Are there best practices in implementing encryption in Arangodb?
I am aware of that there is a crypto module here
https://docs.arangodb.com/3.1/Manual/Appendix/JavaScriptModules/Crypto.html
but I am unsure about implementation details.
I have to build a database with sensible data. The goal would be to store this data already encrypted in the cloud, so even the cloudprovider would not be able to read its contents.
But I am not sure, if this is posssible at all, like how would I query data, when it is encrypted?
On the other hand, I would not need to encrypt all data, it would be great already, if I could separate, which data belongs to which person/customer/user in the database.
Alls ideas, suggestions and hints on this are welcome, thanks for your support :)
Belated answer here, but basically any data at rest (or being stored in your database) should be encrypted. (data in motion should be encrypted as well, but that's another topic.) Encryption can be decrypted. In contrast, hashing is an irreversible process. Passwords should be stored salted and hashed, then when the user sends their password in you hash it with the same salt and compare. You can also pepper it if needed. But other sensitive data that you need to access again could not be hashed only encrypted.
It's a biiiiig topic, a little too big for a question here on SO I think, but below is a video that may be helpful. But I encourage you to do more research into SSL, Encryption, Shared Secrets, Public/Private Key Encryption, Hashing/Salting/Peppering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZtInClXe1Q
Related
So how do websites keep passwords long term?
I mean really important websites, say a government or a big ecommerce or social networking website.
Sure, they store a hash (or salted hash) of the password in the webserver-connected datastore that is used for authentication, but is that it?
NOTE: I am not asking about hashing or salting, I'm asking about where the store the metadata (e.g., hash or salted hash) such that it's always available?
In fact, how do websites like Facebook store passwords? I'm guessing they would have multiple copies of the hash spread out over the world? And backed up to tape once in a while?
You only need the hash of the user's password for most applications. Usually, the actual password isn't stored, for security reasons. If the datastore is compromised, you wouldn't want the hacker to be able to gain the actual passwords for the users.
That's usually why, actually, the hashes are salted in the first place. Salting makes it much harder to use a rainbow table (a precomputed table of all possible combos for passwords going through a certain type of hash) to regain the original password, which the user may be using on other sites.
This was answered in more depth here: Best way to store password in database
the question is too broad to answer. It isn't just relevant for government web pages; it would be a real security issue if there are clear text passwords stored. Depending on security needs, there are password hashes used in most cases. If users need a certificate (e.g. stored on a card, or obtained using another process), there might be a public key of the user stored on the server (instead of the hash).
Your question also asks on completely different topics. For sure, a web backend database also needs backups (not only for passwords), and there are several load balancing techniques which may also consider geolocation topics etc.
So, let's assume I have read every article/post about appropriately salting and hashing passwords in order to secure user credentials.
This means I am not wondering what hashing algorithm to use (SHA1 vs. SHA2 vs. PDKBF2), how to generate the salt, how to store the salt, how to append the salt, or whether I should be writing the code myself vs. leveraging well-established libraries like bcrypt. Please, avoid rambling about these issues here as I have read 50+ other pages of that already.
Just assume the following is my approach (also note I understand this is not flawless or likely sufficient for applications like financial service, I am really just wondering if this is an acceptable min bar to claim that I "do the right thing").
User comes to my amazing website (www.myamazingwebsite.com) and logs in with email and pass.
I pull her salt and hash from my database. Assume the salt is lengthy enough, unique per-user, and created using a CSPRNG upon user registration.
I prepend the salt to her input password, hash it using SHA-512, run 1,000 iterations, then compare it to the hashed value pulled from the db:
var hash = sha512(salt + password);
for (i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
hash = sha512(salt + password + hash);
}
If they match, the user is authenticated. Otherwise, they are not.
Now, my question is how secure is my above approach. The questions I would like help answering:
Do I need to change the salt periodically? For example, perhaps I could re-compute and store a new hash using a newly created random salt after every successful login. This seems like it would be more secure but I am not sure what standard practice is here.
The request to the server will be done via https. Does that mean I can assume that I can process all of the hashing and validation logic server side? Would most folks consider this sufficient, or do I need to consider some hybrid both on client and server side?
Anything else I am overlooking or need to consider?
Thanks in advance, I appreciate the help.
1) Assuming you've done the right thing and do not store their password, you can't change the salt unless they are logging in. I suppose you could change their salt every time they do log in, but it doesn't really help (and might hurt).
