"Nessus has found HTML forms on the remote web server. Some CGI scripts do not appear to be protected by random tokens, a common anti-cross-site request forgery (XSRF) protection. The web application might be vulnerable to XSRF attacks. Note that :
Nessus did not exploit the flaw.
Nessus cannot identify sensitive actions; for example, on an online bank, consulting an account is less sensitive than transferring money.
You will need to audit the source of the CGI scripts and check if they are actually affected."
"The following CGIs are not protected by a random token :
/Web Client/ListDir.htm
/Web%20Client/ListDir.htm"
Related
I am looking to implement a Lambda#Edge function that will add CSP headers to my website and thus will improve my site's security.
I do have an issue with the URL report settings (report-to/report-uri). As far as I can tell, there's no way for me to authenticate CSP violation requests. Does that mean that if a malicious person gains a hold of my reporting API, they can just spam POST requests and send false data? Is there any way to add any sort of security for the reports that get posted via the reporting directive?
Yes, a malicious person can sent a fake SPAM violation reports. But he will not gain any profit from that, just DOS-attack which will not affect the website.
You can make some protection from this if you do use your own service for obtaining reports of violations. You can check cookies, generate a special URL for the reporting API for each visitor (for example, add md5 (IP-address) to it), etc.
But there is usually no reason to protect reports. An attacker cannot determine if this API is currently running or disabled. Therefore, a blind attack of reporting API does not make sense.
I don't agree with #granty
If I was the attacker: yes I can't be sure that the reporting API is running but nevermind. I know there is a risk that the API is up until report-uri directive is set in the Content-Security-Policy header. If I was trying to exploit a vulnerability I would perform a blind attack on the CSP report uri so that potential admins are misinformed on all my exploit tests on the website. This attack make sense if you know that there is a risk that CSP can be triggered by your exploit.
When building SPA style applications using frameworks like Angular, Ember, React, etc. what do people believe to be some best practices for authentication and session management? I can think of a couple of ways of considering approaching the problem.
Treat it no differently than authentication with a regular web application assuming the API and and UI have the same origin domain.
This would likely involve having a session cookie, server side session storage and probably some session API endpoint that the authenticated web UI can hit to get current user information to help with personalization or possibly even determining roles/abilities on the client side. The server would still enforce rules protecting access to data of course, the UI would just use this information to customize the experience.
Treat it like any third-party client using a public API and authenticate with some sort of token system similar to OAuth. This token mechanism would used by the client UI to authenticate each and every request made to the server API.
I'm not really much of an expert here but #1 seems to be completely sufficient for the vast majority of cases, but I'd really like to hear some more experienced opinions.
This question has been addressed, in a slightly different form, at length, here:
RESTful Authentication
But this addresses it from the server-side. Let's look at this from the client-side. Before we do that, though, there's an important prelude:
Javascript Crypto is Hopeless
Matasano's article on this is famous, but the lessons contained therein are pretty important:
https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/august/javascript-cryptography-considered-harmful/
To summarize:
A man-in-the-middle attack can trivially replace your crypto code with <script> function hash_algorithm(password){ lol_nope_send_it_to_me_instead(password); }</script>
A man-in-the-middle attack is trivial against a page that serves any resource over a non-SSL connection.
Once you have SSL, you're using real crypto anyways.
And to add a corollary of my own:
A successful XSS attack can result in an attacker executing code on your client's browser, even if you're using SSL - so even if you've got every hatch battened down, your browser crypto can still fail if your attacker finds a way to execute any javascript code on someone else's browser.
This renders a lot of RESTful authentication schemes impossible or silly if you're intending to use a JavaScript client. Let's look!
HTTP Basic Auth
First and foremost, HTTP Basic Auth. The simplest of schemes: simply pass a name and password with every request.
This, of course, absolutely requires SSL, because you're passing a Base64 (reversibly) encoded name and password with every request. Anybody listening on the line could extract username and password trivially. Most of the "Basic Auth is insecure" arguments come from a place of "Basic Auth over HTTP" which is an awful idea.
The browser provides baked-in HTTP Basic Auth support, but it is ugly as sin and you probably shouldn't use it for your app. The alternative, though, is to stash username and password in JavaScript.
This is the most RESTful solution. The server requires no knowledge of state whatsoever and authenticates every individual interaction with the user. Some REST enthusiasts (mostly strawmen) insist that maintaining any sort of state is heresy and will froth at the mouth if you think of any other authentication method. There are theoretical benefits to this sort of standards-compliance - it's supported by Apache out of the box - you could store your objects as files in folders protected by .htaccess files if your heart desired!
