shape or form. It's the most secure.
The process
Users request password reset by their email.
They receive an email with a link
Theyclick the link and provide a new password that gets hashed right away and stored in the system.
You could temporarily set the passwordFormat value for affected users to "Clear" in the aspnet_Membership table, assign them a password, and then work on getting the e-mail working.
Setting the aspnet_Membership.passwordFormat value to 0 changes the format to Clear text, which means it's not encrypted. It's not secure, but will allow login. After that, you can reset the password and it'll be changed back to 2 (Encrypted).
The user should change their password again, and hopefully the email will succeed.
If they entered an incorrect address, they should contact an administrator who can correct their email address.
If it is possible to tell if an e-mail is successfully sent before you actually commit the change to the database this would be a good option. This isn't always the case, but maybe it could work for your application.
Usually with my experience ASP will thrown an exception if the e-mail fails. If this happens don't do anything in the DB, if the mail goes through then change the password. That doesn't mean they will get the e-mail but you can't account for problems during travel of the e-mail anyway. The option above would apply after this fails. ;)
I don't know the support for such a feature in asp.net.
But, some website send you an email with a link to click (that expires in some days). Clicking which, will make sure you are committing to that action (i.e. password is changed only after they receive email & click the link they received).
ASP.NET also supports the question and secret answer approach to password recovery if email doesnt work.
Related
I noticed that after a user receives a password reset email and resets their password, the email verified flag on the user's account is unchanged. Can this behaviour be changed?
I find this behaviour confusing as if the user changes the password they've obviously confirmed they are in control of the email account.
Another question might be: if you are in control of the email account and you want to reset the password, does it mean that you are the original user?
i.e. you may be able to do it, is it however a correct behavior? Others will be more useful for the technical aspect but I thought that this might be worth thinking about.
A customer of ours complained about login password recovery using plain text password. The only workaround I know is auto-login with encripted username and passord in the query string.
What other options exist to increase the password recovery security?
Thanks.
You can send them a URL that lets them reset the password themselves.
You could create a database table that stores, at the very minimum, a user id and a hash value.
Send the user a link that includes the hash, and on the receiving page look up the associated information and allow the user to reset the password to the account. Which I'm hoping you store in the database as a hash value. Plain text passwords should never be stored or sent out.
Just be sure that the link either expires or is deactivated once the password is changed. Otherwise someone could visit that link whenever they want and change the password.
Along the same lines as Brandon's excellent answer, here is what we do:
Do not store passwords in plain text, or even a decryptable value. Always store passwords using a 1-way hashing algorithm. This means only the user can ever know what the plain-text password is.
When a user forgets their password, present them with a form where they enter their email address, and click submit.
When they submit their email address, create a table row with 2 major pieces: The first is a password reset token (we use a Guid for this). The token should be timestamped, so that you know when it was created, and when it expires (ours expire within 2 hours of submission). The second piece is a secret code that the user will have to enter in order to reset their password.
Send an email to the user, with a link to a page that will accept the token and secret code. When they click the link (or visit the page and enter the code manually), you can then present them with a page that lets them change their password without knowing its previous value.
Using a time-constrained token is a good idea, because if the user's email account is later compromised, the criminals can't use the email to reset the password -- assuming of course that the email account is not compromised within 2 hours of the password reset request.
I wouldn't send out the actual password of the account in plain text to the user's email address. The reason for this is because if someone hacked the users email address now they have their actual password. Most likely this password will be used for other systems as well.
The alternative is to send an encrypted querystring that links to that user and allow them to change their password based on some sort of security question or demographics you have specific to that user.
Facebook uses a matching of friends images to names. If you have their DOB and address you could use that (not that secure). Or you could set up specific security question and answers which would be better.
I have my little web application, with simple registration strategy - provide email and password and you are done.
Recently bot's starting to attack my application, registering big number of users from non existent emails using the same passwords.
I want to prevent that. My idea is to extend login verification, but check the existance of email address. Do you know any web services (prefereably WCF) that could do that?
This is definitely not the way to solve this problem. Try one of these
Allow user to enter only username and send auto-generated password to their email.
Send a verification link to the user email and approve him/her only after verification
This has been discussed on How to check if an email address exists without sending an email? . Basically there are ways verify email addresses, but in practice none of them is reliable. However, you can still check via SMTP, and if the server denies the existence of the expected user, send him an email with a verification link anyway. This does not prevent spammers from setting up fake servers that acknowledge the existence of any user, of using other peoples email addresses, but it's probably the closest you can get to your initial requirement of having no verification email.
I would recommend you to update your registration form. Try to use something tricky for bots. For example, post the form via AJAX with JSON object wrapper.
Try a service like: http://elasticemail.com/
You can use the api to check if the email was delivered. There is also a 'bouce list' you can check.
net website, i would like to implement forget password. I am using following steps
Form having input box for login Id and email Id and CAPTCHA
when user enter details and submit, at backend after validation new password is generated and replaced old password at database.
