File based Spring Security - spring

I'm working on a Web Service project to provide data to a partner. Our app is really light weight and has only a handful of APIs. Because of time constraint and in-house pre-existing knowledge we went the Spring MVC / Spring Security path to serve those restful APIs.
At any rate this is a B2B project where we are expecting only that partner to hit our servers. So it seems a little over kill to modify are very small db schemas to add tables that would contain only 1 user access record for that partner...
Heard someone say though that it's possible to use an encrypted file, or at least a file where the password information is encrypted, instead of the database to hold the Spring Security user access information... Is that true? If it is can anyone point me to some references? I couldn't find anything relevant on Google at first glance... :(
Thanks.

http://www.mularien.com/blog/2008/07/07/5-minute-guide-to-spring-security/
See the '' under the authentication-provider; this allows you to use encrypted passwords (use sha). If you only have a single user and you wanted the information in an external file, then you could use a property file configuration placeholder to simply specify
${user.1.id} ${user.1.passwordenc},etc... kinda hacky, but it would work.

It's VERY possible. In fact, you can do it without coding; it's pretty simple to include the credentials directly in the XML defining the Spring Security stuff. You usually see this in examples, followed by warnings to "DON'T DO IT LIKE THIS!"
If in-house security is no big deal and you're not worried that your developers can see your password (as if they needed it, heh!) and no one else is likely to access your configuration files, then this is a quick and easy yet workable solution.
I'm going to post this, but I'm off to go dig in the Spring Security documentation for the example I was talking about I'll be back!
Update
Trever Schick was a bit faster with the example. I had a different example in mind but his code shows exactly what I was talking about. You define your security provider in the XML and provide user ID/password right there. There are a number of utilities available on the 'net for you to MD5 or SHA encode your password for you so you can cut and paste it into the file.

You need to implement a new org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.UserDetailsService that reads the user's information (username, password, enabled flag, and authorities) from a file. I don't know if someone already implemented it.

Related

Is this issue due to bots?

In our MVC website log I can see lot of errors with message "A public action method was not found". Requests are coming with junk action method name.
For example if I have action name "GetProducts" then requests are coming with actiona name as "GetProducts AND 1=1" , "GetProducts;id'" , "GetProductswhscheck".
is this because of internet bots are trying to access my website with junk values?
It may be bots, it may be script kiddies, or it may be crackers. Either way - somebody is trying to find vulnerabilities on your site.
Let's look at the first one:
GetProducts AND 1=1"
This looks like an attempt at SQL Injection. There was probably a longer query after the "1=1", trying to get information out of your database - like usernames, e-mail addresses, and so on.
To defend yourself, make sure your queries are parameterized. You may also want to add some form of rate-limiting on your system; if possible, see if you can add captchas.
You may also want to look at this answer on Information Security Stack Exchange, and the OWASP top 10 security vulnerabilities.
Do this as soon as possible, because somebody's trying to break in to your system.

Katharsis security + API versioning

I am currently evaluating possibilities, how to write/generate level2+ rest API. I came across karharis and i pretty like the concept and the whole idea how its done seems sound to me. But I have not found answers to these questions:
How to handle security properly. I can imagine that it might get tricky, as JSON api supports traversing to some extent. (out app will run in spring environment, so I suppose that we might use spring-security, but I do not know, if we will encounter some hidden traps)
API versioning. I havent found any clues how to handle API evolution. Are there any already supported options (content negotiation, path variable, query parameter...?) or do we need to hack it ourselves?
Thanks in advance!

