I want to track all users (both authenticated users and anonymous users) , so far the solution i found are not good.
First of all, we can use a cookie but as we all know its not a reliable solution, second of all we, can use browser finger printing, but until this moment I did not find any solution for server side.
I found this solution valve but it is for client side and this one browserFingerPrint , I want an approach which user does not find any token in request , I want to create the key in server side so I can track users.
Does any one know any solution?
note : my server side technology is Asp.net Mvc
use case : users can comment on m site and also they can like or dislike comments, I want to allow all users to do this and also I want to track users before action (like or dislike)
No, there is no solution for what you want that doesn't use some form of a "token" which fingerprints anonymous users.
Let's see why.
An anonymous browser sends a series of bits of data, such as IP, browser agent and other headers. These should never be used to identify a user because they can be easily forged. They can be OK for tracking, and for most purposes IP address or some hash based on IP address and browser agent is sufficient. However this won't do for things which require security, such as commenter identification.
For commenter identification, it is necessary to prevent fraud. This is typically achieved by giving a unique token to each user. This can be transmitted in many forms, off the top of my head: cookies, headers, query string, POST parameters, or client certificates. However it does require a token issued by the server. If the client can generate a token from scratch, then it follows it can generate a fake token.
Related
I have an app, client side, that uses auth0 for accessing the different API's on the server. But now I want to add another app, a single page app, I'm going to use VueJs, and this app would be open "ideally" w/o a user having to sign in, it's like a demo with reduced functionality, I just want to check that the user is not a robot basically, so I don't expose my API in those cases.
My ideas so far:
- Somehow use recaptcha and auth0 altogether.
- Then have a new server that would validate that the calls are made only to allowed endpoints (this is not of my interest in the question), so that even if somehow the auth is vulnerated it doesn't leave the real server open to all type of calls.
- Pass the call to the server along with the bearer token, just as if I was doing it with my other old client app.
Is this viable? Now I'm forcing the user to validate, this is more a thing about UX (User-experience), but I'd like a way to avoid that. I'm aware that just with auth0 I can't do this see this post from Auth0, so I was expecting a mix between what I mentioned.
EDIT:
I'm sticking to validating in both cases, but I'm still interested to get opinions over this as future references.
At the end, with the very concept of how auth0 works that idea is not possible, so my approach was the following:
Give a temporary authenticated (auth 0) visitor a token which has restricted access level, then pass the request to a new middle server, the idea is to encrypt the real ids so the frontend thinks it's requesting project A123456etc, when indeed it's going to get decrypted in the middle server to project 456y-etc and given a whitelist it will decide to pass the request along with the token to the final server, the final server has measures to reduce xss and Ddos threats.
Anyway, if there's a better resolve to it I will change the accepted answer.
You could do a mix of using recaptcha for the open public, then on the server side analyse the incoming user request (you can already try to get a human made digital fingerprint just to differentiate with a robot-generated one) and the server (more a middle server) makes the call to you API (and this server has limited surface access)
What we normally do in these situations (if I got your issue correctly) is to create two different endpoints, one working with the token and another one receiving the Recaptcha token and validating it with Google servers.
Both endpoints end up calling the same code but this way you can add extra functionality in a layer in the 'public' endpoint to ensure that you are asking only for public features (if that cannot be granted just modifying the interface).
I have to implement a web site (MVC4/Single Page Application + knockout + Web.API) and I've been reading tons of articles and forums but I still can't figure out about some points in security/authentication and the way to go forward when securing the login page and the Web.API.
The site will run totally under SSL. Once the user logs on the first time, he/she will get an email with a link to confirm the register process. Password and a “salt” value will be stored encrypted in database, with no possibility to get password decrypted back. The API will be used just for this application.
I have some questions that I need to answer before to go any further:
Which method will be the best for my application in terms of security: Basic/ SimpleMembership? Any other possibilities?
The object Principal/IPrincipal is to be used just with Basic Authentication?
As far as I know, if I use SimpleMembership, because of the use of cookies, is this not breaking the RESTful paradigm? So if I build a REST Web.API, shouldn't I avoid to use SimpleMembership?
I was checking ThinkTecture.IdentityModel, with tokens. Is this a type of authentication like Basic, or Forms, or Auth, or it's something that can be added to the other authentication types?
Thank you.
Most likely this question will be closed as too localized. Even then, I will put in a few pointers. This is not an answer, but the comments section would be too small for this.
What method and how you authenticate is totally up to your subsystem. There is no one way that will work the best for everyone. A SPA is no different that any other application. You still will be giving access to certain resources based on authentication. That could be APIs, with a custom Authorization attribute, could be a header value, token based, who knows! Whatever you think is best.
I suggest you read more on this to understand how this works.
Use of cookies in no way states that it breaks REST. You will find ton of articles on this specific item itself. Cookies will be passed with your request, just the way you pass any specific information that the server needs in order for it to give you data. If sending cookies breaks REST, then sending parameters to your API should break REST too!
Now, a very common approach (and by no means the ONE AND ALL approach), is the use of a token based system for SPA. The reason though many, the easiest to explain would be that, your services (Web API or whatever) could be hosted separately and your client is working as CORS client. In which case, you authenticate in whatever form you choose, create a secure token and send it back to the client and every resource that needs an authenticated user, is checked against the token. The token will be sent as part of your header with every request. No token would result in a simple 401 (Unauthorized) or a invalid token could result in a 403 (Forbidden).
No one says an SPA needs to be all static HTML, with data binding, it could as well be your MVC site returning partials being loaded (something I have done in the past). As far as working with just HTML and JS (Durandal specifically), there are ways to secure even the client app. Ultimately, lock down the data from the server and route the client to the login screen the moment you receive a 401/403.