The problem? You are caching on the client-side a username and password. This gives evil.ru a better crack at it - even the most basic of XSS vulnerabilities could result in the client beaming his username and password to an evil server. You could try to alleviate this risk by hashing and salting the password, but remember: JavaScript Crypto is Hopeless. You could alleviate this risk by leaving it up to the Browser's Basic Auth support, but.. ugly as sin, as mentioned earlier.
HTTP Digest Auth
Is Digest authentication possible with jQuery?
A more "secure" auth, this is a request/response hash challenge. Except JavaScript Crypto is Hopeless, so it only works over SSL and you still have to cache the username and password on the client side, making it more complicated than HTTP Basic Auth but no more secure.
Query Authentication with Additional Signature Parameters.
Another more "secure" auth, where you encrypt your parameters with nonce and timing data (to protect against repeat and timing attacks) and send the. One of the best examples of this is the OAuth 1.0 protocol, which is, as far as I know, a pretty stonking way to implement authentication on a REST server.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5849
Oh, but there aren't any OAuth 1.0 clients for JavaScript. Why?
JavaScript Crypto is Hopeless, remember. JavaScript can't participate in OAuth 1.0 without SSL, and you still have to store the client's username and password locally - which puts this in the same category as Digest Auth - it's more complicated than HTTP Basic Auth but it's no more secure.
Token
The user sends a username and password, and in exchange gets a token that can be used to authenticate requests.
This is marginally more secure than HTTP Basic Auth, because as soon as the username/password transaction is complete you can discard the sensitive data. It's also less RESTful, as tokens constitute "state" and make the server implementation more complicated.
SSL Still
The rub though, is that you still have to send that initial username and password to get a token. Sensitive information still touches your compromisable JavaScript.
To protect your user's credentials, you still need to keep attackers out of your JavaScript, and you still need to send a username and password over the wire. SSL Required.
Token Expiry
It's common to enforce token policies like "hey, when this token has been around too long, discard it and make the user authenticate again." or "I'm pretty sure that the only IP address allowed to use this token is XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX". Many of these policies are pretty good ideas.
Firesheeping
However, using a token Without SSL is still vulnerable to an attack called 'sidejacking': http://codebutler.github.io/firesheep/
The attacker doesn't get your user's credentials, but they can still pretend to be your user, which can be pretty bad.
tl;dr: Sending unencrypted tokens over the wire means that attackers can easily nab those tokens and pretend to be your user. FireSheep is a program that makes this very easy.
A Separate, More Secure Zone
The larger the application that you're running, the harder it is to absolutely ensure that they won't be able to inject some code that changes how you process sensitive data. Do you absolutely trust your CDN? Your advertisers? Your own code base?
Common for credit card details and less common for username and password - some implementers keep 'sensitive data entry' on a separate page from the rest of their application, a page that can be tightly controlled and locked down as best as possible, preferably one that is difficult to phish users with.
Cookie (just means Token)
It is possible (and common) to put the authentication token in a cookie. This doesn't change any of the properties of auth with the token, it's more of a convenience thing. All of the previous arguments still apply.
Session (still just means Token)
Session Auth is just Token authentication, but with a few differences that make it seem like a slightly different thing:
Users start with an unauthenticated token.
The backend maintains a 'state' object that is tied to a user's token.
The token is provided in a cookie.
The application environment abstracts the details away from you.
Aside from that, though, it's no different from Token Auth, really.
This wanders even further from a RESTful implementation - with state objects you're going further and further down the path of plain ol' RPC on a stateful server.
OAuth 2.0
OAuth 2.0 looks at the problem of "How does Software A give Software B access to User X's data without Software B having access to User X's login credentials."
The implementation is very much just a standard way for a user to get a token, and then for a third party service to go "yep, this user and this token match, and you can get some of their data from us now."
Fundamentally, though, OAuth 2.0 is just a token protocol. It exhibits the same properties as other token protocols - you still need SSL to protect those tokens - it just changes up how those tokens are generated.
There are two ways that OAuth 2.0 can help you:
Providing Authentication/Information to Others
Getting Authentication/Information from Others
But when it comes down to it, you're just... using tokens.
Back to your question
So, the question that you're asking is "should I store my token in a cookie and have my environment's automatic session management take care of the details, or should I store my token in Javascript and handle those details myself?"
