Log Requests from some Link - asp.net-mvc

How can i log requests that are going on some link?
I need to store requests Headers, Verb (Get or Post etc.), Request Data and Request Body.
It's must be some separate application like Fiddler.
DESC: I have web application. It makes some search. I want to log data of search request using another application which can log any requests for some site (in my case for my web app). How to make it? I make research for solution but find many examples where user can create some Module or Filter which must be included in web application. This case for me is not allowed.

If you have control of both sides, you can basically do whatever you want..
Maybe link to an action first that acts as a tracker:
public ActionResult Track()
{
//get whatever data you want here
//Request.Headers, Request.RequestType ect
//track the data in a database or whatever
SaveSomeData();
//get the original url from a post variable, or querystring, where you put it
var redirectUrl = Request["redirect"];
return Redirect(redirectUrl);
}
Then you would change your links for example a link to http://google.com, would change to
http://mywebsite.com/mycontroller/track?url=http://google.com
Another possible way would be to create a proxy, and monitor the data that goes through it.
Need a better idea of what you need though to help out more.

Related

Dynamic redirect url from google console - oAuth

I have created a MVC/API project to enable external authentication and worked fine for my local host url. However, I need to achieve the below.
I am supporting multi tenancy (same app service and different DB), so each tenant has to connect different DB based on the custom param in the MVC url
Ex: https://localhost/tenant1, .../tenant2, .../tenant3 etc (not going with separate subdomain at this point)
I am not sure if the Google Console supports the wildcard url as a return ur and not sure how to achieve that in MVC code (Ex:http://localhost/* OR {0} .. something like that. (So dynamic input parameter will be returned back from google)
I am reading and attempting some solutions. Will update the answer here once i get the complete solution. In the meantime if anyone has any suggestions, please help me.
UPDATE 1:
I have updated my source code as follows:
Create session object before redirecting to the external login
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["Tenant"] = "tenantname";
After callback read the tenant details and save in the session for subsequent DB calls based on the tenant name
public async Task<ActionResult> ExternalLoginCallback(string returnUrl)
{
var loginInfo = await AuthenticationManager.GetExternalLoginInfoAsync();
if (loginInfo == null)
{
return RedirectToAction("Login");
}
if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["Tenant"] != null)
{
string sessionObj = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["Tenant"] as String;
}
This is a common requirement, and is easily solved. There are two components.
Firstly, regardless of which of your many URLs your application lives at (myapp.com/tenant1, /tenant2, etc) you have a single redirect URL (eg myapp.com/oauthredirect).
Secondly, when starting the OAuth dance (https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2WebServer#redirecting), you can specify a state parameter which will be passed into your oauthredirect routine (eg. as state=tenant1). You can then use this to create a redirect back to the appropriate site URL once you have finished your user registration tasks.
Be careful when specifying your redirect URLs into the developer console. They must be a character-by-character match with the actual URL. So, foe example, you will need to specify both http://myapp.com/oauthredirect and https://myapp.com/oauthredirect. I've always found it quite useful to create a local entry in /etc/hosts (or the windows equivalent) so your localhost is also resolved by eg. http://test.myapp.com
Authorized redirect URIs For use with requests from a web server. This
is the path in your application that users are redirected to after
they have authenticated with Google. The path will be appended with
the authorization code for access. Must have a protocol. Cannot
contain URL fragments or relative paths. Cannot be a public IP
address.
http://localhost/google-api-php-client-samples/Analytics/Oauth2.php
http://localhost/authorize/
You can have as many of them as you want but the wild card is not going to work.

