I'm having a lot of trouble finding information about securing remote functions on Coldfusion CFCs for AJAX calls. Lets say you're retrieving sensitive information for a user after the user logs in to the site via an AJAX call. You call something like this:
https://www.mySite.com/pathToCFC/MyCFC.cfc?method=getBankInfo&userID=2343
So this is obviously super insecure as anyone could call this from a browser and change userID to get different user's bank info.
I've read about using the roles attribute on the remote function and using cflogin to authenticate a user, but even with this in place, wouldn't you have to pass the userID like the above call? Wouldn't an authenticated user still be able to switch the userID to discover new user's bank info?
Don't pass the userid from the client. The userid and other sensitive data should be stored server-side. In fact, every bit of data passed from the client must be considered suspect, and validated.
So, if you're using cflogin, for instance, and you're on a single server, or a sticky-sessioned server, then store the userid and any other critical information in the session scope.
On each request, you fetch this data from the session, not from what the client provides.
This a good starting point on User Security in Coldfusion
Wait a second, if you have user X which has to request his details from the server, you don't need his ID, you have it in session, or if you use cflogin feature you'll have getUserAuth().
I you have administrator who can see other users details and you're worried about him seeing bank details you need roles, cf's roles or your custom solution etc.
In any case you don't need to send explicit call "gimme bank account details for user 3456"..
Related
I have a website that authenticates users with the active directory. This website is made for internal company use and does not hold any sensitive information. The website is secured with SSL. When a user logs in, his/her username and password will be transmitted to the server through POST. I then store his/her username in a session cookie with a TTL of 1 day, refreshed by every single web action. From this point on, every webpage will check to see if this cookie with the username exists. If it does, it will allow users to access that certain page. Login out will just remove this cookie.
Would this way of authentication be acceptable? Is there a better way to handle user authentication? Is it necessary to use sessions instead and store session id's in cookies?
It does work out nicely to use Sessions, yes. I don't know what language you'd be using, but storing information in general locally is a good idea (this does not include sensitive and private information, ie. passwords).
Pages usually check your authentication (and its type) upon loading.
I've lost my touch with PHP, but for instance ASP.NET has a pretty neat (but complicated) Identity system where your login information would be stored in a separate Session, and destroyed upon logging off, but also stores information regarding its Type. This would later allow the developer to mark pages that would require a specific type of an Identity. For example:
[Authorize(Roles="admin")]
public ActionResult Index() {
// Your action information
}
Again, I'm rusty with PHP, but I imagine it's similar where you'd simply check the Sessions before the <html> tag, ie.
<?php
if(is_null($_SESSION["user-info"]["type"])
header("Location: index.php");
?>
<html>
...
Overall, the way you use sessions in each of the back-end web development languages could defer, but the overall usability is the same. You'd use Sessions to store User information, Store "basket" items, etc.
We are using WSFederationAuthenticationModule in an ASP.NET MVC 5 application to authenticate users via Windows Azure ACS. We have tried multiple things to save some user specific data in the session after the authentication has succeeded but everytime we write to the session object we got the exception 'Session state is not available in this context'. Our favorite was the event System.IdentityModel.Services.FederatedAuthentication.WSFederationAuthenticationModule.SignedIn but of course at this time the session does not exist. Where is the recommended place to write initial data of an currently authenticated user into the session?
Have you considered using the ClaimsAuthenticationManager for this? The beauty of this is that you can access the current claims for the authenticated user (before your application code is executed), run whatever query you need to run, and then stuff new claims into the claimset of the principal. I've used this technique before for similar situations as you described.
If you really need to get access to the session data, then I think you want to look at the SessionSecurityTokenHandler class.
Experts,
what's the recommended way to pass the user id (system internal id of the user used to query for the user info) between controllers in a codeigniter app?
I'm considering the following options:
1. Use the CI session id to query the database for the user id in every controller. That way I don't have to place the user id in the session which is a security concern. But this option means an extra db query in every controller
2. Store the user id directly in the session so I have it readily available to query for user info.
What do you think?
From my understanding of MVC you're not normally supposed to talk directly between two controllers. However in this case I would use the session. As far as security goes there are plenty of extensions to codeigniter dealing with authentication such as TankAuth and WolfAuth including many others that you might look into if that is your concern. In this case however I'd say using the session to store a user id is perfectly fine as long as you're not storing sensitive data along with it.
