Need to submit some CC data from the View to the Controller where it will be processed, can I just POST it or is there some common way of securing the data in transit?
Post the data using SSL.
Here's a good resource on setting up SSL with IIS and ASP.NET.
Posting with SSL like Rex M mentioned is definitely the first step. You should probably make the page where they are typing their credit card number SSL as well. This will give your users the green URL of comfort.
You should also include protection against CSRF attacks. Use the anti-forgery token.
Also, you should use the PRG (Post, Redirect, Get) pattern to make sure that the credit card numbers aren't submitted twice. After the post, don't just render a different view, send a redirect so their browser does a GET against another URL - probably your confirmation page.
You'll run into a few ASP.NET MVC specific things:
If you have some http pages and some https pages, how will you code the links to the https pages from the http pages. You can hard code them, but you'll have to hard code the domain and protocol. You can't just use <%= Html.ActionLink(... see this SO question for more details.
You'll want to make sure you can't hit your controllers when you are not using SSL. This will help you catch any errors, and ensure that no one uses http instead of https. See the [RequireSsl] attribute in the futures assembly. Here's a blog post about it from Adam Salvo
I haven't read about the implementation of the ASP.net-MVC. However, i believe that you have mixed up the terminology.
The MVC Pattern would be evaluated on the server end. [So there is little need to do security checks between the components (unless they are exposed outside the program)]
I believe that many people get the impression that you are talking about HTTP POSTS after a form submission (as opposed to HTTP GETs)
Related
I am working on Asp.Net MVC 5. When i click a link (placed in another website) I navigate to UserDetails.cshtml page. Basically that 3rd party site is passing the UserName & Password to my site & using that I authorize & display further user info.
It's fine but the Url is looking like this
localhost:8080//Admin/UserDetails/UserName/PWD.
I don't want to show the UserName & Password in URL i.e URL should look something like :
localhost:8080//Admin/UserDetails/
One possible solution could be rewrite the URL in IIS (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ASPNETMVCAndTheNewIIS7RewriteModule.aspx)
But I believe there is an easier way to handle this by using the routing mechanism of MVC.
Please help me to figure out the same.
EDIT :
As many of you are confused why I am not doing a Form Post here, let me re-frame my question. I have no control over the third party application, so I cant request them to do a form Post to my MVC application. Again the 3rd party application is a Oracle Reporting application (OBI), so doing a POST from that application might not be feasible too...
Let me reverse engineer your requirements from your question:
I want to have an URI that when invoked will give access to a secured section of my website. This URI must be clicked by visitors of a third-party site, whom I give that URI to. I want to hide the credentials from the URI.
You cannot do this, the requirements are conflicting. You cannot hand out URIs that will authenticate anyone who fires a request to that URI.
You could do something with a token (like http://your-site/auth/$token), but then still, anyone with access to that URI can use it to authenticate themselves, or simply put it up on their own website.
If you have data you want to expose to a third-party site, let that site perform an HTTP request (with tokens, usernames, headers or whatever you want to use to authenticate) in the background to your site, and display the response in their site. Then the visitor won't see that traffic, can't share the URI and all will be secure.
No. No. NO. Like seriously, NO. Any sensitive information should be sent via a post body over a secure connection (HTTPS). You can't "hide" information in a GET request, because it's all part of the URI, or the location of a particular resource. If you remove a portion, it's an entirely different location.
UPDATE
I find it extremely hard to believe that any third-party application that needs to authenticate via HTTP and isn't designed by a chimp with a typewriter, wouldn't support a secure method to do so, especially if it's an Oracle application. I'm not familiar with this particular app, but, and no offense meant here, but I would more easily believe that you've missed something in the documentation or simply haven't found the right way to do it yet before I'd believe you have to send clear-text credentials over GET.
Regardless, as I said previously, there's no way to hide information in a GET request. All data in a GET is part of the URL, and therefore is plainly visible in the browser location bar or whatever. Unfortunately, I have no advice for you other than to look closer at the documentation, even reach out to Oracle if you have to. Whether by post or something like OAuth, there almost has to be another way.
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/
I am attempting to construct a web app in which the back end is a complete RESTful web service. I.e. the models (business logic) would be completely accessible via HTTP. For example:
GET /api/users/
GET /api/users/1
POST /api/users
PUT /api/users/1
DELETE /api/users/1
Whats the proper way to provide more methods that aren't CRUD (verbs/actions)? Is this considered more of a RPC-api domain? How would one properly design the RPC api to run on top of the RESTful api?
For example, how would I elegantly implement a forgot password method for a user.
POST (?) /api/users/1/forgot
The application (Controllers/View) would then use a https requests (HMVC like) to access the models and methods. What would be the best for authentication? OAuth, Basic Auth over HTTPs?
Although this is "best practice" for scalability later on, am I over engineering this task? Is it best to just follow the typical MVC model and provide a very basic API?
This question has been mostly inspired by ASP.NET's MVC 4 (WebAPI) and a NodeJS module https://github.com/marak/webservice.js
Thanks in advance
I recently started learning REST, and when developing a new web service I think you're doing the right thing to consider it.
You are correct in your assumptions about the custom verbs. REST acknowledges that some actions need to be handled in a different way, and custom verbs don't violate the requirements. You should use POST when communicating with the server, but the verbs are normally written in imperative. Instead of forgot, I'd probably use remind or something similar. I.e., you should give instructions on what to do, rather than describe what happened without clearly indicating what you expect as a result.