how to verify referrer inside a MVC or Web Api ajax call

my MVC app has common ajax methods (in web api and regular controller). I'd like to authorize these calls based on which area (view) of my app the call is coming from. The problem I am facing is how to verify the origin of the ajax call.
I realize that this is not easily possible since ajax calls are easy to spoof, but since I have full control of how the view gets rendered (full page source) perhaps there is a way to embed anti-forgery type tokens that could later be verified to a Url Referrer.
Authentication is already handled and I can safely verify the identity of the call, the only problem is verifying which URL (MVC route) the call came from. More specifically, preventing the user from being able to spoof the origin of the ajax call.
I tried creating a custom authorization header and passing it between view render and ajax calls, and that works, but still easy to spoof (since a user could sniff the headers from another part of the site and re-use those). In the end I am not sure how to safely verify that the header has not been spoofed. The only thing that comes to mind is encoding some info about the original context inside the token, and validating it somehow against incoming call context (the one that's passing the token in ajax call).
I see that MVC has AntiForgery token capabilities, but I am not sure if that can solve my problem. If so I'd like to know how it could be used to verify that /api/common/update was called from /home/index vs /user/setup (both of these calls are valid).
Again, i'd like a way to verify which page an ajax call is coming from, and user identity is not the issue.
update
as per #Sarathy recommended I tried implementing anti-forgery token. As far as I can tell this works by adding a hidden field with token on each page, and comparing it to a token set in a cookie. Here is my implementation of custom action filter attribute that does token validation:
public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
var req = filterContext.RequestContext.HttpContext.Request;
var fToken = req.Headers["X-Request-Verification-Token"];
var cookie = req.Cookies[AntiForgeryConfig.CookieName];
var cToken = cookie != null
? cookie.Value
: "null";
log.Info("filter \ntoken:{0} \ncookie:{1}", fToken, cToken);
AntiForgery.Validate(cToken, fToken);
base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
}
then my anti forgery additional data provider looks like this:
public class MyAntiForgeryProvider : IAntiForgeryAdditionalDataProvider
{
public string GetAdditionalData(System.Web.HttpContextBase context)
{
var ad = string.Format("{0}-{1}",context.Request.Url, new Random().Next(9999));
log.Info("antiforgery AntiForgeryProvider.GetAdditionalData Request.AdditionalData: {0}", ad);
log.Info("antiforgery AntiForgeryProvider.GetAdditionalData Request.UrlReferrer: {0}", context.Request.UrlReferrer);
return ad;
}
public bool ValidateAdditionalData(System.Web.HttpContextBase context, string additionalData)
{
log.Info("antiforgery AntiForgeryProvider.ValidateAdditionalData Request.Url: {0}", context.Request.Url);
log.Info("antiforgery AntiForgeryProvider.ValidateAdditionalData additionalData: {0}", additionalData);
return true;
}
this works, in that i can see correct pages logged in the provider, and anti forgery breaks w/out the tokens.
however, unless i did something wrong, this seems trivial to spoof. for example
if i go to pageA and copy the token form pageB (just the form token, not even the cookie token), this still succeeds, and in my logs i see pageB while executing ajax method from pageA
confirmed that this is pretty easy to spoof.
I am using csrf to generate ajax tokens like this:
public static string MyForgeryToken(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper)
{
var c = htmlHelper.ViewContext.RequestContext.HttpContext.Request.Cookies[AntiForgeryConfig.CookieName];
string cookieToken, formToken;
AntiForgery.GetTokens(c != null ? c.Value : null, out cookieToken, out formToken);
return formToken;
}
I then pass the form token back with each ajax call and have a custom actionfilterattribute where I read/validate it along with cookie token
public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
var req = filterContext.RequestContext.HttpContext.Request;
var fToken = req.Headers[GlobalConstants.AntiForgeKey];
var cookie = req.Cookies[AntiForgeryConfig.CookieName];
var cToken = cookie != null
? cookie.Value
: "null";
log.Info("MyAntiForgeryAttribute.OnActionExecuting. \ntoken:{0} \ncookie:{1}", fToken, cToken);
AntiForgery.Validate(cToken, fToken);
this all works (changing anything about the token throws correct exception), then in my IAntiForgeryAdditionalDataProvider I can see what it thinks it's processing.
as soon as i override the csrf token from another view, it thinks it's that view. I don't even have to tamper with the UrlReferrer to break this :/
one way this could work if i could force the cookie to be different on every page load
I am assuming you can use IAntiForgeryAdditionalDataProvider for this.
public class CustomDataProvider : IAntiForgeryAdditionalDataProvider
{
public string GetAdditionalData(HttpContextBase context)
{
// Return the current request url or build a route or create a hash from a set of items from the current context.
return context.Request.Url.ToString();
}
public bool ValidateAdditionalData(HttpContextBase context, string additionalData)
{
