Run web application only inside a particular .EXE - sql

I have a web application, which run in all browsers using ASP.NET, SQLSERVER.
Since its relating to transferring funds and transmitting vouchers any one can use this from anywhere in the world.
Only user name and password are the security parameters used here.
We are facing an issue in the security side, any sales agent / customer who got this credentials can make transactions on that particular dealers account.
Is it possible to launch the web-app only inside an .EXE file, which can act as a parent to run my web-app.
So any anyone suggest an idea to do this mechanism /or a better solution to overcome this obstacle?

1) Change your application to use two-factor authentication.
2) User best-practices for application security -- no magic fix ever guarantees real security.

Related

Google Cloud Run - Understanding of Authenticating end users

I have a web application which runs until now with cloud run, but without access restriction. Now it should be available only for certain users.
I read https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/authenticating/end-users and also tried both
mentioned ways: Google-Sign-In and the "Identity Platform" tutorial.
If I understand correctly, you have to program the actual user handling yourself in both variants. For example, determining which email addresses have access to the application, etc.
I was looking for a declarative way where, ideally, I only maintain a list of permitted email addresses and the "cloud run application" is only "magically" linked to this. With the result that only these users get access to the web application. That doesn't seem possible?
Ideally, the actual application should not be changed at all and an upstream layer would take care of the authentication and authorization, possibly in conjunction with the "Identiy Platform".
Best regards and any hint is welcome
Thomas
Let me add some sugar to this to better understand all these.
A Cloud Run application is packaged by you, you maintain the source code, if this is a website, placing a login button and handling authentication is your job to accomplish.
A Cloud Run system which is running all this on a hardware, it doesn't "look into" or handles your application code outside of the "code". Simply put it doesn't know if it's a Java or Python code and how to handle authentication out of the box for you - but read further.
If you require a simple way to authorize look into API Gateway it can be placed "before" Cloud Run. It might not be exactly your use case. These exists only for "API" designed services.
That upstream layer you need is the managed Identity platform, but the CODE should be assembled by you and deployed inside your Cloud Run service. The code will be the UI driven part, the authorization logic is handled by the Identity Platform so it reduces the amount of development time.
Your users would sign up using a dedicated registration page, and sign in by entering their emails and passwords. Identity Platform offers a pre-built authentication UI you can use for these pages, or you can build your own. You might also want to support additional sign-in methods, such as social providers (like Facebook or Google), phone numbers, OIDC, or SAML.
Look into some of the advanced examples to get a feeling how authorization can be customized further: Only allowing registration from a specific domain you could reuse one of these samples to maintain that shortlist of users that you mentioned.
In addition to #Pentium10's answer, you can also make all users authenticate to your app somewhat forcibly. (Imagine you're building an internal portal for your company, or an /admin panel for your app that only certain users/groups can access.)
This sort of use case can be achieved by placing Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) in front of your Cloud Run service. That way, all requests go through this proxy that validates the caller. This is not like Identity Platform in the sense that visitors don't create accounts on your website (they use existing Google accounts or other IdPs like ActiveDirectory, or whatever you configure on IAP).
I have a little tutorial at https://github.com/ahmetb/cloud-run-iap-terraform-demo/ since IAP+Cloud Run integration is still not GA and therefore not fully documented.