Here's why: Having a unique salt on everyone simply makes it harder for an attacker that has access to your database from attempting to guess the passwords. If you've done things correctly, he would have to use a different salt for each person. He can't just start guessing passwords using a site-wide salt and see if it matches anyone. As long as you have a unique salt for each user, you are doing the best you can.
In fact, changing the salt does nothing but give an attacker with access to your database over time MORE information. Now he knows what their password looks like salted two different ways. That could (theoretically) help crack it. For this reason, it would actually be ill advised to change the salt.
2) Https is sufficient. If someone can compromise https, then any additional client side hashing or such will not help. The clients computer is compromised.
3) I think you have a fair understanding of best password practices. Don't overlook other security issues like sql-injection and cross-site scripting.
Do I need to change the salt periodically?
No. The salt is a per-user public parameter that servers two purposes. First, it ensures that an attacker cannot build an offline dictionary of passwords to hashes. Second, it ensures two users with the same password have different hashed password entries in the database.
See the Secure Password Storage Cheat Sheet and Secure Password Storage paper by John Steven of OWASP. It takes you through the entire threat model, and explains why things are done in particular ways.
The request to the server will be done via https. Does that mean I can assume that I can process all of the hashing and validation logic server side?
This is standard practice, but its a bad idea. Its a bad idea because of all the problems with SSL/TLS and PKI in practice. Though this is common, here's how it fails: the SSL/TLS channel is setup with any server that presents a certificate. The web application then puts the {username, password} on the wire in the plain text using a basic_auth scheme. Now the bad guy has the username and password.
There's lots of other problems with doing things this way. Peter Gutmann talks about this problem (and more) in his Engineering Security book. He's got a witty sense of humor, so the book is cleverly funny at times, too even though its a technical book.
Would most folks consider this sufficient, or do I need to consider some hybrid both on client and server side?
If possible, use TLS-PSK (Preshared Key) or TLS-SRP (Secure Remote Password). Both overcome the problems of basic_auth schemes, both properly bind the channel, and both provide mutual authentication. There are 80 cipher suites available for TLS-PSK and TLS-SRP, so there's no shortage of algorithms.
Anything else I am overlooking or need to consider?
Cracking is not the only threat here. More than likely, the guy trying to break into your organization is going to be using one of the top passwords from the millions of passwords gathered from the Adobe breach, the LinkedIn breach, the Last.fm breach, the <favorite here> breach.... For example:
25 most-used passwords revealed: Is yours one of them?
The 30 Most Popular Passwords Stolen From LinkedIn
Top 100 Adobe Passwords with Count
Why bother brute forcing when you have a list of thousands of top rated passwords to use?
So your FIRST best defense is to use a word list that filters a user's bad password choices. That is, don't allow user's to pick weak or known passwords in the first place.
If someone gets away with your password database, then he or she is going to use those same password lists to try and guess your user's passwords. He or she is probably not even going to bother brute forcing because he or she will have recovered so many passwords using a password list.
As I understand it, these word lists are quite small when implemented as a Bloom Filter. They are only KB in size even though there are millions of passwords. See Peter Gutmann's Engineering Security for an in depth discussion.
I want to make a user login system for the purpose of learning. I have several questions.
I did some research and found that the proper way of implementing a user login system is to store the user name/id and the encrypted/hashed version of the password in the database. When a user logs in, the password is encrypted client side (MD5, SHA-1 etc.) and sent to the server where it is compared with the one in database. If they match, the user log in successfully.
This implementation prevents DBAs or programmers seeing the cleartext of the password in the database. It can also prevent hackers intercepting the real password in transit.
Here is where I'm confused:
What if the hackers know the hash/encrypted version of password (by hacking the database) or DBAs, programmers get the hashed version of the password by just simply reading the text in the database. They could then easily make a program that sends this hashed version of the password to the server allowing them to successfully log in. If they can do that, encrypting the password doesn't seem very useful. I think I misunderstanding something here.
Is this (the way I described above) the most popular way to implement user login functionality? Does it follow current best practices? Do I have to do everything manually or does some database have the built-in ability to do the same thing? Is there a most common way/method of doing this for a website or a web app? If so, please provide me with details.
My former company used couchDB to store user login info including passwords. They did not do too much with the encryption side of things. They said couchDB will automatically encrypt the password and store it in the documents. I am not sure if this is a safe way. If so, then it is pretty convenient for programmers because it saves lots of work.