If your concern is more in the terms of XSS or request forging, there are ways to prevent that even with just HTML and JS (though not as easy as dropping anti-forgery token with MVC).
My two cents.
If you do "direct" authentication - meaning you can validate the passwords directly - you can use Basic Authentication.
I wrote about it here:
http://leastprivilege.com/2013/04/22/web-api-security-basic-authentication-with-thinktecture-identitymodel-authenticationhandler/
In addition you can consider using session tokens to get rid of the password on the client:
http://leastprivilege.com/2012/06/19/session-token-support-for-asp-net-web-api/
In may Rails web application, I need to enable more control in user authentication like if a user after registration will have specific credentials to login. So he/she should be able to login from a particular system(PC) only. This can prevent other users from logging in even if they know the particular users' credentials. Can we use Cookies for this purpose? Will Cookie always be unique if we access a particular web app from a particular PC? Help me to have a better solution.
Thanks in adv :)-
In my opinion, use cookies with caution, when you have no other options.
In this particular case (i.e. identify a unic computer), I think you can identify it by 2 solutions :
A stupid cookie with a value you know. The problem of a cookie is that a user can simply copy/paste the cookie value to another computer to have same access.
A unic key computed from computer data. You can create it with some accessible informations from this computer : browser, browser plugins, browser version, operating system, etc. This key can now be stored as a cookie. You have to check if this key is valid, regarding your identification function. Copy past have no effect because source informations are not the same. The main problem of this solution is it's 'too' secure : if the user change its browser, add a plugin, change its browser version, the function to compute key will not work at all.
This is the second solution I use, with this informations for example Rails Browser Detection Methods or https://github.com/josh/useragent
You can store secuirity token (md5 hash or something else) in the cookie, and check it for access.
I'm going to be writing the services for an iPhone app being built by a third party vendor.
I'll be using ASP.NET MVC to accept posts and also return JSON formatted data.
My question is, how do you secure it?
Just using an API key perhaps? Would that be enough to ensure that only data from the iPhone apps are allowed to hit the specified services?
I'm sort of struggling with the same concepts myself. I think the first thing is to do HTTPS only, so that it's starting out more secure than not.
Next, it depends on how you're going to do authentication. If all you need is an API key, (to track which entity is accessing the data) that should be fine. If you also want to track user information, you'll need some way to associate that specific API keys can access specific types of records, based on a join somewhere.
I'm looking at doing forms auth on my app, and using an auth cookie. Fortunately ASP.NET on IIS can do a lot of that heavy lifting for you.
Example time: (I'm sure I'll need to add more to this, but while I'm at work it gives something to gnaw on)
Forms auth:
Send a pair (or more) of fields in a form body. This is POST through and through. There's no amount of non-reversible hashing that can make this secure. To secure it you must either always be behind a firewall from all intruding eyes (yeah right) or you must be over HTTPS. Simple enough.
Basic auth:
Send a base64 encoded string of "username:password" over the wire as part of the header. Note that base64 is to secure as a screen door is to a submarine. You do not want it to be unsecured. HTTPS is required.
API key:
This says that an app is supposedly XYZ. This should be private. This has nothing to do with users. Preferably is that at the time that the API key is requested, a public key is shared with the API grantor, allowing the API key to be encoded on transit, thus ensuring that it stays private but still proves the source as who they are. This can get complicated, but because there is an application process and because it won't change from the vendor, this can be done over HTTP. This does not mean per-user, this means per-developing-company-that-uses-your-api.
So what you want to have happen is that for the app accessing your data, that you want to make sure it's an authorized app, you can do negotiation using private keys for signing at runtime. This ensures that you're talking to the app you want to talk to. But remember, this does not mean that the user is who they say they are.
HOWEVER.
What you can do is you can use the API key and the associated public/private keys to encode the username and password information for sending them over the wire using HTTP. This is very similar to how HTTPS works but you're only encrypting the sensitive part of the message.
But to let a user track their information, you're going to have to assign a token based on login based on a user. So let them login, send the data over the wire using the appropriate system, then return some unique identifier that represents the user back to the app. Let the app then send that information every time that you are doing user specific tasks. (generally all the time).
The way you send it over the wire is you tell the client to set a cookie, and all the httpClient implementations I've ever seen know that when they make a request to the server, they send back all cookies the server has ever set that are still valid. It just happens for you. So you set a cookie on your response on the server that contains whatever information you need to communicate with the client by.
HTH, ask me more questions so we can refine this further.
One option would be to use forms authentication and use the authentication cookie. Also, make sure all the service calls are being sent over SSL.
Scenario:
Upon starting a session on my site, I generate a rand token that is shown to the user that once. Say they “store” it away for later use.
I then, INSERT the md5(token) into SQL with timestamp.
When the user visits other pages like login, they would have to pass the token via URL as part of the validation process. I would check to see if the token exist and maybe UPDATE userid to this token.
So. Even if someone steals a user’s PHPSESSID cookie, wouldn’t it do ANY good to the hacker since they can’t access any of these pages without knowing the token?
You are right that they won't be able to access the pages without the token, but as an added point, sometimes I'd like to use IP tracking or browser tracking used concurrently as well.
The rationale being that even if someone gets a PHPSESSID cookie and the token, he would have to be coming from the same IP source as well as use the same browser. Then again these are just means of security by obscurity.
I recommend if you are really concerned about security, you can try looking at using a HTTPS connection. Hope it helped. Cheers!