// Check whether the allowed list contains additional data or delegate the validation to a separate component.
return false;
}
}
Register the provider in App_Start like below.
AntiForgeryConfig.AdditionalDataProvider = new CustomDataProvider();
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.helpers.iantiforgeryadditionaldataprovider(v=vs.111).aspx
Hope this helps in your scenario.
You mentioned in your question that you're looking for Anti-forgery token capabilities.
Hence, I think what you're asking about is an anti-CSRF solution (CSRF=cross site request forgery).
One way to do this is to render a true random number (a one-time token) into your page, then passing it on each request, which can be done by adding a key/value pair to the request header and then checked at the backend (i.e. inside your controller). This is a challenge-response approach.
As you mentioned, in the server-side code you can use
var fToken = req.Headers["X-Request-Verification-Token"];
to get it from the requesting page.
To pass it along from each client AJAX request of the page, you can use
var tokenValue = '6427083747'; // replace this by rendered random token
$(document).ajaxSend(function (event, jqxhr, settings) {
jqxhr.setRequestHeader('X-Request-Verification-Token', tokenValue);
});
or you can set it for each request by using
var tokenValue = '2347893735'; // replace this by rendered random token
$.ajax({
url: 'foo/bar',
headers: { 'X-Request-Verification-Token': tokenValue }
});
Note that tokenValue needs to contain the random number which was rendered by the web server when the web page was sent to the client.
I would not use cookies for this, because cookies don't protect you against CSRF - you need to ensure that the page, which is requesting is the same as the page which was rendered (and hence created by the web server). A page being on a different tab in the same browser window could use the cookie as well.
Details can be found on the OWASP project page, in the OWASP CSRF prevention cheat sheet.
My quick interim solution was to use custom tokens created on each page load (guid which i keep track of in my token cache), which are passed as headers in all ajax calls. Additionally i create a original url hash and combine it into the custom auth token.
in my ajax methods I then extract the hash and compare it with UrlReferrer hash to ensure that hasn't been tampered with.
since the custom token is always different it's less obvious to guess what's going on as token appears to be different on every page load. however this is not secure because with enough effort the url hash can be uncovered. The exposure is somewhat limited because user identity is not the problem so worst case is a given user would gain write access to another section of the site but only as himself. My site is internal and i am auditing every move so any temper attempts would be caught quickly.
I am using both jQuery and angular so appending tokens with all requests like this:
var __key = '#Html.GetHeaderKey()' //helper method to get key from http header
//jQuery
$.ajaxSetup({
beforeSend: function (xhr, settings) {
xhr.setRequestHeader('X-Nothing-To-See-Here', __key); // totally inconspicuous
})
//angular
app.config(['$httpProvider', function ($httpProvider) {
$httpProvider.defaults.headers.common['X-Nothing-To-See-Here'] = __key;
});
update
the downside of this approach is that custom tokens need to be persisted across a web farm or app restarts. Based on #Sarathy's idea I am trying to side step this by leveraging MVC anti forgery framework. Basically add/remove my "salt" and let the framework manage the actual token validation. That way it's a bit less to manage for me. Will post more details once i verify that this is working.
So this is going to be one of those "you're doing it wrong" answers that I don't like, and so I apologize up front. In any case, from the question and comments, I'm going to propose you approach the problem differently. Instead of thinking about where did the request come from, think about what is the request trying to do. You need to determine if the user can do that.
My guess as to why this is hard in your case is I think you have made your api interface too generic. From your example api "api/common/update" I'm guessing you have a generic update api that can update anything, and you want to protect updating data X from a page that is only supposed to access data Y. If I'm off base there then ignore me. :)
So my answer would be: don't do that. Change your api around so it starts with the data you want to work with: api/dataX api/dataY. Then use user roles to protect those api methods appropriately. Behind the scenes you can still have a common update routine if you like that and it works for you, but keep the api interface more concrete.
If you really don't want to have an api for each table, and if its appropriate for you situation, perhaps you can at least have an api for protected/admin tables and a separate api for the standard tables. A lot of "if"s, but maybe this would work for your situation.
In addition, if your user can update some dataX but not other dataX, then you will have to do some sort of checking against your data, ideally against some root object and whether your user is authorized to see/use that root object.
So to summarize, avoid an overly generic api interface. By being more concrete you can use the existing security tools to help you.
And good luck!