AutoUnlock a Windows User Session

Recently, I have been working on a CredentialProvider in order to unlock automatically (the trigger can be any event, so let’s say the end of a timer) a Windows Vista (or more recent version) user session.
For that I read some useful articles on the subject, the change between GINA and this new architecture. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163489.aspx.
I think, like everyone in the process of creating a custom CredentialProvider, I didn’t start from scratch but from the sample code provided by Microsoft. And then I tried to change the behaviour (things like logging) in the different functions.
So in the end I can use the custom CredentialProvider, enter the SetUsageScenario methods but still I cannot reach the Set or GetSerialization method. From what I’ve understood in the technical documentation on CredentialProvider (still provided by Microsoft) theses two methods should be called automatically. Is there something I missed ?
Also, my original idea was to get an authentication package using Kerberos in order to perform an implicit user authentication. I got this idea by seeking information on other SO or MSDN threads like
Is this approach the good one ?
Thank you very much for your time answering my questions. Any clarifications are welcomed, even if they don’t directly resolve my problems :-)
First of all - you need to set autologon flag to true in your implementation of the ICredentialProviderCredential::SetSelected(BOOL *pbAutoLogon) and ICredentialProvider::GetCredentialCount methods.
Next, you need to call ICredentialProviderEvents::CredentialsChanged when your timer is hit.
LogonUI will recreate your credentials, and because autologon is set to true it will call your GetSerialization() method.
SetSerialization and GetSerialization functions are called from your provider by LogonUI. After user enters username/password and presses ENTER button, LogonUI calls GetSerialization function and provides a pointer, as one of the four parameters, that will point in future to CREDENTIAL_PROVIDER_CREDENTIAL_SERIALIZATION structure created and filled by you, and then this structure will be sent from LogonUI to Winlogon to perform authentication. I don't know how to make LogonUI to call GetSerialization from your credential provider code and as far as I know you can't call GetSerialization by your own because where will you pass your filled CREDENTIAL_PROVIDER_CREDENTIAL_SERIALIZATION structure if no one requested it, but only LogonUI can path it to Winlogon?
There is a document called "Credential Provider Technical Reference", there you can read some details about credential providers. In the Shell samples folder there is a strange folder called "Autologon", maybe it will help you! Good Luck!

couchdb public interface authentication through rewrites

I have a website set on a specific domain which is completely separated from my couchdb url through rewrites and virtual hosts, and I got to a point where I need to add some user authentication using _sessions API but I'm afraid I can't do it with rewrites:
{
"from": "auth",
"to": "../../../_session"
}
gives me:
{"error":"insecure_rewrite_rule","reason":"too many ../.. segments"}
which is acceptable, but now I'm wondering how would I get the session authentication to work from my domain without exposing couchdb url, and also, the session seems to be related to the domain so if I login through couchdb.example.com it won't work when using mywebsite.com as the public interface?
Thanks
PS. I've just found this post where there's an alternative by disabling secure_rewrites on the httpd config file, which seems to work, although, I was wondering that perhaps might be not a good approach and if is there something else which is ideal for this kind of problem.
I recommend to set secure_rewrites=false and don't worry about it.
We had a great discussion about CouchDB rewrites and security in the Iris Couch forum. Also see my post later about using Audit CouchDB. These are the highlights:
The secure_rewrites option is not the ultimate source of security for your data. At best, it is one layer in a multi-layer solution
The ultimate source of security is the _security object in the database. So that is where you should focus your attention
The Audit CouchDB tool scans every detail about your couch and it will tell you if any red-flags are present. It is implemented in Javascript so if you have NodeJS, you can run it; or simply reading the source code gives you an idea of what it is looking for.
If you are using vhost, than /_session handler is available at the vhost root without any rewrite rules (by default).
See the section [httpd] of default.ini:
vhost_global_handlers = _utils, _uuids, _session, _oauth, _users

Handle concurrent file download with flex/blazeDs/Spring

I'm currently working on a Flex3/blazeDS/Spring/MySQL project.
In this, some users needs to download some import logs. Problem is that given the singleton concept around spring, if 2 users ask for a download at the same time, the servlet responsible for export file creation may cross content between the 2 asked files.
I'm not that much familiar with spring but from what i've been reading around it seems that the solution lies in saying that the servlet is in "Request" scope so there will be a new one created for each download request instead of having a singleton.
Does anyone have ever done something like this before? Every tutorials i've seen so far explains how to handle file download request but it never talks about the fact that 2 users asking for a download may have some issues...
Thanks for any leads on how to fix this.
Each user will receive his own thread, and you should not have any problems unless using member variables (which is a bad practice anyway). If not, I do not see any problem, but it would help if you can post your code.

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