Azure Storage Blob Policy to enforce ClientSideEncryptionVersion.V2_0 - azure-blob-storage

i updated my application because of this security vulnerability.
Is it possible to set a policy in Azure Storage Blob that only blobs without encryption or with ClientSideEncryptionVersion.V2_0 can be uploaded?
Upload attempts with ClientSideEncryptionVersion.V1_0 should be blocked.

We don't have this feature today. You may leave your feedback here All the feedback you share in these forums will be monitored and reviewed by the Microsoft engineering teams responsible for building Azure.
Client side encryption can be done only using SDK because we use CEK to encrypt the data before uploading, so you have to write your own custom logic for this scenario, Also make sure that all your application are upgraded to latest SDK.
Alternatively, would it be possible to use the Azure Metric Explorer to evaluate the upload attempts with the ClientSideEncryptionVersion?
No. Encryption metadata is stored with the blob, but we don’t have granular tracking for what metadata is set.
Or can you alternatively, for example, give a tag or an application version when uploading that is saved together with the blob?
This is completely dependent on the application and the features you use in storage/the SDK. There isn’t anything automatically enabled by the SDK.
Please let me know if you have any further queries.

Related

How to block Google Firestore access from the Google Firestore api

I am working with Google Firestore in native mode and CRUD'ing data within it using the "cloud.google.com/go/firestore" api in Go. Access to the data is wide open as long as you know the project id and using the Firestore API on a server. I don't want to try the rules until I figure out how to secure the data from server attacks that. Again, all the API requires is the project id to access the data so I need to lock that down firstly before I move any further. Rules are only for mobile/web clients from what I read and Server side clients completely bypass the rules. Please help. I do not want to use the Firebase API because attackers can still use the Firestore api to access the data.
It's unclear from the limited information in your question but, your Firestore database is not open to anyone with the Project ID.
The service is only accessible to any thing (human|machine) that has valid credentials. Either humans with e.g. Gmail accounts or Service Account key holders.
In either case, only identities that you've explicitly added to the project will be able to access its resources and then only those with the appropriate IAM roles|permissions.
Google provides an elegant facility called Application Default Credentials (ADCs) that simplifies authenticating clients.
I suspect that your code is using ADCs to authenticate you to the project|service.
Access to the data is wide open as long as you know the project id and using the Firestore API on a server.
If that is a concern, consider disallowing all access in the Firebase security rules for your Firestore database.
Also have a look at my answer here to understand why sharing your project ID is not a security concern, and in fact is necessary if you want to allow direct access from client-side devices: Is it safe to expose Firebase apiKey to the public?. If you don't want to allow direct client-side access, closing down the security rules (as they are by default, unless you choose test mode when creating the database) is the way to go.

Saving organization-wide application settings in Teams app

I have a Teams application (Tab). I am an ISV provider, and provide a multi-tenant application that is installed by customers via Teams App Store in their organizations.
How do I save settings for my application organization-wide for the customers? For example, CustomerA has installed the app and then CustomerB. I want some storage that would be unique for CustomerA and CustomerB and the app, and located in customer's environment. The settings I want to save are not per-user, but per-organization (tenant).
Somewhat similar to "App Data" folder you have in Windows Desktop for example.
Does such a storage exist? Does API for this storage exist?
A tab app is a simply a web application that you render inside of Teams. As a result, what the app does, and where and how it does it, is totally up to you. This includes any data storage you choose to have behind the scenes. For example, your tab could be built in PHP and use MySQL, or built in ASP.Net and use SQL Azure or CosmosDB. It's totally up to you, but you need to implement it yourself, as an ISV.
The important piece to differentiate clients, however, is being aware of the TenantId for each user, so you can look up which client's settings you need from the database. The most simple way to do this is simply the tid property on the Teams tab context. You can read more about that here. Unfortunately, because it's just accessed via Javascript, it's not entirely secure - for a more secure mechanism, you should be creating an Azure Application, and generating jwt tokens that you can authenticate against in your backend. It's a much more complex topic, but hopefully this answer at least gives the background you need. For more info on the security aspects (validating the token etc.), please see this question: How to restrict access to Azure Function to only allow requests from a custom Microsoft Teams App?.

How to move Parse.com database to my own server and still use Parse.com SDK?

I'm using Parse.com SDK services for my Android app.
I've seen that Parse had released their Android SDK as an open source project on Github on this address.
My app is almost finished, and when I'm uploading it to the Play Store, I don't want to be controlled by Parse.com (I mean that I don't want to be blocked someday, or I don't know that), so I want to move my whole database to my own server that hosted on a secure company.
I've checked the open source project on Github and realized that all I need to use it on my own server is to generate an Application ID and a client key.
So I want to ask if someone knows how to generate an Application ID and a client key of Parse to use it on my own server, or that you maybe knows another way of moving it to my server? And one more question: Today I'm using also Facebook SDK with my app. If I will move my database to my own server, will I still be able to use Facebook SDK on my app?
Thanks!
I have write an article about how to migrate parse to a custom server.
https://medium.com/#jcminarro/run-parse-server-on-your-own-server-using-digitalocean-b2a7d66e1205
There's a massive difference between Parse open-sourcing their SDKs compared to revealing their entire backend architecture and its configuration.
The open-sourced SDKs are essentially wrappers for Parse's REST API along with some convenience functions and logic for natively interpreting the JSON data Parse is transmitting.
At a high level, Parse uses MongoDB for its core database and is entirely hosted using AWS (Amazon Web Services). The entire architecture is highly complex and is not something you could just drag and drop onto your own software stack or hardware backend.
To help give you a better idea of how Parse achieves all of their services, here's an interesting presentation their Dev Ops team gave at an AWS convention. Suffice it to say, hosting the backend services for over 180,000 apps requires a complex infrastructure and that is the "secret sauce" so to speak for Parse and is why Facebook purchased them for over $85 million two years ago.