Handling WebDAV requests on MVC action

I have an existing MVC3 application which allows users to upload files and share them with others. The current model is that if a user wants to change a file, they have to delete the one there and re-upload the new version. To improve this, we are looking into integrating WebDAV to allow the online editing of things like Word documents.
So far, I have been using the .Net server and client libraries from http://www.webdavsystem.com/ to set the website up as a WebDAV server and to talk with it.
However, we don't want users to interact with the WebDAV server directly (we have some complicated rules on which users can do what in certain situations based on domain logic) but go through the previous controller actions we had for accessing files.
So far it is working up to the point where we can return the file and it gives the WebDAV-y type prompt for opening the file.
The problem is that it is always stuck in read-only mode. I have confirmed that it works and is editable if I use the direct WebDAV URL but not through my controller action.
Using Fiddler I think I have found the problem is that Word is trying to talk negotiate with the server about the locking with a location that isn't returning the right details. The controller action for downloading the file is "/Files/Download?filePath=bla" and so Word is trying to talk to "/Files" when it sends the OPTIONS request.
Do I simply need to have an action at that location that would know how to respond to the OPTIONS request and if so, how would I do that response? Alternatively, is there another way to do it, perhaps by adding some property to the response that could inform Word where it should be looking instead?
Here is my controller action:
public virtual FileResult Download(string filePath)
{
FileDetails file = _fileService.GetFile(filePath);
return File(file.Stream, file.ContentType);
}
And here is the file service method:
public FileDetails GetFile(string location)
{
var fileName = Path.GetFileName(location);
var contentType = ContentType.Get(Path.GetExtension(location));
string license ="license";
var session = new WebDavSession(license) {Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials};
IResource resource = session.OpenResource(string.Format("{0}{1}", ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["WebDAVRoot"], location));
resource.TimeOut = 600000;
var input = resource.GetReadStream();
return new FileDetails { Filename = fileName, ContentType = contentType, Stream = input };
}
It is still very early days on this so I appreciate I could be doing this in entirely the wrong way and so any form of help is welcome.
In the end it seems that the better option was to allow users to directly talk to the WebDAV server and implement the authentication logic to control it.
The IT Hit server has extensions that allow you to authenticate against the forms authentication for the rest of the site using basic or digest authentication from Office. Using that along with some other customisations to the item request logic gave us what we needed.
This is exactly what i did for a MVC 4 project.
https://mvc4webdav.codeplex.com/