New passowrd is send to user at email.
Please help me whether i am doing right or not?
Is there any other secure mechanism for the same?
[EDIT]
Thanks, i got your reply. Really this is a secure mechanism. But here i have few doubt
What message should i shown to user when he enter loginId and email address at forgotten password page?
Whether message would be same for valid user and mallicious user?
Advantage of using CSRF token? Any help / link
When user click on link then what should i do; because as i guess user should automatically loggin into their account -then after that i have 2 choice (first) send new password automatically to user (second) new form will shown to user where user will enetr old password and new password twice?
Please help?
I can see why you'd want a CAPTCHA, but I'd take a different approach.
When a password reset is requested check that a reset has not already been requested for that account within the last X minutes. If a password has already been requested ignore the reset request.
Check the IP requesting the password reset. If that IP has requested a password reset in the last Y minutes ignore the request.
If the checks in 1 & 2 pass check the account exists. If it doesn't ignore the request.
If we've gotten this far generate a one time token, which expires in Z minutes and a password reset URL which encompasses this token. Email this to the registered email address. When the URL is loaded prompt for a new password and reset.
For those who believe that you should tell the user where the email has gone I strongly disagree. This is "information leakage", even if you do limit it to the domain name. For example say I've registered on JeffAtwoodEatsBabies.com as blowdart. If Jeff had requested a password reset for me and you showed the registration domain then he'd see idunno.org. This is my personal domain and thus Jeff would know the blowdart user is, in fact, me. This is a bad bad thing. I should not have to register using hotmail or gmail or whatever in order to protect myself from your code showing an email domain to all and sundry.
In addition you shouldn't be showing error messages at all. No matter what happens, a username is not actually registered, or too many requests have been made or the sky has fallen you should be telling the user that the password reset procedure has started. Informing a user that an account doesn't exist is more information leakage.
One final thing you could do is add a CSRF token to the reset request page, so it cannot be driven from other web sites.
Followup
So to answer your further questions.
What message you show is up to you. "Instructions for resetting your password have been emailed to the registered email for this account" is one idea, but really it's down to your audience.
Already addressed above.
Wikipedia is a good starting point. How you do it depends on your platform and is a complete other question! For ASP.NET you could look at my codeplex project, http://anticsrf.codeplex.com or look at ViewStateUserKey.
When the link is clicked I would first validate the token in the URL against the username it's being applied to then I would either allow the user to enter a new password, or generate a new one and email it. You can't prompt for the old one, as the whole point is the user has forgotten it!
There are many ways this has been implemented. As you said, generating a new password and sending it to the registered email address is one method. I wouldn't suggest you go that route though, as my password would be reset everytime somebody tried guessing my password.
Instead, the best thing I've seen to date is simply emailing the registered email with a link that will begin a password reset process. You may even let the user know which email address to check by showing a masked version of their email address used in registration:
An email was sent to ********#hotmail.com. Please check your inbox to continue.
Be sure to keep in consideration those of us who may forget which email address were registered with - typically a few security questions are a great way to make that information available.
I've done that recently. When the user enters their username or email address, we generate a unique token and email it to them as part of a link. Upon receipt of that email, they click the link, and are automatically logged in, taken to the my account screen, and prompted to reset their password.
Of course, this relies 100% on the security of the email client, but it's hard to beat from a usability perspective.
You shoud check the answer to the question : Can anyone provide references for implementing web application self password reset mechanisms properly? from D.W. on security.stackexchange.
It is the most complete answer I found on the subject. I also suggest you to read this article : Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature
I have a simple web application set up where admins can create users. Users do not create themselves. All an admin has to do is enter a username and an e-mail and a temporary password is sent to the user for them to login. This e-mail is sent in plain text format. If the user is logging on for the first time, they are required to change their password and enter a security question and answer. The user obviously has to know their temporary password in order to login for the first time and this is the only way I know of letting them know (through e-mail). The other option would be to have the admin call the user and tell them over the phone or in person their temporary password, but this is not practical. How could I handle a situation like this?
I typically use a temporary url based on an invite record on the back end. Essentially you create an invite record and generate a hash based on some information perhaps the users email address, a timestamp and a random value. Store the hash as part of the invite record and then send them a url with the hash as the parameter.
When they click the link lookup the invite and validate that it exists and has not been used - then allow them to setup their password and invalidate the invite.
It gets rid of the need to send any sort of password and you can set an expiry on your invite records if you want as well.
The scenario you describe is very common- emailing a temporary password and requiring it to be changed on first login. Unless you have a specific problem with this model I see no reason not to use it. Having an admin call users can get complicated- I would avoid this at all costs.
You can generate a custom url with a password and user hash as argument where the user has to log itself. The hash will be difficult to retrieve if the attacker does not have the information