I found this link
Best way in asp.net to force https for an entire site? and it redirects the whole site to https.
I only want to use https for the pages need to be authorized (usually with [Authorization] attribute) - e.g. account management and some other pages, plus login page. And don't use https for these pages don't need to be authorized.
Don't.
Your authentication cookie will be included with every request whether you need it or not. This means every request you serve over HTTP instead of HTTPS is vulnerable to session hijacking.
Related
I am preparing to work on a project where I need to display a dashboard from an online application. Unfortunately, the use of an API is currently not possible. The dashboard can be embedded in an iFrame. However, when it is displayed it will prompt the user viewing the dashboard to login to an account.
I have one paid account to this service. Are there any rails gems to login to the service before the iFrame is processed?
Or would a proxy within my rails app be a better route to go?
Any pointers are appreciated!
Neither a Rails gems nor a proxy within your rails will work and they same have the same limitation.
They are both running on the back-end, server side.
The authentication you need is client side.
Unless you mean proxy the ENTIRE thing, the auth request and all subsequent requests and user interactions with this dashboard. That should work but (see below)
The way authentication works (pretty much universally) is: once you log in to any system, it stores a cookie on your browser and then the browser sends that cookie for every subsequent request.
If you authenticate on the backend, that cookie will be sent to your rails code and will die there, and the users browser will never know about it.
Also - it is not possible to do the auth server side and capture the cookie and then have the user browse the site with their browser directly, for two reasons:
Sometimes auth cookies use information about the browser or HTTP client to encrypt the cookie, so sending the same cookie from a different client wont work
You can not tell a browser to send a cookie to a domain different than your own.
So your options are, off the top of my head right now:
If there is a login page that accepts form submissions from other domains, you could try to simulate a form submission directly to that sites "after login" page. (The page the user gets directed to once they fill up the login form). Any modern web framework as XSRF protection (Cross Site Request Forgery protection) and will disallow this approach for security reasons.
See if the auth this site uses has any kind of OAUTH, Single Sign On (SSO) or similar type of authentication integration that you can do. (Similar to an API, so you may have already explored this option)
Proxy all requests to this site through your server. You will have to rewrite the entire HTML so that all images, CSS, stylesheets, and all other assets are also routed through the proxy or else the URLs are rewritten in the HTML to not be relative. You might hit various walls if a site wasn't designed for this use case. From things like the site using relative URL's for assets that you aren't proxying, the site referencing non-relative URL's causing cross-domain errors, etc. Note its really hard to re-write every single last assets reference, its not only the HTML you're worried about, Javascript can have URL's in it too, and CSS can as well.
You could write a bookmarklet or a browser extension that logs the user into the site.
Have everyone install Lastpass
Have everyone install the TamperMonkey browser extension (and others like it for other browser), and write a small User Script to run custom javascript automatically to log the user in on that site
Scrape that site for the info you need and serve it on your own site.
OK I'm out of ideas. :)
In ASP.NET MVC there is a ValidateAntiForgeryToken attribute, that enables cross-site scripting defence.
Is it possible to replace this mechanism with
authorization check, including checking that resource, that is being manipulated, belongs to current user;
referrer check, that will forbid AJAX web api requests from external hosts;
inhibition of site hosted in iframe?
This does not prevent cross site scripting, only cross site request forgery.
authorization check, including checking that resource, that is being manipulated, belongs to current user;
No, because the resource does belong to the current user, it is only the request that has not been willingly made by the current user.
e.g. say on your website www.foo.com you have the following URL that will delete the user's account.
www.foo.com/DeleteAccount
Your user is logged into www.foo.com. Now say your user visits www.evil.com which includes the following image tag on the page.
<img src="http://www.foo.com/DeleteAccount" />
This will make a request to your page and delete the user's account because the DeleteAccount resource will have checked authorisation via cookies and determined that the user is indeed authorised because the auth cookie was supplied with the request.
referrer check, that will forbid AJAX web api requests from external hosts;
Yes, this is a valid check although it is weaker than the method of using the Anti Forgery Token as mentioned in your question.