Furthermore, the preferred way to construct the service is to include api into the domain name, and drop it from the path. I'd write your particular example like this:
POST /users/1/remind HTTP/1.1
Host: api.myservice.example.com
Session handling in REST is a bit tricky. The cleanest way of doing it would probably be to authenticate with username and password on every single request, using Basic access authentication. However, I believe that it's rarely done like that. You should read this question (and its accepted answer): OAuth's tokens and sessions in REST
EDIT: I'd also drop the trailing forward slash in the GET request in your example. If the service is truly RESTful, then the resource is not supposed to be accessibly from both /users/ and /users. A particular resource should have one and only one URL pointing to it. A URL with a trailing slash is actually distinct from one without. REST promotes dropping it, and a RESTful web service should not accept both (which in the case of GET means responding with 200 OK), although it may redirect from one to the other. Otherwise, it might lead to confusion about the proper URL, duplicate caching, weeping and gnashing of teeth. :)
EDIT 2: In RESTful Web Services by Richardson & Ruby you're discouraged from putting the new verb in the path. Instead, you could append something like ?_method=remind. It's up to you which one you choose, but please remember that you're not supposed to handle these requests with GET, regardless of what you choose. A GET must not change the resource, and should not cause side effects if the user browses back and forth in the history. Otherwise, you might end up resending the password several times. Use POST instead.
I have an ASP MVC 3 website that has a Feedback form and should require SSL.
Now, I have an action called Feedback inside a controller called 'ContactUs' that is responsible for viewing and processing the feedback.
When I used the [RequireHttps] attribute on that action, it works nice and it changes the URL to "https". However, I noticed that all the links inside my page are now pointing to "https"! As if this attribute had forced the routing engine to apply the same to all links!!!
Of course, the SSL is only required for this single action and all the rest need to have normal http.
Could anyone tell me how to solve this?
In your case [RequireHttp] attribute might be OK if you clear out the login cookie - or you'll be sending it in clear-text across the wire. It might be more work than it's worth to avoid the slight cost of further HTTPS calls. SO is all about recycling questions and other users reading your question might think it's OK to drop down to HTTP after login, when it's usually the wrong thing to do.
The [RequireHttps] attribute can be used on a controller type or action method to say "this can be accessed only via SSL." Non-SSL requests to the controller or action will be redirected to the SSL version (if an HTTP GET) or rejected (if an HTTP POST). You can override the RequireHttpsAttribute and change this behavior if you wish. There's no [RequireHttp] attribute built-in that does the opposite, but you could easily make your own if you desired.
There are also overloads of Html.ActionLink() which take a protocol parameter; you can explicitly specify "http" or "https" as the protocol. Here's the MSDN documentation on one such overload. If you don't specify a protocol or if you call an overload which doesn't have a protocol parameter, it's assumed you wanted the link to have the same protocol as the current request.
The reason we don't have a [RequireHttp] attribute in MVC is that there’s not really much benefit to it. It’s not as interesting as [RequireHttps], and it encourages users to do the wrong thing. For example, many web sites log in via SSL and redirect back to HTTP after you’re logged in, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Your login cookie is just as secret as your username + password, and now you’re sending it in clear-text across the wire. Besides, you’ve already taken the time to perform the handshake and secure the channel (which is the bulk of what makes HTTPS slower than HTTP) before the MVC pipeline is run, so [RequireHttp] won’t make the current request or future requests much faster.
You can create another custom filter attribute to move back to http. Try solution from this question...
Why once SSL is enabled with [RequireHttps] at action level, it remains enabled forever?
So far, my https deployments have commonly involved a naive lockdown of the entire site with https and provide an http-to-https redirect on the web server.
I now plan to have a single ASP.NET MVC site (on the cloud) that will contain both http and https pages. So, the site will have 2 conceptual (not physical) zones providing for both secure and non-secure requests.
Configuration-wise, I have set up input ports for both 80 and 443 and the site accepts both requests.
Is there any way I can flip protocol to https for any call that goes to an action that belongs in the secure zone? For instance, the kind of things that action filters can do.
Thanks much.
edit: Please note that the whole idea of this is to avoid using absolute urls on the form action attribute because of portability issues and because the user will not see the https:// assurance visual cues on the browser.
P
You might want to take a look at the MVC futures assembly from Microsoft available for download here.
This has a FilterAttribute, RequireSslFilterAttribute that allows you to easily tag Action methods in your controller that require SSL - e.g.
[RequireSsl(Redirect=true)]
public ActionResult LogOn()
{
return View();
}
The optional redirect parameter will cause the request to be redirected to the same URL but via https instead of http if required.
WARNING: As Daniel points out though, by the time you hit this Action it may already be too late if data was posted to a non secure version of the page - it is already potentially compromised, so you still need to exercise care when using this and make sure all sensitive data is sent via https. (I just noticed your comment to Daniel, you obviously understand this, I'll leave the warning here for anyone else who stumbles upon this though!)
EDIT: As Luke points out, in MVC2 this attribute is now part of the core framework and is renamed to [RequireHttps]
Is there any way I can flip protocol to https for any call that goes to an action that belongs in the secure zone?
The short answer is no, once the request has come via http, it has already been potentially compromised. You can require that certain calls come via the HTTPS (not sure how to do that as I have not done ASP.Net for awhile) and send an error if they do not. The key is to decide when you want the application to make the jump, ie during login and choose the HTTPS as the action for those forms. Is that what you meant by 'action filters'?