Using cloudflare flexible ssl option causes login form to refresh instead of sending request - apache

I am using cloudflare's "flexible ssl" as an intermediary between client and my site.
After setting this up, I went to the browser and tried accessing my site via https:
https://example.com/login
and everything works. I fill in my login info and log in successfully and am not on http://example.com . I manually enter https://example.com/* where * is many other pages and it all works fine.
Now I want to redirect all requests to use the seemingly working https. So i go to my cloudflare account on their website and create a page rule : http://example.com/* to always use https.
Now I go to example.com/login and successfully redirected to https://example.com/login, I fill in my log in information and submit the login form , the page refreshes and I am back to https://example.com/login with an empty login form.
Anyone know what the problem is or how to help troubleshoot?
I am using laravel as a framework for the site and apache as the webserver.


create a page rule : http://example.com/* to always use https
Noted. Be aware that CloudFlare does this by accepting every HTTP request on http://example.com/* and returning a 301 redirect to the equivalent HTTPS request. The browser completes the redirect by sending a GET request to the HTTPS URL.
I fill in my log in information and submit the login form
Check the login form source carefully and check what URL the login form is submitted to. My guess is that the form is submitted to http://example.com/login or something similar. CloudFlare will accept the POST request to http://example.com/login and return a 301 redirect to https://example.com/login -- which your browser will complete as a GET request and hence not sending the login data.
So your best solution is to make sure that your login form POSTs to the correct HTTPS URL not to the HTTP URL.
That's my best guess anyway.
how to help troubleshoot?
Ensure that you are using different log files to distinguish between HTTP and HTTPS requests on your server.
Some other suggestions:
Get a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate and put that on your site so that the communication between CloudFlare and your site is all SSL. https://letsencrypt.org/
Ensure that HSTS is turned on for all of your HTTPS requests so that the browser will know not to send any requests to any HTTP URLs.
Create a development server where you can test all of this working with HTTPS between the browser and the web server without CloudFlare. Once you've got it all working in HTTPS mode without CloudFlare then you can try it with CloudFlare and you should get essentially the same results. Your problem is with the HTTP -> HTTPS switch, not specifically with CloudFlare.

Related

Http url going to https url without using permanent redirect

I have just added support SSL on my website
However unlike most websites if you go to Http it doesn't automatically change to Https
The system administrator resolved this by configuring a permanent redirect 301, however the server is also used to verify licenses from my Java desktop application, and the permanent redirect caused the code to fail because it just receives Http response 301 so we had to remove the 301
So is there another way for a user to enter the non ssl url and it change to the secure version without breaking my application code that makes calls to non ssl url as well.

FOR BROWSER(S) ONLY you can redirect with meta-refresh or javascript instead of HTTP; Java won't interpret meta or js even if your response to an application request is HTML, which APIs usually aren't. This is not a permanent redirect so it satisfies the constraint unnecessarily stated in your Q, but you could add HSTS (on the HTTPS connection only) so that subsequent browser requests to this domain (and optionally any subdomains) are forced to HTTPS before sending, for a period of time (commonly several months or a year).

Can I use vb.net to interrogate a website to know if it uses SSL

I have a program that asks the user to type in a URL, and click download. Then the program downloads the webpage.
However, some websites use SSL, and in that case the user has to prefix his URL with https:// for this to work.
The problem is that the user may not know whether the website uses SSL, and may type http://... instead of https://....
Is there some way to send a preliminary message to the website (from vb.net) asking whether the URL should start with https or just http? If there is, I can correct the user URL before attempting to retrieve the web page.
(I should say there it is not enough to use something like this:
request.RequestUri.Scheme - this looks at the URL the user submitted, not the URL coming back from the server, as far as I know)

For websites that uses SSL, usually they will force the request to use HTTPS. That is when you send a request in HTTP, for example, http://www.example.com, the website will send a redirect response with HTTP status code 302 as well as the URL the client side that initiate the request should redirect user to.
So, you can try HTTP first and check the response to see if there is a redirect. So, you will need to handle that in your code.

Prevent http page from redirecting to https page

I have a website (userbob.com) that normally serves all pages as https. However, I am trying to have one subdirectory (userbob.com/tools/) always serve content as http. Currently, it seems like Chrome's HSTS feature (which I don't understand how it works) is forcing my site's pages to load over https. I can go to chrome://net-internals/#hsts and delete my domain from Chrome's HSTS set, and the next query will work as I want without redirecting to an https version. However, if I try to load the page a second time, it ends up redirecting again. The only way I can get it to work is if I go to chrome://net-internals/#hsts and delete my domain from Chrome's HSTS set after each request. How do I let browsers know that I want all my pages from userbob.com/tools/ to load as http? My site uses an apache/tomcat web server.
(Just FYI, the reason I want the pages in the tools directory to serve pages over http instead of https is because some of them are meant to iframe http pages. If I try to iframe an http page from an https page I end up getting mixed-content errors.)

