I am wondering what are the technical hurdles involved with offering a voting system (or say ratings) without requiring the user to sign in. I know there are issues with robots, voting a bunch - but what if you keep the users IP address? Do proxies become an issue?
I'd like to build a public voting system that is still reliable.. is that possible right now?
EDIT
The stakes are moderately high for correctness, that is human-verification, and one-vote-per-user. A full-fledged login will ask too much of the user given his role (voter)
Also, if this is "impossible" to accomplish, how can you detect vote fraud after the fact? Could wikipedia's model work here?
Thanks,
Matt Mueller
As you said, you'll need to handle robot behavior.
If you log an IP address, you'll have problems with corporate users which usually stay behind a proxy, so everyone seems to have same IP.
Maybe you should to display some CAPTCHA image to validate human votes. Can't be that hard for users, since it's suppose to vote only once.
EDIT: How to enforce one vote per user?
You can:
Ask for a valid email and send a link to vote
To log your user in and let it vote
Let user vote and save a cookie
Let user vote and ban user IP
All this options have a weakness, so you'll never be sure.
To handle this problem "definitely", you'll probably need to bind their virtual identity with their real identity. This can be done by asking for personal information and keeping it. But that brings a whole new problem set.
First of all, be sure the voting uses POST to prevent robots and pre-caching clients to cause a vote.
Restricting IP addresses will cause problems with dynamic IP ranges, proxies and people sharing a connection, so I wouldn't go this way.
Most of those systems remember that a user a voted using a cookie, but this can of course easily be tricked by deleting the cookie or just using a different browser.
Related
First of all, I'd like to preface this post by stating that I know this is a terrible user experience...
I have a client who would like to prevent site visitors from sharing login credentials.
Because this is a corporate marketing site, social login is not an option.
The client claims that there is a site where upon registration, a cookie is dropped onto the user's device and the user is also given a unique password that will only work on that specific device.
Does anyone know how to make this work using Wordpress? (I'd like to avoid using third party plugins)
This sounds like the use of Single Sign On (SSO) or 2 factor Authenticaton (2FA) will be needed. The SSO Wikipidea page references a cookie based solution for TCP/IP networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_sign-on so perhaps that's how this came up from your client.
Once you identify what your options are with that, based on what your client is using for authentication, then set up may be a bit easier. I think a plugin would save you a lot of time, since this is a pretty elaborate task. This one may do the trick https://wordpress.org/plugins/miniorange-saml-20-single-sign-on/
Regardless it's pretty challenging to prevent the sharing of credentials. SSO may be a deterrent if that gives access to something else that user doesn't want to share. 2FA doesn't prevent a user from sharing the pin thats generated too. Perhaps the only real way is to require an IP match on a device with bio-metric authenticaton.
When a customer signs up for a site, we want to let them know whether a username/email is available for use.
We have a httphandler that serves the purpose of feeding a jquery script that showsthe customer whether or not their desired username/email is available.
The question is:
The service can clearly be seen being called when you view the request in fiddler.
It shows /emlhandler.asmx?name=xxxxxxxxxxx#yyy.com
From the handler, a simple 0 or 1 is returned to indicate whether or not the name/address is available.
My concern is that this seems like a major security issue that would be very easy for an inexperienced person to exploit to discover all the users on the site.
So friends, how do you protect your site info and still allow the ajax callback to provide a great user experience?
Thanks.
Heath
You are being slightly paranoid here. Every site that allows user registration has to do something similar. One thing you can reasonably do is add a slight delay (maybe 2 or 3 seconds) to the handler's processing in order to reduce the likelihood or ease of a brute-force attack. Frankly, I don't think anyone would bother.
Another option is just to ignore repeated emails and send a verification email before a user's registration actually becomes active. If a new user attempts to use an existing email, the original email owner receives the verification and can cancel or ignore it. But I don't recommend this.
I'd say the vast majority of the sites I've used will just immediately say "this email address is already registered... did you forget your password?" Just knowing an email address is already in use on a given site does not in itself represent a security breach.
One possible solution would be to only enable POST requests for that method.
And since you cannot invoke services from JavaScript from another domain (XSS - Cross-site Scripting) without your authorization, then you would be protected.
However this technique would prevent malicious users from calling your web service to discover user names but this wouldn't prevent the user to automate a process to simulate user entering data in a text box to force a call to the service, in that case, perhaps you could allow just a number of requests per user in an X amount of time.
You could keep track of the number of attempts using the Session object from your web service
Another approac would be to add a re Captcha to your site, however this would decrease the level of responsiveness if you used to allow your users to capture a user name and as soon as they write you call your service. Implementing would require your users to write the auto-generated captcha in order to submit your data
I'm starting to size up a project where I feel security needs strike a little closer to home. What tools and techniques could I look at to attempt to raise an alarm when a valid login is used, but the owner of the login has given it away or had it stolen. I would prefer ASP.NET, then MVC 3, oriented stuff.
This is not a silver bullet, but perhaps you should consider employing some kind of two-factor authentication. For example: when a user creates an account with you, you require that she provide you with a phone number where she can receive text messages as part of the registration process. Then, when she attempts to log in, you text her a temporary authentication code to be used in combination with her username and password.
This ads an extra layer of security to the system, because an attacker would have to both know her username and password and have physical access to her cell phone in order to compromise her account.
I hope that's helpful.
Seems like you would get a lot of false positives... but you might try checking what IP address the login is coming from. Most people will log in from the same IP address most of the time, so when that changes, it's at least a warning sign. If you want to be very strict about security, you could maintain a whitelist (for each account) and require that they get their IP address added to the whitelist before logging in.
