I'm a relatively new programmer to backend security so very much in the dark about how to set up HTTPS. I'm currently writing an IOS app that is sending http requests to my public EC2 backend domain, however I'm trying to transition this to HTTPS. Right now the backend is running on the developmental Flask server using HTTPS with a self signed certificate. However the problem is that on the IOS app side, it rejects this as invalid so I'm unable to test HTTPS dependant features. I tried to use the domain exception with the infoplist and ip.xip.io but it still complains that someone could be pretending to be this address. Could someone list in a very systematic way how I should approach building this out,i.e are there any free CA's, do I need a cert from a CA, and how to go about properly connecting the app and backend with HTTPS using my ec2 public ip.
Perhaps the iOS app will authenticate properly using a free community certificate. Investigate free certificate authorities, like letsencrypt. There are several. These work like the commercial CAs such as GoDaddy.
Actually the easiest solution was to just use Ngrok
Related
I am trying to set up a workflow of authentication to a new kubernetes cluster (Azure AKS) using oauth2-proxy (https://oauth2-proxy.github.io/oauth2-proxy/).
My question is probably pretty dumb, but I am a bit confused.
Is there a way to test a flow like that without having already a valid TLS certificate to use https and a valid registered domain everywhere?
Because for what I see in examples and tutorials everyone is referencing directly with https and registered domains both in Ingress and Oauth2 application (which in my case would be Azure AD App Registration).
There is no way to just have a POC of the tool before buying domains and tls certificates?
Thank you very much!
I would recommend that you start by using proper TLS certificates, because some things don't work over HTTP like they used to do. For example some important cookies will be rejected if set/sent over HTTP.
This is due to the SameSite cookies security property:
see:SameSite cookies
I created a simple .NET Core Console application on C# which uses TcpListener to accept connections on a specific port and return an answer.
I bought an AWS Lightsail instance and deploy my server application manually via RDP. The instance has a static IP-address and a domain name like ec2-<IP>.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com (as I discovered via reverse DNS lookup). The client is an iOS application and it needs a secure TCP connection to transfer data to server and vice versa. iOS app is not working with my self-signed certificate - it needs to use certificate from trusted CA, so the question is: where I can get the trusted SSL-certificate for Amazon Lightsail instance mentioned above?
I created a package to help with sockets and iOS using Obj-C. Also included is a very good resource for creating a certificate that will work. You will actually probably need to create a certificate authority, and intermediate certificate authority, and server/client certificates, check out the link:
https://github.com/eamonwhiter73/IOSObjCWebSockets/tree/master
I want to create a iOS app, and I am starting to design a api using node.js+mongodb+express. I know people can use charles to set up a proxy and when user open the app in the iphone device, they can see the api requests in charles app. So people can use this api to do some harm to the app services or what. I want to secure my api. I won't open my api to others. So, I don't need oauth. What else I can do to secure my api? And if any tutorial is provided, that will be good.
Do it with https, just make sure your app stops working if the certificate is invalid.
Alternative:
Crypt/decrypt your http(s)-body before sending/after receiving with a global password (not recommended) or a public key on your phone and a private key on your application.
If someone gets that pw or public key, they can still manipulate the API.
What you want to do is use https with additional security.
First: In the app "pin" the server certificate, that is validate the server certificate in the app, this is quite common these days. AFNetworking supports this.
Second: Add a certificate to the app and verify it on the server. Now the server knows it is communication with your app.
Now both the server and app have assurance they are communication with authenticated end points.
I have an iOS client app which connects to a server using HTTPS.
I've added code in the client to verify the identify of the server.
How can a tester testing this feature test that it is now secure, how can they for example create a MITM situation and check that the client rejects connects etc.?
I've tried googling for how to do this but haven't had much luck.
Can it be done using tools like Charles and proxies etc. or is messing around with a wireless router and having detailed knowledge necessary?
This might be over simplification for your solution, but concepts might help.
A web browsers extracts the name of hosts from embedded certificate and do a comparison of host name that we're trying to connect with. If validation fails, we usually see a security warning. For ex: we can connect with facebook by either typing https://www.facebook.com or by typing https://173.252.100.16/. When we choose second option, we get a security warning.
Your program must be using SSL client socket to connect with HTTPS server. The socket must be having capability to extract the hostname from the embedded certificate. Once you get that, compare that with valid HOST NAME that your program is trying to connect with. If it matches, let request proceed, If not, abandon that session.
To re-create MITM, your web server can use a self signed certificate that can be issue to whatever host name you want, but the IP of server could be 127.0.0.1 (for example). Since there is a mismatch between the host name and actual IP, we can probably simulate the MITM situation.
I'm assuming that digital certificate can't be forged in this case.
I'm working on an ios application without authentication. Now I would like to protect my server API from calls other then my ios application. A possible solution would be to have the application generate a unique key (based on the appname and the signing), which is not stored on the device since this is the main problem. I could think off an application logic that does some protection combined with some file encryption but the problem is that somewhere something is stored (ex public key can be stored in keychain but still not safe for my API-hackers).
Anyone any tips/advice on how I can handle this ?
thanks in advance
In short, there is no 100% secure way to make sure that the request comes from your application, if the key is available to the iPhone, it's available to extract from the iPhone.
You can make it reasonably safe by calculating a key runtime from info in the application as you say and communicate it over SSL, but a determined attacker can always reverse engineer the key generation too.
What you want to do is employ mutually-authenticated SSL, so that your server will only accept incoming connections from your app and your app will only communicate with your server.
Here's the high-level approach. Create a self-signed server SSL certificate and deploy on your web server. You can use freely available tools for this, like keytool, and I think (but don't know for sure) that Apple includes a tool for this with the iOS SDK. Then create a self-signed client and deploy that within your application in a custom keystore included in your application as a resource. Configure the server to require client-side SSL authentication and to only accept the client certificate you generated. Configure the client to use that client-side certificate to identify itself and only accept the one server-side certificate you installed on your server for that part of it.
If someone/something other than your app attempts to connect to your server, the SSL connection will not be created, as the server will reject incoming SSL connections that do not present the client certificate that you have included in your app.