MS Sync Toolkit how to handle huge initial download

We're using Microsoft Sync Framework Toolkit to allow some iOS devices to synchronize their SQLite local storage with a central SQL Server database over an OData service (just like the sample does).
The problem is that the central database is quite big (more than 500 MB) and that the customer want to initially replicate all his content on their devices.
So we configured the service to sync all tables but it crashes the first time a device tries to sync (OutOfMemoryException).
How should we design/configure the service to manage such a situation? Setting filters doesn't seem to fit our needs since we need all the data.
I should add that we tried to configure SetDownloadBatchSize with no luck. Maybe there is something to configure on the client as well?

Azure, Sync Framework and Access Control Service: Are there obvious shortcomings or problems in using this technologies together?

I have a desktop application which uses flat files (some xml and small pictures) as data. I want this data to be available on other PCs which have the desktop application installed and usable by a smartphone client (WP7 at the moment) as well.
The user should have it very easy to synchronize this data. He should be able to use accounts he already possesses (Live-Login, Googlemail, Facebook,...).
I thought about using Azure Blob Storage to save the data in Azure, the Sync Framework to perform the actual synchronization and the Access Control Service to handle authentication.
I have not used any of this technologies before so any advice would be great but I'm searching foremost for errors or shortcomings in this strategy I don't see yet. Is this approach viable at all?
Windows Azure is basically a virtualized datacentre. It is elaborate and complicated and is pitched at corporations who don't want to own their server infrastructure or hardware.
If I understand correctly, what you want is a cloud fileserver, not a whole LAN. Windows SkyDrive fulfils this requirement nicely and offers 25GB of storage per member with no charge for membership.
About Hotmail and Windows Live People often confuse Hotmail and
Windows Live, because when you set up a Hotmail account it uses
Windows Live for authentication and therefore you end up with a
Windows Live account and all the associated facilities, including
SkyDrive. However, it is entirely possible to set up a Windows Live
account using any email address as the username.
If you do this, it is important to be aware that the Windows Live
password associated with a given email address is completely
independent of the password required by the mail server that hosts
mail for the account. This can cause a great deal of user confusion.
For Hotmail (or any other mail server that uses Windows Live for
authentication) they are guaranteed to be the same password.
There is no official Microsoft framework support for SkyDrive. There is an open source project called SkyDriveApiClient, but it only works with the full .NET framework. I tried porting it but the author was a bit of an architecture astronaut, and it is absolutely riddled with [Serializable] which is not available on WP7x.
The WP7 guys have said that the WP7 framework will probably include support for SkyDrive but not in Mango (WP7.1) and given that Microsoft's typical release cycle is 18 months and Mango has yet to hit the streets, I'd say it will be two years before you can count on intrinsic cloud file services for WP7.
Roll-your-own wouldn't be hard, WCF services are dead easy to use from WP7. But that's not really cloud since you have to provide and maintain the server infrastructure yourself. For this reason and given the MS timetable, I have put a great deal of effort into producing my own SkyDrive client for WP7. Core functionality is complete and I am now refactoring, improving robustness and adding performance enhancements like local cacheing of tokens (cookies, essentially). I don't intend to release it; I have a number of apps planned that depend on this functionality and it suits me fine that there is a substantial barrier to competition.
I didn't tell you that to tease you. My point is that I'm so sure SkyDrive is the right answer that I put a lot of work into making it happen.
Cloud file storage is a perfect fit for mobile devices.
Azure is not a good answer for the sort of phone apps individuals want because the data store isn't shared in a way that required indexing or supports high levels of concurrency
I can certainly think of corporate phone apps that would benefit from using SQL Server as storage
Azure can do file services but it represents an ongoing expense. Nobody's going to put up with that when Google and Microsoft both give away web based cloud storage.
I can personally attest that if you're determined, it is possible to use SkyDrive from WP7.
Cloud storage is the only way you're going to get programmatically accessible storage that's shared by your user's mobile device and his computer. One of the things I intend to do that depends on shared storage is write a Silverlight app that lets you prepare map routes with multiple waypoints on a desktop computer and a companion app that uses them on WP7.
The Windows Live team has released what they call support for WP7. They supply a sample project showing you how to instantiate a browser object and load their login pages and manipulate them to log in and use their javascript API to manipulate SkyDrive.
This has one big advantage: browser cookies and cached credentials. The disadvantages are obvious; technical shortcomings notwithstanding the Windows Live team seems to think the only thing people want to do with a phone is tag their photos and fiddle with social media.
I have finished my own libraries. They do not support most of the social media twaddle. I have treated SkyDrive as no more or less than a cloud file system, providing
Authenticate(username, password)
CreateFolder(folderpath[, blocking=false])
Delete(fileOrFolderPath[, blocking=false])
SaveString(filepath, value[, blocking=false])
LoadString(filepath)
I could handle binaries but Convert.ToBase64 makes this unnecessary and strings are convenient for XML. CreateFolder, Delete and SaveString are optionally blocking. LoadString is always blocking because it's a function that returns the loaded string. CreateFolder is recursive so you can create an entire path in one call (eg /folder1/folder2/folder3). Calling CreateFolder on a pre-existing path has no effect, and SaveString uses CreateFolder to ensure the path is valid, making it unnecessary to create a filepath in advance. Authenticate loads the file system (except file content) into memory eliminating server chatter. This is asynchronous and a FileSystemReady event announces when the file system is completely loaded. The model is maintained as you add and remove files and folders.
This was a lot of work and no one reponded to my attempt to make it an open source project so I'm not inclined to give the fruits of my labour away, but provided your plans don't compete with mine I could be persuaded to come to an arrangement.

Resources