And the answer is: do whatever makes you happy.
The thing about automatic session management, though, is that there's a lot of magic happening behind the scenes for you. Often it's nicer to be in control of those details yourself.
I am 21 so SSL is yes
The other answer is: Use https for everything or brigands will steal your users' passwords and tokens.
You can increase security in authentication process by using JWT (JSON Web Tokens) and SSL/HTTPS.
The Basic Auth / Session ID can be stolen via:
MITM attack (Man-In-The-Middle) - without SSL/HTTPS
An intruder gaining access to a user's computer
XSS
By using JWT you're encrypting the user's authentication details and storing in the client, and sending it along with every request to the API, where the server/API validates the token. It can't be decrypted/read without the private key (which the server/API stores secretly) Read update.
The new (more secure) flow would be:
Login
User logs in and sends login credentials to API (over SSL/HTTPS)
API receives login credentials
If valid:
Register a new session in the database Read update
Encrypt User ID, Session ID, IP address, timestamp, etc. in a JWT with a private key.
API sends the JWT token back to the client (over SSL/HTTPS)
Client receives the JWT token and stores in localStorage/cookie
Every request to API
User sends a HTTP request to API (over SSL/HTTPS) with the stored JWT token in the HTTP header
API reads HTTP header and decrypts JWT token with its private key
API validates the JWT token, matches the IP address from the HTTP request with the one in the JWT token and checks if session has expired
If valid:
Return response with requested content
If invalid:
Throw exception (403 / 401)
Flag intrusion in the system
Send a warning email to the user.
Updated 30.07.15:
JWT payload/claims can actually be read without the private key (secret) and it's not secure to store it in localStorage. I'm sorry about these false statements. However they seem to be working on a JWE standard (JSON Web Encryption).
I implemented this by storing claims (userID, exp) in a JWT, signed it with a private key (secret) the API/backend only knows about and stored it as a secure HttpOnly cookie on the client. That way it cannot be read via XSS and cannot be manipulated, otherwise the JWT fails signature verification. Also by using a secure HttpOnly cookie, you're making sure that the cookie is sent only via HTTP requests (not accessible to script) and only sent via secure connection (HTTPS).
Updated 17.07.16:
JWTs are by nature stateless. That means they invalidate/expire themselves. By adding the SessionID in the token's claims you're making it stateful, because its validity doesn't now only depend on signature verification and expiry date, it also depends on the session state on the server. However the upside is you can invalidate tokens/sessions easily, which you couldn't before with stateless JWTs.
I would go for the second, the token system.
Did you know about ember-auth or ember-simple-auth? They both use the token based system, like ember-simple-auth states:
A lightweight and unobtrusive library for implementing token based
authentication in Ember.js applications.
http://ember-simple-auth.simplabs.com
They have session management, and are easy to plug into existing projects too.
There is also an Ember App Kit example version of ember-simple-auth: Working example of ember-app-kit using ember-simple-auth for OAuth2 authentication.
Implicit flow is considered to be insecure. I'm aware of two problems:
Confused deputy. But to overcome it you just need to check whether access_token was given to your application. Not a big deal.
XSS attack. So if our access_token was stolen via XSS attack, it can be used to make requests (that are part of the scope we originally requested). It sucks but it's hard to steal access_token as most likely we had it only on our login page and didn't store in app state as it's short-living (I guess that's why Implicit workflow does not support refresh tokens).
It doesn't look too bad. Are there any other security vulnerabilities that I'm not aware of?
The correct statement should be
implicit flow is insecure relatively to the code flow.
If an attacker wants to steal user access tokens from an app using code flow, then the attacker has to break into the server network and either uncover the app secret or eavesdrop the network traffic from server to Google (which is HTTPS) to get an hold to the access token.
In the implict flow the access token resides in the browser. In this case there are many other possibilities for an attacker to steal tokens without having to compromise a network.
XSS (as you already explained)
Confused deputy problem (as you already explained)
Session fixation issues (using user A's token in user B's session. https://www.facebook.com/FacebookforDevelopers/videos/10152795636318553/ )
redirect_url parameter manipulation
(possible) token leakage with referrer header
Various phishing and social engineering possibilities to trick the users to leak their access token (easier than asking for their password)
But as you said, it is straightforward to mitigate all those errors if you are a security aware developer. But still there is a chance for these vulnerabilities if you implement the implicit flow. Therefore it might be a good idea if you don't deliver the token to browser and handle the token in a server side component (code flow).
