My company has a website product (ASP.NET) which is sold to customers. It means we don't host the website. They install it on their server and run it in the intranet.
I need to implement some sort of copy protection mechanism so that not everyone ends up installing the website. It has following aspects:
It has to be completely software based (no dongles).
Hiding usage information in registry or some folder in c:\ (basically outside virtual directory) is not an option for a website
Please can you suggest any scheme/method?
One suggestion is to use some kind of web service running, of course you need to have a main server to do so. In this server you can have some of your clients servers data (IP of the authorized servers, CPU and Motherboard ID's, and other important data).
This web service has to run some important logic of the program and return a value to the authorized servers. If the data of autorization sent by the client doesn't match, the server do will not execute the routine.
Of course I assume that this side of the logic is included in a DLL in the application and not in plain code.
A technique that worked well for a buddy of mine was to install a web bug on an administrative page which would report back to their server. You can monitor when and where the application is installed. It could be easily removed, but won't by most customers.
Simple, easy to do, and works relatively well.
Something you could try. Compile binaries for each client, obfuscate the code, lock the site down to a single domain. If its an internal app the domain might be something like "productname.clientname.internal". The app checks the domain of all the incoming requests, refuses anything that doesn't match.
As already pointed out by jeffamaphone: people will find ways around it, but it's enough to 'slow down' those not super determined.
[disclaimer]I sell the product I am recommending.[/disclaimer]
Take a look at DeployLX. You can add licensing to your web based application to require one of a couple different options.
Hardware based locking so it can only be used on one machine.
Domain based locking so it's tied to a specific domain name.
IP based locking to tie it to an IP address.
License server locking to that your app checks in periodically with a centralized web service.
It's pretty flexible and should let you create a balance between protection and not frustrating your users.
Related
We are one of the Openstack cloud user and use Swift to store lots of files in cloud. And our users (the end-users) will access these files. If the files are public, then the end-users can directly visit the object URL in web or mobile applications. However, some of files are private. Each end-user can only access his own private files.
The end-user may have two methods to access his private files:
A. The end-user always sends requests to our server. And our server will get the files from Swift, and then send them to the user. In this
method, Our server can be regarded as a file proxy. We have the
authentication of Openstack, and the user has the authentication of
our server. We should maintain our own user system.
One problem of this method is the scalability. Because each request
will be sent to our server, then the server will be the bottleneck if
many files are uploading or downloading at the same time. The high
scalability feature of Swift can't be used if we don't have enough
servers. Actually we really don't need lots of servers except file
transferring.
B. The end-user directly sends requests to Swift. It may solve the huge file bandwidth problem. But he must have the authentication
method of Openstack. So we need thousands of Openstack accounts for
our users while we are only one of the user of Openstack! It seems
strange and is not feasible.
Are there any other methods to meet the requirement?
You could use your server to get the files (scenario A), but put that server "in the cloud". Then as access needs to scale up, you spin up additional servers under a load balancer. You, therefore, are distributing the load horizontally as needed.
An idea.
(Disclaimer: I am a Rackspace employee)
A third idea is to use swift's tempurl feature, when a client needs a file, you genenerate a signed url to the file, having checked checked if they are authorised, and the url they get enables them to download directly from swift,
so two problems are solved
1. User A can not get User B's files
2. Download is straight from swift, so your server does not become the bottleneck for downloads (only for authorization).
I have experience developing software and web applications and I have decided to do some freelance work on the side. Well, I met with my first client and they are requesting a relatively simple, custom system that (without being long winded) tracks client’s paperwork as it progresses through the business’s different manual processes. It is a small business that has about 10 employees, but all of the employees will interact with the client’s paperwork, therefore everyone would need access to the new system. When I say ‘track’ I literally mean that the employees will ‘check as complete’ on a simple page the increases a progress bar at different stages for the paperwork. Now I am %110 capable of coding the custom system that meets their needs, but I am unsure about how I should go about doing it.
The information that is being tracked in the new system and stored in the DB is confidential information that they are very protective of. My main question is how should I be developing this to be as secure as I can?
-They have their own server in house, so should I develop an application (VB and SQL) for the server and require employees to log on remotely to use it? Can more than one person access/use the application at a time?
-Or should I develop a web application (ASP.Net/VB and SQL) that is only accessible on their network to their employees? They plan to expand offices, could they set up a VPN to access the site?
I’m leaning towards a web application, but I have not done too much in term of security. Basically I’m looking for pros and cons for either option or any suggestions on what I should.