HTTP Strict Transport Security (or HSTS) is a setting your site can send to browsers which says "I only want to use HTTPS on my site - if someone tries to go to a HTTP link, automatically upgrade them to HTTPS before you send the request". It basically won't allow you to send any HTTP traffic, either accidentally or intentionally.
This is a security feature. HTTP traffic can be intercepted, read, altered and redirected to other domains. HTTPS-only websites should redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS, but there are various security issues/attacks if any requests are still initially sent over HTTP so HSTS prevents this.
The way HSTS works is that your website sends a HTTP Header Strict-Transport-Security with a value of, for example, max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains on your HTTPS requests. The browser caches this and activates HSTS for 31536000 seconds (1 year), in this example. You can see this HTTP Header in your browsers web developer tools or by using a site like https://securityheaders.io . By using the chrome://net-internals/#hsts site you are able to clear that cache and allow HTTP traffic again. However as soon as you visit the site over HTTPS it will send the Header again and the browser will revert back to HTTPS-only.
So to permanently remove this setting you need to stop sending that Strict-Transport-Security Header. Find this in your Apache/Tomcat server and turn it off. Or better yet change it to max-age=0; includeSubDomains for a while first (which tells the browser to clear the cache after 0 seconds and so turns it off without having to visit chrome://net-internals/#hsts, as long as you visit the site over HTTPS to pick up this Header, and then remove the Header completely later.
Once you turn off HSTS you can revert back to having some pages on HTTPS and some on HTTP with standard redirects.
However it would be remiss of me to not warn you against going back to HTTP. HTTPS is the new standard and there is a general push to encourage all sites to move to HTTPS and penalise those that do not. Read his post for more information:
https://www.troyhunt.com/life-is-about-to-get-harder-for-websites-without-https/
While you are correct that you cannot frame HTTP content on a HTTPS page, you should consider if there is another way to address this problem. A single HTTP page on your site can cause security problems like leaking cookies (if they are not set up correctly). Plus frames are horrible and shouldn't be used anymore :-)

You can use rewrite rules to redirect https requests to http inside of subdirectory. Create an .htaccess file inside tools directory and add the following content:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule (.*) http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
Make sure that apache mod_rewrite is enabled.

Basically any HTTP 301 response from an HTTPS request indicating a target redirect to HTTP should never be honored at all by any browser, those servers doing that are clearly violating basic security, or are severaly compromized.
However a 301 reply to an HTTPS request can still redirect to another HTTPS target (including on another domain, provided that other CORS requirements are met).
If you navigate an HTTPS link (or a javascript event handler) and the browser starts loading that HTTPS target which replies with 301 redirect to HTTP, the behavior of the browser should be like if it was a 500 server error, or a connection failure (DNS name not resolved, server not responding timeout).
Such server-side redirect are clearly invalid. And website admins should never do that ! If they want to close a service and inform HTTPS users that the service is hosted elsewhere and no longer secure, they MUST return a valid HTTPS response page with NO redirect at all, and this should really be a 4xx error page (most probably 404 PAGE NOT FOUND) and they should not redirect to another HTTPS service (e.g. a third-party hosted search engine or parking page) which does not respect CORS requirements, or sends false media-types (it is acceptable to not honor the requested language and display that page in another language).
Browsers that implement HSTS are perfectly correct and going to the right direction. But I really think that CORS specifications are a mess, just tweaked to still allow advertizing network to host and control themselves the ads they broadcast to other websites.
I strongly think that serious websites that still want to display ads (or any tracker for audience measurement) for valid reasons can host these ads/trackers themselves, on their own domain and in the same protocol: servers can still get themselves the ads content they want to broadcast by downloading/refreshing these ads themselves and maintaining their own local cache. They can track their audience themselves by collecting the data they need and want and filtering it on their own server if they want this data to be analysed by a third party: websites will have to seriously implement thelselves the privacy requirements.
I hate now those too many websites that, when visited, are being tracked by dozens of third parties, including very intrusive ones like Facebook and most advertizing networks, plus many very weak third party services that have very poor quality/security and send very bad content they never control (including fake ads, fake news, promoting illegal activities, illegal businesses, invalid age rating...).
Let's return to the origin of the web: one site, one domain, one third party. This does not mean that they cannot link to other third party sites, but these must done only with an explicit user action (tapping or clicking), and visitors MUST be able to kn ow wherre this will go to, or which content will be displayed.
This is even possible for inserting videos (e.g. Youtube) in news articles: the news website can host themselves a cache of static images for the frame and icons for the "play" button: when users click that icon, it will start activating the third party video, and in that case the thirf party will interact directly with that user and can collect other data. But the unactivated contents will be tracked only by the origin website, under their own published policy.

In my local development environment I use apache server. What worked for me was :
Open you config file in sites-availabe/yoursite.conf. then add the following line inside your virtualhost:
Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=0". Restart your server.

HTTP to HTTPS (SSL) without redirect (Twitter Example)

I am trying to optimize my site for all HTTPS. I know that Twitter is all HTTPS and I noticed that they don't redirect HTTP to HTTPS, but instead just initiate an HTTPS connection.
Here is a screenshot of Google Chrome's Network Activity, notice there is no redirect (301/302), the HTTP request (first line) just hangs as pending and the second line is the HTTPS page. Note, I have cleared all my browser cache so HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) shouldn't matter.
Here is another screenshot of the request/response for the HTTPS page. Notice, that it seems Twitter inserts some fields into the REQUEST, such as :scheme
How do they do this? I would assume its faster so that if a user types twitter.com into their browser, instead of a redirect (think extra network round trip), Twitter seems to seamlessly move to SSL (HTTPS).
A follow on question would be, does this work in all browsers?

They have been added to a list of preloaded HSTS sites in Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Forcing url forwarded to http when enabling SSL for Joomla Login Module

I was enabling "Encrypt Login Form" for my joomla website but after user logging in, it always forwarded to https:// url. Is there any easy way to force forwarded url to use http:// ? So the ssl will be used for login or registration purpose only?
Thanks