Is this way (point 3) secure enough for normal use? Do other database system such as mySQL have this kind of ability that can do the same thing? If so, does it mean that using mySQL built-in method is secure enough?
I am not looking for a very super secure way of implementing user login functionality. I am rather looking for a way that is popular, easy-to-implement, proper, secure enough for most web applications. Please give me some advice. Details provided will be really appreciated.
When a user login, client side code will encrypt the password by MD5 or SHA-1 or something like that, and then send this encrypted password to server side and then compare it with the one in database. If they are matched, the user log in successfully.
No, no, the client needs to send the unhashed password over. If you hash the password on the client side then that hash is effectively the password. This would nullify the security of the cryptographic hashing. The hashing has to be done on the server side.
To secure the plaintext password in transit it needs to be sent over a secure channel, such as an encrypted TLS (SSL) connection.
Passwords should be salted with a piece of extra data that is different for each account. Salting inhibits rainbow table attacks by eliminating the direct correlation between plaintext and hash. Salts do not need to be secret, nor do they need to be extremely large. Even 4 random bytes of salt will increase the complexity of a rainbow table attack by a factor of 4 billion.
The industry gold standard right now is Bcrypt. In addition to salting, bcrypt adds further security by designing in a slowdown factor.
Besides incorporating a salt to protect against rainbow table attacks, bcrypt is an adaptive function: over time, the iteration count can be increased to make it slower, so it remains resistant to brute-force search attacks even with increasing computation power.... Cryptotheoretically, this is no stronger than the standard Blowfish key schedule, but the number of rekeying rounds is configurable; this process can therefore be made arbitrarily slow, which helps deter brute-force attacks upon the hash or salt.
A few clarifications:
Don't use MD5. It's considered broken. Use SHA but I'd recommend something a little better than SHA1. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5
You don't mention anything about salting the password. This is essential to protect against Rainbow tables. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_tables
The idea of salting/hashing passwords isn't really to protect your own application. It's because most users have a few passwords that they use for a multitude of sites. Hashing/salting prevents anyone who gains access to your database from learning what these passwords are and using them to log into their banking application or something similar. Once someone gains direct access to the database your application's security has already been fully compromised. - http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/23/users-same-password-most-websites/
Don't use the database's built in security to handle your logins. It's hacky and gives them way more application access than they should have. Use a table.
You don't mention anything about SSL. Even a well designed authentication system is useless if the passwords are sent across the wire in plain text. There are other approaches like Challenge/Response but unfortunately the password still has to be sent in plain text to the server when the user registers or changes their password. SSL is the best way to prevent this.
What's the simplest way to upgrade a VB.NET site to using encrypted passwords? Are there easy to use encryption algorithms built in to System.UI?
My site is using plain text password storage, and it will soon be going to a public server at godaddy from a private one on the local network. I'm going to have to start adding in encryption algorithms to all the password parsing functions, and it would be nice if I could just set a SALT key in the web.config file and Encrypt(password) or something like that.
Not in System.UI but definitely in System.Security.Cryptography:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.aspx
There are definitely standard "good practices" you'll want to follow. No point in re-inventing the wheel, especially when it comes to password storage. There are a lot of resources for that, and they're better at it than I am :)
Generate a salt for each user and store it in the database. Then hash the users incoming plain text password, add the salt to it and hash it again. For extra security, hash the password at the client before posting back to your server. Once you have the posted hash, you can add the salt to it and hash it again then store that value as the users password. This basically ensures that no one, even if they have access to your database can easily get to the users passwords.
This is the simplest way and all that is required is a reference to the cryptography libraries. You can get as fancy as you want with your algorithm. I've just provided a loose example of something that could be easily done in just a few minutes.
What algorithm should I use for encrypting and embedding a password for an application?
It obviously is not bullet proof, but it should be good enough to thwart someone scanning the database with a hex editor, or make it hard for someone who has the skills to use a debugger to trace the code to work out, either by scanning for the encrypted password, or using a debugger to run through the decryption code.
Object Pascal would be nice.
Major Edit
I think I did not explain myself well enough. The password needs to be decrypted back into its original form and applied. The application itself uses a local SQL database and a local webserver, and the password is fixed and can't be changed by the end users. It is to ensure that changes to be made only from within the app itself. The user passwords are only to allow access to the app itself, rather than the database
/vfclists
If you want an easy solution just stick with a good hashing algorithm like MD5 and store just the hash inside your application. Then whenever the user inserts the password you will calculate the hash of the password and check if it's equal to the one stored.