PS, stackoverflow is awesome! Long time user, first time poster!
If you want to develop using vb & sql you have to consider that:
You need to have real ip
Your system will communicate threw certain port and you have to handle the security measure for letting certain port opened in your server.
You should have good knowledge in network programming
If you want to develop using asp.net you have to consider that:
in case only office employees will use the system, you can develop against users in Active Directory and for outside users with username and password with SSL connection or vpn
for preventing more than one person access the file you can simply add column 'locked' in case file is being used.
Well im not a web fan (I suck) ive seen too many security issues go with it...i.e Lulzsec, but i do very much love VB apps.
So I would definetely recommend a VB app connected to a MSSQL database (coz it's easy to configure and havent seen any security exploits yet),my Chinese friend told me there is a way to access MySQL free databases.Now, allow remote access but make sure your Windows Firewall is also configured properly do look at all angles of security.
If I remember well there is an option in MSSQL to specify the IP addresses or is it MAC addresses that can access the DB so maybe input all of the 10 employees' IP addresses assuming they are static,if they are dynamic (DHCP) don't bother. And ask them to make the IP address of the server where you will host the DB on static.
If only 10 employees use the DB then limit the connections to 10. For now develop this when it comes to VPN you can make a Remote version of the App im sure that will come later right now focus on the basics. Also use Dotfuscator when you are publishing the app I heard it is very good.N also im suggesting the document/work order is received at the reception so that user will check in the document with specifics...if they are passing on the work order to the next user they should select the user and then THAT user may enter some sort of verification code unique to the user...im sure you can envision the rest from here. Now do I also get a cut from this?lol
I've been doing the same for years now, and I always take the website side, this days I go width ASP.NET MVC 4, it's easier, everything in their place and extremely easier to test and maintain.
The web application has a very big advantage to any standalone windows application, you deploy and upgrade only one application instead to maintain all the different versions once you start deploying windows apps, and they are harder to debug once you start to having different machines with different versions and so on...
so, Web or Win app = Web app, always!
All you need is a server that run IIS and set it up for using Active Directory (Visual Studio has that project already, simply create an ASP.NET MVC and choose the "intranet" template), it will set up everything for you, and all you need later is tweak the Active Directory connection string.
I also use a self-signed SSL to protect data between client and server, as I also make the apps available outside the office without VPN needed, as long as they login with their secure AD credentials.
And... audit everything into a secondary database, every action performed by a user since they login until they logout, every view, update or creating data witch .NET makes it simple if you create your Logging method to simple log messages and Stack messages on errors.
This will greatly benefit your employer and you when something goes wrong.
I would say to go with web application. Advantage using web application is, if they want to expand bussiness .. same can you do with you WebApp. But choose .Net over VB, going with latest techonology will help you resolve current challanges.
My organisation (a small non-profit) currently has an internal production .NET system with SQL Server database. The customers (all local to our area) submit requests manually that our office staff then input into the system.
We are now gearing up towards online public access, so that the customers will be able to see the status of their existing requests online, and in future also be able to create new requests online. A new asp.net application will be developed for the same.
We are trying to decide whether to host this application on-site on our servers(with direct access to the existing database) or use an external hosting service provider.
Hosting externally would mean keeping a copy of Requests database on the hosting provider's server. What would be the recommended way to then keep the requests data synced real-time between the hosted database and our existing production database?
Trying to sync back and forth between two in-use databases will be a constant headache. The question that I would have to ask you is if you have the means to host the application on-site, why wouldn't you go that route?
If you have a good reason not to host on site but you do have some web infrastructure available to you, you may want to consider creating a web service which provides access to your database via a set of well-defined methods. Or, on the flip side, you could make the database hosted remotely with your website your production database and use a webservice to access it from your office system.
In either case, providing access to a single database will be much easier than trying to keep two different ones constantly and flawlessly in sync.
If a webservice is not practical (or you have concerns about availability) you may want to consider a queuing system for synchronization. Any change to the db (local or hosted) is also added to a messaging queue. Each side monitors the queue for changes that need to be made and then apply the changes. This would account for one of the databases not being available at any given time.
That being said, I agree with #LeviBotelho, syncing two db's is a nightmare and should probably be avoided if you can. If you must, you can also look into SQL Server replication.