The OWASP CSRF Cheat Sheet states
Although it is trivial to spoof the referer header on your own browser, it is impossible to do so in a CSRF attack. Checking the referer is a commonly used method of preventing CSRF on embedded network devices because it does not require a per-user state. This makes a referer a useful method of CSRF prevention when memory is scarce. This method of CSRF mitigation is also commonly used with unauthenticated requests, such as requests made prior to establishing a session state which is required to keep track of a synchronization token.
However, checking the referer is considered to be a weaker from of CSRF protection. For example, open redirect vulnerabilities can be used to exploit GET-based requests that are protected with a referer check. It should be noted that GET requests should never incur a state change as this is a violation of the HTTP specification.
There are also common implementation mistakes with referer checks. For example if the CSRF attack originates from an HTTPS domain then the referer will be omitted. In this case the lack of a referer should be considered to be an attack when the request is performing a state change. Also note that the attacker has limited influence over the referer. For example, if the victim's domain is "site.com" then an attacker have the CSRF exploit originate from "site.com.attacker.com" which may fool a broken referer check implementation. XSS can be used to bypass a referer check.
Also note that sometimes the referer isn't always passed as the user may be using privacy software that removes the header.
inhibition of site hosted in iframe?
This can be a valid defence for widgets that you host to be included on other sites.
e.g. www.bar.com could include your widget on their page via the use of a script tag:
<script src="//www.foo.com/widget.js"></script>
In order to prevent www.bar.com from submitting the form within your widget, your JavaScript code would document.write an IFrame into the page and then include your content within that. The Same Origin Policy will prevent the IFrame content from being read by the parent page and your form could not then be submitted by the site that includes your widget. However, here you may need a manual confirmation window to pop up in the case of any clicks to prevent click jacking attacks (e.g. if you had a like button (similar to Facebook) and you wanted to prevent fake likes from the including page submitting your form automatically).
OWASP Recommendation
The OWASP Recommendation is to use the Synchronizer Token Pattern which is the one implemented by ASP.NET MVC with ValidateAntiForgeryToken.
I am wondering if I should keep the GET pages off SSL, while the POST of that same URL on SSL? I am reading issues with doing redirects of required pages that need SSL with SEO. ASP.NET MVC has an attribute that however does a 302 redirect instead of a 301. Is there a best practice in doing this with SEO. I have pages such as Login, Register, an Account page.
Typically, in terms of SEO, the principles don't apply to forms as the spider doesn't try to complete the forms, so the redirects from these pages doesn't affect them. It is just static links etc that they follow.
The main thing to worry about with SEO on a password protected site is ensuring that paid/private content doesn't end up in the search engine etc etc.
/* edit */
In terms of the redirect, I wouldn't use a flag on the controller to action this. If a site must be viewed via the https protocol, then I would set the Require SSL property on the directory in IIS and handle the 403.4 error specifically to issue a permanent redirect to the place the person was trying to access.
This will ensure any static pages that are accessed are pulled through the https protocol too.
Si
I'm getting ready to have an SSL cert installed on my hosting.
It is my understanding that (and correct me if I'm wrong...):
Once the hosting guys install the cert, I will be able to browse my site on Http or Https (nothing will stop me from continuing to use Http)?
The only thing I need to do, is add logic (in the case of MVC, Controller attributes/filters) to force certain pages, of my choosing, to redirect to Https (for instance, adding a [RequiresHttps] attribute sparingly).
Do I have to worry about doing anything extra with these things to make sure I'm using SSL properly? I'm not sure if I need to change something with logic having to do with:
Cookies
PayPal Express integration
Also, I plan on adding [RequiresHttps] only on the shopping cart, checkout, login, account, and administration pages. I wish to leave my product browsing/shopping pages on Http since I heard there is more overhead for using Https. Is this normal/acceptable/ok?
One more question... I know ASP.NET stores some login information in the form of an Auth cookie. It is okay that a user logs in within an Https page, but then can go back and browse in an Http page? I'm wondering if that creates a security weakness since the user is logged in and browsing in Http again. Does that ruin the point of using SSL?
I'm kind of a newb at this... so help would be appreciated.