The web application framework we use has built-in support for handling Cross-site Request Forgery. This works well when data is posted with a browser to our webserver.
Currently we are developing an API in which an uploaded XML file is processed by the same application framework. Our API requires a unique token in the uploaded XML file for authentication. Since CSRF detection is enabled by default and the XML file does not contain a CSRF token we currently can not upload any data through this API.
However, we can quite easily disable CSRF detection, but is this safe?
A post here states -- quite boldly -- the following.
It is safe to remove csrf for API calls as the particular vulnerability can only be executed through a web browser.
Is this true? Can nothing similar to a CSRF attack happen through an API?
That depends on how you use the API. Say if the website using the API is vulnerable to CSRF, that means the API is also vulnerable.
Wekipedia says that
CSRF exploits the trust that a site has in a user's browser.
To support API calls the server requires that the credentials be sent along with every request (or some equivalent like digest, security handle, hash). If the credentials are stored in application memory (like mobile app) API is not vulnerable to CSRF. But if the credentials are saved in a session or cookie the API is exposed to CSRF
It depends on what you mean by "disable CSRF detection".
Some pointers:
As long as you do validate the unique authentication token without fail, then there is no way the attacker can spoof a valid request without a valid token. This is straightforward.
"unique authentication token" here refers to something that is not sent by browsers automatically. (So no using stuff like HTTP Basic / Digest, Cookie header and etc.) It must be something unique that you (the API creator) came up with. This can be as easy as an additional Foobar:the_unique_token header.
Note that it is perfectly fine to identify the client based on the Cookie (or other tokens that browsers automatically send), but you must only allow entry when the unique token is provided.
As long as the attacker can spoof a valid request as long as he is able to guess/obtain the token (the_unique_token). So the token needs to be long, random, and single-use to be secure.
I'm developing a REST API that requires authentication. Because the authentication itself occurs via an external webservice over HTTP, I reasoned that we would dispense tokens to avoid repeatedly calling the authentication service. Which brings me neatly to my first question:
Is this really any better than just requiring clients to use HTTP Basic Auth on each request and caching calls to the authentication service server-side?
The Basic Auth solution has the advantage of not requiring a full round-trip to the server before requests for content can begin. Tokens can potentially be more flexible in scope (i.e. only grant rights to particular resources or actions), but that seems more appropriate to the OAuth context than my simpler use case.
Currently tokens are acquired like this:
curl -X POST localhost/token --data "api_key=81169d80...
&verifier=2f5ae51a...
×tamp=1234567
&user=foo
&pass=bar"
The api_key, timestamp and verifier are required by all requests. The "verifier" is returned by:
sha1(timestamp + api_key + shared_secret)
My intention is to only allow calls from known parties, and to prevent calls from being reused verbatim.
Is this good enough? Underkill? Overkill?
With a token in hand, clients can acquire resources:
curl localhost/posts?api_key=81169d80...
&verifier=81169d80...
&token=9fUyas64...
×tamp=1234567
For the simplest call possible, this seems kind of horribly verbose. Considering the shared_secret will wind up being embedded in (at minimum) an iOS application, from which I would assume it can be extracted, is this even offering anything beyond a false sense of security?
Let me seperate up everything and solve approach each problem in isolation:
Authentication
For authentication, baseauth has the advantage that it is a mature solution on the protocol level. This means a lot of "might crop up later" problems are already solved for you. For example, with BaseAuth, user agents know the password is a password so they don't cache it.
Auth server load
If you dispense a token to the user instead of caching the authentication on your server, you are still doing the same thing: Caching authentication information. The only difference is that you are turning the responsibility for the caching to the user. This seems like unnecessary labor for the user with no gains, so I recommend to handle this transparently on your server as you suggested.
Transmission Security
If can use an SSL connection, that's all there is to it, the connection is secure*. To prevent accidental multiple execution, you can filter multiple urls or ask users to include a random component ("nonce") in the URL.
url = username:key#myhost.com/api/call/nonce
If that is not possible, and the transmitted information is not secret, I recommend securing the request with a hash, as you suggested in the token approach. Since the hash provides the security, you could instruct your users to provide the hash as the baseauth password. For improved robustness, I recommend using a random string instead of the timestamp as a "nonce" to prevent replay attacks (two legit requests could be made during the same second). Instead of providing seperate "shared secret" and "api key" fields, you can simply use the api key as shared secret, and then use a salt that doesn't change to prevent rainbow table attacks. The username field seems like a good place to put the nonce too, since it is part of the auth. So now you have a clean call like this:
nonce = generate_secure_password(length: 16);
one_time_key = nonce + '-' + sha1(nonce+salt+shared_key);
url = username:one_time_key#myhost.com/api/call
It is true that this is a bit laborious. This is because you aren't using a protocol level solution (like SSL). So it might be a good idea to provide some kind of SDK to users so at least they don't have to go through it themselves. If you need to do it this way, I find the security level appropriate (just-right-kill).