You can read up on CodeIgniter sessions here: http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user_guide/libraries/sessions.html
There is a great authentication library Ion Auth. Check it out
http://benedmunds.com/ion_auth/
I'm currently making a site using GWT, being hosted on AppEngine. I'm making it with my own logins that I'm making (I know Google provides something with GWT, but I need my own login system), and I've been trying to figure out sessions for quite a while now. I've found a few tutorials, and one of the sites that I was reading is http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/wiki/LoginSecurityFAQ
There is a section there on "How to Remember Logins". I know how to get the session ID and store it on the client in a cookie through an RPC call. What I don't understand is, eventually after a day or so, the user comes back and I'm supposed to get the session ID from the cookie and send it back to the server. What am I supposed to do on the server in order to securely evaluate if session ID is still legal, and pull up all the necessary information about the user?
Additional questions:
1. What would make the session ID change?
2. What if the user was on a laptop, and the user went somewhere else. Would he still be able to be securely logged back in without having to type in his login and password again?
Thanks!
~Scott
Similar question: question on GWT, Cookies and webpage directing.
One important thing you should remember: don't rely on cookies alone - transfer the session ID/token in the payload of the request too and compare it with the cookie value on the server side. This will prevent XSRF attacks. That's the sort of thing you should be worried about.
The policy on how to deal with session IDs depends on how seriously you take security in your application and what type of application is it. For example, you can login with the same token on GMail from different IPs - I presume they allowed this because it's common that the user's IP changes over sessions. They did however add a feature that allows you to see from which IPs the user logged in recently. And don't forget about users with dynamic IPs (quite a large number) - if you keep track of tokens and IPs you will basically disallow those users to be kept logged in between sessions.
What am I supposed to do on the server
in order to securely evaluate if
session ID is still legal, and pull up
all the necessary information about
the user?
You should keep track of the session IDs/login pairs in your DB.
What would make the session ID change?
Either it expires or the user tries to log in with a token that is not bound to their IP. You could add your own rules too - like the number of logins, etc. For additional security, you can generate a new session ID/token on every new login/session (the user authenticates with the old token, the server checks that it's valid and sends back the user the new token he/she should use from now on).
To remember logins you need to securely generate a unique session id. Normally, this is placed in a cookie. I would recommend using a framework that does session cookies for you. Getting it wrong can leave your site wide open to abuse. Things to consider include:
Do you need to worry about cookie stealing. The user's IP address should be encoded in the session id, or linked to the session id. Check the IP address on every page access.
Ensure your logins are on encrypted sessions. Otherwise, you expose credentials in plaintext on the network.
How long should sessions last. They should time out after a fixed time limit. This can be hours or days long.
Remember me should be different functionality on a different cookie. It needs to contain something that can be used to indentify the user. Depending on your security requirments it may need to be an encrypted value. This cookie can have a longer timeout.
Answers to your additional questions are.
Nothing on the client side is likely to change the session id. The session id should be regenerated every login.
Depending on how secure the session id is, they may have to login. Secure session cookies often encode the IP address to prevent cookie stealing. If so, the laptop user would need to login again.
I just started looking into OAuth and it looks really nice. I have oauth with twitter working in ruby right now.
Now I'm wondering, what is the recommended safe way to store the responses in my local database and session?
What should I store?
Where should I store it?
This example twitter-oauth-with-rails app stores a user.id in the session, and the user table has the token and secret. But that seems like it'd be really easy to hack and get the secret by just passing in a slew of test user ids, no?
The tokens are useless without the consumer key/secret of your twitter app as they're not the same for every app but depend on the consumer key/secret.
To get a session variable you would have to guess the session id which is not that easy to accomplish.
If you want you can store those tokens in the session but I would suggest storing the user tokens in your database with all the other user data so your session contains only the data to identify the user in your system.
Update: I'm not sure if I understand correctly what you mean by accessing the tokens from the database by guessing an ID.
Do you have any authentication in place so that the users have to enter some credentials to access their data? You should store the tokens the same way you store the users email address or password and only authenticated users should be able to access it.
If you're developing a web application you can add a hidden field to the form the user submits, with some hash-like value calculated with the user.id so evil guys cannot change that value and just "guess" for an access token