Starting with your questions, on one, (1) yes nothing will stop you to use for the same pages http ether https.
and (2) Yes you need to add your logic on what page will be show only as https and what as http. If some one wondering, why not show all as https the reason is the speed, when you send them as https the page are bigger and the encode/decode is take a little bit more, so if you do not need https, just switch it to http.
Switching Between HTTP and HTTPS Automatically is a very good code to use for the implementation of switching logic fast and easy.
Cookies
When the cookie have to do with the credential of the user then you need to force it to be transmitted only with secure page. What this mean, mean that if you set a cookie with https, this cookie is NOT transmitted on non secure page, so is stay secure and a man in the middle can not steal it. The tip here is that this cookie can not be read on http pages - so you can know that the user is A, or B only on secure page.
Cart - Products
Yes this is normal : to leave the products and the cart on unsecured connection because the information is not so special. You start the https page when you be on user real data, like name, email, address etc.
Auth cookie
If you set it as secure only, then this cookies not show/read/exist on unsecured page. It is an issue if you not make it secure only.
Response.Cookies[s].Secure = true;
Few more words
What we do with secure and non secure page is that we actually split the user data in two parts. One that is secure and one that is not. So we use actually two cookies, one secure and one not secure.
The not secure cookie is for example the one that connect all the products on the cart, or maybe the history of the user (what products see) This is also that we do not actually care if some one get it because even a proxy can see from the url the user history, or what user see.
The secure cookie is the authentication, that keep some critical information for the user. So the non secure cookie is with the user everywhere on the pages, the secure is only on check out, on logged in, etc.
Related
MSDN, How To: Protect Forms Authentication in ASP.NET 2.0
Setting up SSL page only on login page
Can some hacker steal the cookie from a user and login with that name on a web site?
1) Yes, you are right.
2) Yes. You can optionally handle HTTP 403.4 code (SSL required) more gracefully, by automatically redirecting the client to the HTTPS version of the page.
As for authentication cookies, I've found this MSDN article for you. Basically, you can set up your website (and the client's browser) to only transmit authentication cookie via HTTPS. This way it won't be subject to network snooping over unencrypted channel.
Of course, this is only possible if all of your [Authorize] actions are HTTPS-only.
I'm an old hand at C but a raw newbie at Java/Tomcat.
I'm fine with Tomcat session management in http alone. Its when I've come to look at switching to https that I've had problems.
I gather for Tomcat that you have to start with an http session if you want to maintain a session as you switch from http to https and back to http. This works fine for me when the browser is enabled for cookies.
But when the browser is disabled for cookies (and URL rewriting is being used) then switching http to https or back again causes a fresh session to be started each time. I'm assuming this is a security thing.
Q1 - Is it possible/desirable to maintain a session between http and https using URL rewriting?
Q2 - If it isnt possible then what do e-commerce developers do about non-cookie users?
I dont want to prevent non-cookie people using my site. I do want some flexibility switching between http and https.
thanks for any help,
Steven.
It doesn't seem desirable to maintain session between HTTP and HTTPS using the same cookie or URL token.
Imagine the case where you're user is logged on, with a given cookie (or URL token) passed back and forth for every request/response in an e-commerce website. If someone in the middle is able to read that cookie, he can then log on to the HTTP or HTTPS variant of the site with it. Even if whatever the legitimate user is then doing is over HTTPS, the attacker will still be able to access that session (because he too will have the legitimate cookie). He could see pages like the cart, the payment method, perhaps change the delivery address.
It makes sense to pass some form of token between the HTTP session and the HTTPS session (if you're using sessions), but treating them as one and the same would cause some vulnerability. Creating a one-off token in the query parameter just the transition could be a solution. You should however treat them as two separate authenticated sessions.
This vulnerability can happen sometimes with websites that use mixed HTTP and HTTPS content (certain browsers such as Firefox will give you a warning when that happens, although most people tend to disable it the first time it pops up). You could have your HTTPS session cookie for the main page, but that page contains images for the company logo, over plain HTTP. Unfortunately, the browser would send the cookie for both (so the attacker would be able the cookie then). I've seen it happen, even if the image in question wasn't even there (the browser would send the request with the cookie to the server, even if it returned a 404 not found).