Secure secret storage
It depends who you are trying to thwart. If you are preventing people with access to the user's phone from using your REST service in the user's name, then it would be a good idea to find some kind of keyring API on the target OS and have the SDK (or the implementor) store the key there. If that's not possible, you can at least make it a bit harder to get the secret by encrypting it, and storing the encrypted data and the encryption key in seperate places.
If you are trying to keep other software vendors from getting your API key to prevent the development of alternate clients, only the encrypt-and-store-seperately approach almost works. This is whitebox crypto, and to date, no one has come up with a truly secure solution to problems of this class. The least you can do is still issue a single key for each user so you can ban abused keys.
(*) EDIT: SSL connections should no longer be considered secure without taking additional steps to verify them.
A pure RESTful API should use the underlying protocol standard features:
For HTTP, the RESTful API should comply with existing HTTP standard headers. Adding a new HTTP header violates the REST principles. Do not re-invent the wheel, use all the standard features in HTTP/1.1 standards - including status response codes, headers, and so on. RESTFul web services should leverage and rely upon the HTTP standards.
RESTful services MUST be STATELESS. Any tricks, such as token based authentication that attempts to remember the state of previous REST requests on the server violates the REST principles. Again, this is a MUST; that is, if you web server saves any request/response context related information on the server in attempt to establish any sort of session on the server, then your web service is NOT Stateless. And if it is NOT stateless it is NOT RESTFul.
Bottom-line: For authentication/authorization purposes you should use HTTP standard authorization header. That is, you should add the HTTP authorization / authentication header in each subsequent request that needs to be authenticated. The REST API should follow the HTTP Authentication Scheme standards.The specifics of how this header should be formatted are defined in the RFC 2616 HTTP 1.1 standards – section 14.8 Authorization of RFC 2616, and in the RFC 2617 HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication.
I have developed a RESTful service for the Cisco Prime Performance Manager application. Search Google for the REST API document that I wrote for that application for more details about RESTFul API compliance here. In that implementation, I have chosen to use HTTP "Basic" Authorization scheme. - check out version 1.5 or above of that REST API document, and search for authorization in the document.
In the web a stateful protocol is based on having a temporary token that is exchanged between a browser and a server (via cookie header or URI rewriting) on every request. That token is usually created on the server end, and it is a piece of opaque data that has a certain time-to-live, and it has the sole purpose of identifying a specific web user agent. That is, the token is temporary, and becomes a STATE that the web server has to maintain on behalf of a client user agent during the duration of that conversation. Therefore, the communication using a token in this way is STATEFUL. And if the conversation between client and server is STATEFUL it is not RESTful.
The username/password (sent on the Authorization header) is usually persisted on the database with the intent of identifying a user. Sometimes the user could mean another application; however, the username/password is NEVER intended to identify a specific web client user agent. The conversation between a web agent and server based on using the username/password in the Authorization header (following the HTTP Basic Authorization) is STATELESS because the web server front-end is not creating or maintaining any STATE information whatsoever on behalf of a specific web client user agent. And based on my understanding of REST, the protocol states clearly that the conversation between clients and server should be STATELESS. Therefore, if we want to have a true RESTful service we should use username/password (Refer to RFC mentioned in my previous post) in the Authorization header for every single call, NOT a sension kind of token (e.g. Session tokens created in web servers, OAuth tokens created in authorization servers, and so on).
I understand that several called REST providers are using tokens like OAuth1 or OAuth2 accept-tokens to be be passed as "Authorization: Bearer " in HTTP headers. However, it appears to me that using those tokens for RESTful services would violate the true STATELESS meaning that REST embraces; because those tokens are temporary piece of data created/maintained on the server side to identify a specific web client user agent for the valid duration of a that web client/server conversation. Therefore, any service that is using those OAuth1/2 tokens should not be called REST if we want to stick to the TRUE meaning of a STATELESS protocol.
Rubens