Of course this approach is a simple solution that doesn't allow you to retrieve the password if it's lost but it should work quite fine if you just need some protection..
EDIT: I mentioned MD5 that was fair good but not anymore, of course you can choose any other stronger function like SHA-2 (512/384) that is more robust. I just wanted to explain an approach more than using a specific hashing algorithm.
SHA should be ok for you, best with salt.
I don't know Object Pascal very well, but probably this will help you:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/op-crypt/
When an application has to do password checking only, it is best to save a hash. An hash can not be decrypted, but it can be checked whether the password the user enters has the same hash.
If you want to save the password so that it can be recovered, it is best to encrypt it first, using some crypto library.
I would suggest SHA1, its one way encryption, i've used it before and by far no one has decrypted it!
If you need more information on sha1 visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Hash_Algorithm and http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/sha.html.
PS: If you're using php you can simply encrypt with SHA1 using the sha1(); function!
I suspect that what you're aiming for is not storing passwords in the application, but trying to prevent the application itself from being run without the password, as a form of DRM. If that's the case, and you're looking to stymie people with debuggers, I think you're well into the realm of needing either a hardware dongle, or a network-based lock. Off the top of my head, I know SafeNet carry products that do this (and I've had some exposure to them in the past, they seem decent), but I don't know how well they compare to the rest of the market.
If you want as much real security as is possible in the scenario you're describing, you should require that when the system is installed an "administrator" enters the database password and his own administrator password; the application should then store a salted hash of the administrator's password, and it should store the database password encrypted with a differently-salted hash of the administrator's password. The database password (or information sufficient to reconstruct it) will be kept in memory while the program is running, but absent the administrator password there would be no way to retrieve when the program isn't running, even with full knowledge of the system.
If it's necessary to allow multiple users to access the database, an "add user" button could allow the addition of a user account. When the user types his password, use it to store hashed/encrypted data as with the administrator.
Any user with a debugger would be able to leverage his knowledge of a valid user account and password into knowledge of the database password, but someone who didn't have knowledge of a valid account password wouldn't be able to do anything.
If I am interpreting your question right, then you want to basically distribute your application to users, allow them to run it, and have the application update your database. At the same time, you want to prevent that person from being able to log in to the database and use it themselves directly.
If your program can be decompiled (like java, but I don't know about other languages like C, C++), then the person who has your application will be able to see the source code. Once they have that, there will most certainly be some way they can discover the user name and password. Even if your source code has stored the password using a reversible encryption algorithm, the person who holds your source code will be able to write similar code as yours to reverse the encryption and discover the password.
Even if your application cannot be decompiled, the user may be able to capture the network packets it sends to the database and determine the password from that. I don't know if you can communicate with the database over SSL.
Instead, I believe you need to split your application into client and server applications. You can write a restful web application, or use a messaging service (like JMS for example), and write a client application that uses it.
In that case, you may or may not want to have user accounts that are managed by your server side application. Let me be clear here, I am not talking about database accounts, but accounts that your application manages, and whose details happen to be stored in the database. If you do create user accounts, you can follow the pattern in my original answer shown below.
============== Hashing Approach, my original answer ============
As others have already mentioned, it's best to add salt to the password and use a digest algorithm before you store the password in your database. However, I think a little more detail is in order.
Using SHA1 or SHA2 with a salt value may be pretty strong, but there are even stronger methods. I highly recommend that you read this section of the spring security manual. I don't think you are using spring or java, but that section covers the concepts involved very well. Allow me to paraphrase:
Use at least an 8 byte salt value, up to 16 bytes would be great. The salt value should be different for every account, if it is the same then a cracker will only need to produce one rainbow table! It should be randomly generated. The documentation doesn't say this, but I also recommend using a secure random number generator, don't use a random number seed that produces a consistent sequence of numbers.
You should hash the password multiple times because it will cause brute force password hacking attempts to take increasingly more time. Indeed, you may want a slow password encoding algorithm instead of a fast one.
Store the raw salt value in the database along with the password, you can even store it in the same field/column. This is required so passwords can be verified in the future.
The BCryptPasswordEncoder is a good example of this.
===============
One alternative approach that may or may not solve your problem is to create a database account that has limited privileges. For example, you could create a database account that can only select, update, insert, and delete on specific tables in your database. You may not find this acceptable, because you may not want to let people do those operations directly, while you may want to let the application do those operations. It depends on your specific situation.