ASP.Net MVC: Check if URL is Authorized

I'd like to simply check from a Controller whether another URL is authorized.
So for example, I'd like to call into a Controller like so:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult IsUrlAuthorized(string url)
{
bool isAuthorized = // What do I put here?
return Json(isAuthorized);
}
So I'd like to know what I could call to check on whether the current user is authorized for the passed-in URL or not. I'm guessing the answer has something to do with Routes, which sit a little bit outside MVC?
This is a somewhat similar question but not quite the same thing:
ASP.NET MVC. Check if user is authorized from JavaScript
Since the user may or may not be authorized in general, but may not have the right permissions or role assignments to see a specific URL.
Ideas?
Update: I use standard MVC authorization attributes to lock down my app, so I'll just give an example of what that looks like here. In MVC Routes map to Controllers. A single method on a Controller can be restricted to one or more Roles:
public class HomeController : Controller
{
[Authorize(Roles = "User, Moderator")]
public ActionResult ListRecentPosts()
{
. . .
}
}
Or, an entire Controller can be restricted to one or more roles:
[Authorize(Roles = "Admin")]
public class AdminController : Controller
. . .
The actual URL that any of these controller methods responds to is based on a default mapping in a standard MVC app:
routes.MapRoute("Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
But, you can be nice to your users and make URLs guessable by adding a lot more Routes - as a result, a Controller method can have many names that point to it. You can't just assume and infer the controller name from the URL (even if it maps out that way for half the URLs in the site).
So presumably I either need a way to ask the Routing engine directly whether a URL is authorized for the current user, or a 2-step of asking the Routing engine for which Controller and Method, then ask if those are authorized - hopefully not by using Reflection and matching Roles directly as that again would appear to assume too much.
Update 2: The way this came up is I have an Account strip at the top of my app. Its state can change by selecting one of several accounts you're authorized as. Depending on where you are in the app, the account you chose might have authorization to view this page - and you might be in the middle of filling out a form you don't want to lose. So the naive approach - just refresh when they pick another account - is harmful, and a waste of the user's time even if there is no form and they're just reading a page that's all text.
While that convenience to the user is nice, the user is going to fairly assume that pages they can't see as a user who shouldn't have permission really are denied (and, it would be harmful to leave them on a page that's forbidden - actions taken from it will fail). So I need to know whether to redirect away based on their new permissions.
One of the things I love about .Net is the way many of its best libraries decompose so well, so you can easily recompose things that are part of its normal functionality, or a new twist. Both the Routing module and MVC appear to be very well constructed, so I have to suspect this can be done.
The cheap hack is to ensure that my authorization module returns a consistent redirect status code when a user isn't authorized, and when the user changes their account in the account strip, fire 2 AJAX calls: One to change account, and then a second to the current page over AJAX just to check the HTTP Status Code. 200 OK means leave the page as is, Redirect means follow the redirect. Obviously this is a little ugly, involves an extra HTTP call, creates a false hit in the logs, and makes an assumption about how authorization is handled across the app.
There could be a secondary concern - the page might be authorized, but just change how it works or looks. This particular app has no change in look based on account (besides the account strip itself), and I can handle functionality changes by just providing a custom event that forms listen to - they can reload any relevant data from the server in response to it.
Using UrlAuthorization.CheckUrlAccessForPrincipal only works if you're only using URL authorization. But for MVC using Routing, we highly recommend that you don't use URL authorization to secure an app.
Instead, we recommend using Authorization attributes on the controller class. The reason is there could be multiple URLs that call the same controller action. It's always better to secure the resource at the the resource and not just at the entry ways.
In this particular case, you'd have to get an instance of the controller given the URL. THat's a little tricky as you'll basically have to run the MVC pipeline from the point where you have the URL to the point where you have the controller. It's possible, but seems heavyweight.
I wonder if there isn't a better and simpler way to accomplish your goals. What is it you're really trying to do?
UPDATE: Based on your scenario, it sounds like this is an initial check just for UI purposes. Perhaps all you need to do is make an asynchronous Ajax request to the URL and check the HTTP Status code. If it's a 401 status code, you know the user is not authorized. That seems like the safest bet.
How about UrlAuthorizationModule.CheckUrlAccessForPrincipal method.
UrlAuthorizationModule.CheckUrlAccessForPrincipal Method (System.Web.Security)

ActionResult return to page that called it

I have a ActionLink, that calls my public ActionResult, and I would like it to return back to the page that it was called from, but how?
There are a couple of tricks that you can use for this.
The simplest is ...
return Redirect(HttpContext.Request.UrlReferrer.AbsoluteUri);
AbsoluteUri may not give you the exact path you are looking for, but UrlReferrer should have the imformation you are looking for. Redirect returns a subclass of ActionResult so it is a valid return value.
Another idea is to base the redirect location off of stored values. This is useful when you are going to make multiple requests before you want to redirect, such as when you validate a form and show validation issues on the first response. Another situation will be when the referrer is not a local site. In either case, your referrer won't be what you want it to and you will need to retrieve the correct location from somewhere else.
Specific implementations include using a hidden input field on your form, session state, pulling a descriminator value from your route data, or even just a more constant value like HttpContext.Request.ApplicationPath.
Good luck.
Keep in mind that due to the state-less nature of the web, your ActionResult isn't "called from" your ActionLink as much it is simply a url that the user-agent requested.
Because of this, the only real "built-in" way you can know where that user was coming from is by inspecting the http Request headers to see what the referring page was:
string referrer = Request.Headers["referer"];
You'd then be responsible for parsing out the Action method from this url, if you were going to call it directly. Be aware that this referrer may not be a link within your own site.

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