Ultimately the data is the same, customer submitted data. Currently it is being entered by them through you, ultimately it will be entered directly by them, I see no need in having two different databases with the same data. The replication errors alone when they will pop-up (and they will), will be a headache for your team for nothing.
I'm trying to find the best server architecture solution to deploy monthly updates to an Asp.net external public facing website. What I'm looking for are ways to release a new version of a website with minimal impact to users. Besides deploying the standard way (ie. stop IIS, copy new website over existing website, start IIS), what are some "better" solutions for deployment out there? It would be nice if they kept their session and didn't have to see a "Website under maintenance" message during the update.
My server configuration
We have 2 IIS web servers (2003) and are trying to figure out the best way to utilize them for deployments. My first thought was to update the non-active web server with the latest release. Then to gracefully point the web traffic to that server with minimal impact to users (best case, the user doesn't lose his session). How would you go about "repointing" the web traffic from server 1 to server 2? Changing firewall NAT? Changing DNS records? Some other way?? We need to be able to test the live site immediately after we release the new changes (duh).
BTW, we are using nant and cruise control to automate the builds, and a custom web service to deploy the build to production. So it's all automated with the click of a button.
Could a better solution be achieved using a 3rd server? If so how?
The way we do is
We have a load balancer from netscaler,
take one webserver out of loadbalancer , do all deployments, do a iisreset and the put back in load balancer.
Do the same thing for server2 .
Finally invalidate loadbalancer cache.
Well, there are a couple of things here:
First, consider using a load balancing solution. Windows 2003 server ships with windows load balancing (WLBS), though its not the greatest product. It is, though, free. With that, you can point all traffic to one server, update it, and then do the opposite.
Secondly, you may want to consider looking at how you're working with sessions. HTTP is stateless, which means that as long as you can reconstruct a user's session on any page hit, you should be fine. One ideal step towards this is using ASP.NET Forms Authentication - the cookie written by it isn't tied to an ASP.NET session. Of course, this approach leads to greater risk - there is a chance users will get an error screen if they hit something JUST AS you're copying files. And then there will be a delay while the app pool refreshes.
Overall, your better option is load balancing. Even with it, though, consider trying the second option as well - having sessions that can regenerate works well if users fail to be sticky to one of the servers in the pool.
Just wanted to add this for brevity. At my previous work, we achieved seamless deployments by using the following setup:
A load balancer would point to the production ASP.NET webservers (two in your case, but we had three), and the webservers would have their session setup to pull from a third server dedicated to hosting OutOfProc ASP.NET session.
To deploy a site, we'd pull one of the servers out of the load balancer, update the files, fire it back up, and place it back into the load balancer pool. Repeat for the rest of the webservers.
Because each webserver got the session data from the one central server, taking one webserver out, did not log out the users on that server.
If we had code changes that were incompatible with the existing session data, we'd wait till a scheduled maintenance window to deploy. Otherwise, users with that session data would get errors till they logged out.
Additionally, since this setup relies on the webserver being up, if you wanted to increase reliability, you could change the OutOfProc to SQL based session servers. You would need several servers that replicated the same session database and point the webservers to them. More complicated, but would reduce site downtime.
I am looking into different ways to handle updating an ASP.NET application across many different clients, and looking for suggestions from your previous experience.
We need the client apps to check if they have any available updates.
A way to Auto update (If possible, something similar to chromes but for webapp).
Some way to check that we are the ones sending the updates. (Checksum of some sort I would guess)
Any other tips/advice
Thanks
Edit: after thinking more about this overnight, I would have to agree that auto updates may not be the best. However maybe something more along the lines of how wordpress does it. Wordpress will display saying that there is an update available then clicking will auto update the system.
I would absolutely not have your application auto update on clients (assuming you mean clients are entities external to your organization) servers. We would immediately stop using a product that would "phone home" and update itself. Clients need to be able to choose when and how an update on their server occurs.
If you are going to do this, the easiest way would be to set up URI the systems could ping once a day etc. and see if there are updates available. If so the application would pull it down from the host system and update itself. If you do it using SSL then the certificate would verify the URI being hit is your company.
Having a hard time figuring out if you're actually talking about a web application or a desktop application. If you're trying to do something similar to Chrome...I'm guessing a desktop application. If that's the case...check out ClickOnce deployment.
It offers the first three bullet points you mention:
Every time a person runs the app, it will check for updates.
If updates are found, the user can choose to install them or not (better user experience than forcing the update on the user).
The application always checks the URL that the app was installed from...which in your case would be your servers.