My bank (Chase) does this by checking a secure cookie during my username/password login. If the cookie is missing or corrupted, they require a second form of authentication, which is either a code sent via text to my phone number on file or via email to my email address on file. Once the second form of authentication is complete, they set the secure cookie and then I can login from that browser with only username and password.
Implement your own Membership provider and add field locked to model,
check for user being locked on login and do some actions
It might be useful to think of the factors of the Authentication process, so that you can be sure that you are sufficiently covering things. You can easily get ridiculous with the layers of assurances, but I happen to find that most banks now have a variation on a simple model. All of this is, of course, over SSL
User submits account name. Additionally, you can require a secondary piece of information, last 4 of account number or year part of date of birth.
Optional, but a good idea: present the user with a counter sign, that is something that verifies the identity of the server. The user selects this at registration and should be looking for this every time they attempt to log in. This aids in preventing phishing.
System checks to see if the current system using IP lookup or cookie is associated with the account. If not, presents challenge question along with password input. Otherwise, presents just the password input.
Complicated, but can actually be done in 2 pages and more secure than is usually required.
I've presented this workflow to a few bank clients and they usually remove one or two of the checks for a balance of user friendliness.
With phones with text capabilities being so common, the idea of SMS verification code as mentioned by others is also a good idea, though I haven't implemented this in a system yet, personally.
I'm looking for the simplest solution to this situation:
I have a pre existing web store with a shopping cart using .NET (vbscript)
I customize what products my customer's see based on the subdomain they use to come to my site (customer.mysite.com)
What my customer's are requesting is, instead of typing in their billing/shipping addresses each time, that they have a selection to choose from from previous addresses they have used.
How can I accomplish this, keeping in mind that they don't log in, they simply use the subdomain to come in to my site and place orders without a user/pass.
The simpler (easier to implement) solution, the better.
Why not just show all the addresses for that subdomain, but, due to some privacy concerns, I would wait until they type in a street address, then show them the addresses for that.
Otherwise, everyone on that subdomain will see the address of everyone else on that subdomain.
If they don't care, then just show all the addresses for that subdomain.
Or, give them an option to login and order, and then when they do that, then you can show them all their addresses they shipped do when they are logged in.
The last one is the preferred one, IMO.
If they don't login then I assume you don't have them create an account either. Thus the server won't be able to identify them. In this case I think you are left with using client cookies. Just make sure you don't store sensitive data in them (like credit card).
I would place a cookie on the users computer with the address information in it attached to the subdomain. The down side to this is that you should not put sensitive information inside cookies but depending on the nature of your business this may not be a problem for you.
I'm rewriting a website and going from a home-grown authentication model where users logged in with their account id (numbers) and password, to .NET FormsAuthentication where users will login with a username that they choose (or is available) and a stronger password. There are over 38K existing accounts and I'm trying to decide if the existing users should re-register or if I should write some code to do this on their behalf. I've already ruled out creating the usernames for the users because they won't be able to change their username. Luckily we don't have any users named Brenda Utthead.
If the user re-registers, some may gripe about having to do this step again and it may raise some support calls, but I stay with the standard process that everyone has to do. Or I can allow the user to login with their existing userid and password and then optionally give them a grace period to convert their account. I'm hesitant about the latter because it's special code and a possible threat vector because it bypasses the standard authentication mechanism and allows users to log in using less secure credentials.
This application currently accounts for about 40% of our website traffic and I'm not worried about users not coming back to the website because of the possibility of them having to re-register.
What does everyone think?
If you want your users to come back your best bet is to convert their accounts and send an email explaining the transition.
Do not make them re-register whatever you do.
You'll lose half of your users if you do that.
Give them a service so that they can enter their previous user id and have them provide their email address. Email them at the address provided and have them login with their email address as their new user name.
I am about to do the same thing. I am writing a migration page where the user logs in with his/her existing credentials and behind the scenes, I write out to the asp.net membership tables. Do a check first to make sure they haven't already migrated for all subsequent visits.
Don't make them re-register. A little work on your side is all it takes and you need to keep your customers happy.
After listening to everyone's suggestion, I've decided to modify the login. I look at the username they provide and try to guess that they're an existing user. Then I look them up in the old table and if I find a match take them to a conversion screen. There they can quickly convert their account or skip the whole process and login temporarily. The conversion form has fewer fields to fill out b/c I was able to authenticate them against the old user table so I don't need them to provide as much info.
I'm not thrilled with skipping the conversion but that option is only offered for the first 45 days from go-live.
Either convert them or find a way for both membership models to exist together, and somehow convert each user across at login or something.
Think about how long it took to get the 38k members and ask yourself if those were all wiped out, would those same people go through the hassle of signing up again. If you've got a really strong community you should be ok, the hit would just be a matter of time till you're built up.
The other thing you could do to mitigate the risk would be to send out a email, although spam blockers may filter them you could get to a high percentage of your users and tell them about the new membership stuff. Might get some older people back to the site as well in the process.
The biggest challenge is converting all the data that is associated with the user's accounts. People are going to be really upset if they've built up some sort of reputation that you're going to destroy with a new membership system.
This website is a check your balance type of website. It's not a banking site per se, but it exists as a convenience tool to users. I don't believe it would be realistic for users to cancel their accounts because they are forced to re-register.
I do like some of the ideas I'm reading in the responses though.
I would migrate their information and then on their first login ask them to confirm that their membership info is correct (just to be anal).