MCV Web application with On-Premise ADFS Authentication

really hope that I can get some pointers with this before I go wasting too much time. In truth, I'm not even one hundred percent sure where I need to be asking this. I'm dealing with a whole heap of technologies I've had little to know experience with. Historically, I've been a pretty simple vb.net desktop developer so I'm learning MCV5 & C# as I go. I realize some of this might be in the wrong place, but hoping for pointers at lease
So the situation is I've been asked to develop a web application/api by a number of my customers so that their field staff can perform certain data entry functions while out of the office and periodically feed back into their management systems. All these customer have the very close to the same requirements and management systems, so my my intent is to build a single web application with a multi-tenant database where I control who gets to see what based on their login.
The core of the web app, database(s) etc I've got my head around, in fact that all seems pretty seamless. Using https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx as a start point I think I can manage the database side of things.
Where I'm really struggling over is how best to secure this system. Looking at the options in available to me in visual studio (2015) I think the best option for me is for me to use an On-Premise ADFS. My boss has already put his foot down regarding Azure, so unfortunately not an option, we pretty much have our own server farm in house more than capable of hosting this.
The real sticker here is my SA has pretty much said this is not his problem, if you want ADFS and a web server, you sort it out. He's given me a nice fresh server VM with Win2012R2 at least, but doesn't want anything more to do with it.
So, to the questions
Is ADFS even needed in this scenario, or am I better deal with this
all via a standard AD or some other tooling? And even if it is possible, is it a good idea?
Duringdevelopment/testing, is it ok to use a self signing certificate or
am I going to run into to trouble with certificate errors?
When configuring ADFS, you get asked for the federation Service name. In
the senario above where I'm using it for authenticating a web app,
is it ever exposed directly to the end user? Are they going to be
needing to type this in to their browsers? and will it be better to have external DNS entries for this?
My 2-cent:
There will be a learning curve, but if all the users are stored in AD, using ADFS will give you some advantages such as SSO, federation against other providers if you ever need it later on.
Using self-signed certificates during dev/test is fine. You can turn off certificate revocation check on ADFS side.
No, that Federation service name doesn't get exposed to the end users. I would suggest you have external DNS entries for your ADFS because your users need to access it from the outside. In short, a user rarely needs to type in ADFS url. Instead, he or she needs to access a service provider site and it will redirects he or she to the ADFS site.
This is becoming a more common scenario and can be seamlessly handled with AD FS. Ideally what you would want to do is:
deploy your AD FS farm
Configure your Web Application to trust your ADFS STS
Whenever you need to add a customer who will be using your multi-tenant application, add a federation trust with that customer (i.e. federation trust between your AD FS and the customer's AD FS)
This will ensure that you don't have to deal with identity management for every individual user when you add a customer. When a customer tries to login to your WebApp, then he will be authenticated against his AD FS, and your AD FS will get the token and sign them and present it to the Web Application. This will give them SSO which everyone has started to expect as a de-facto :)
Self signed certificates - As Thuan mentioned it is ok to use them during testing, just ensure that all your test boxes are configured to trust the certificate or otherwise you will be seeing connection drops all around
Federation service name - As explained in the setup summary above, the federation service name will never need to be exposed to the end user from a customer's organization. For all he knows, he is being authenticated against his AD FS as he is used to it already.
You might want to consider deploying AD FS in Azure:
AD FS deployment in Azure

API Security/Authorization

I am in need of advice on how best to tackle the following scenario and best practices to implement it.
Our company wants to overhaul its old IT systems and create new website app(s) and possibly mobile apps down the line for its employees and contractors to interact with.
So i was thinking about creating an api that both the website apps and mobile apps could be created from...
https://api.company.com/v1
The advice i need is in relation to security/authorization of the api. My thoughts at present in how to implement this would be that the employees/contractors would interact with the api through the companys website app(s)/mobile apps which would then communicate with the api and set the appropriate access permissions
WebsiteApp.company.com ->>> api.company.com/v1
mobileapp ->>> api.company.com/v1
First thoughts is just setting up a username and password for each user on the api side and let both the websiteapps and mobile apps use this. The problem however is that the contractors and possible some employees cannot be fully trusted and could pass on username and passwords to third parties without the company's permission. So my question is really what other security/authorization/authentication strategies should i be looking at to overcome this situation. In a perfect world each user would have to authorize each device/mobileapp/websiteapp he/she wants to access the api from...
Is OAuth 2.0 capable of this?, not sure if its capable of specific user/device/website scenario though ?
Technologies thinking of using are:-
API
Node.js with (Express js? or Restify?) , MongoDb
Consumer Apps
Website Apps (Angular Js, Backbone etc..)
Mobile Apps (PhoneGap, Jquery Mobile etc..)
Many Thanks
Jonathan
It seems that your main concern is that you can't trust the people you are giving access to, and if this is the case, you probably shouldn't be trying to give them access in the first place. If these apps are to be used for any confidential information or intellectual property that you are worried about someone else seeing if the contractor/employee gives away their password, then you have to consider the contractor/employee just taking the information and giving it away.
In this situation your username/password should suffice for authentication, however you should also consider very tight permissions on who can access what. If you are worried about information getting out, everything should be shown on a need-to-know basis. If a contractor doesn't need a specific piece of information, make sure it isn't provided to his account.
You could also consider tracking the locations (IPs) that an account is being accessed from. Perhaps when an account is accessed from a new location have the employee/contractor complete some task to validate the account; which could be anything from entering a validation code (similar to a two-factor authentication), to calling a help-line and having the location authorized.
This might be a bit late, but as i am going through the same process (What is the correct flow when using oAuth with the Reso​urce Owners Password​s Credentials Grant​)
We have not figured out the core implementation what you want to do sounds similar to what we are trying to do for our service.
From my understanding it depends on the apps and if they are trusted or not and what you plan to do with your API moving forwards. If the apps are trusted you could potentially use HTTP-Basic over SSL which is a viable solution.
For us, we are going to create a suite of trusted official apps (Web, Mobile etc) via the API and then open it up, so we are deciding to go through the pain of oAuth2 where for our apps we will use the Resource Owners Passwords Credentials Grant type where you swap a users user name and password for a token which is what the client will use to interact with your API with the trust implicitly defined.
When we open up the API for 3rd party consumption this model wont work and we will go through the processes that all the major sites do and get explicit permission from the user on what the 3rd party apps can do with their data.

Authentication for a Read only web application without login screen

I have a web based application which is used to find information about various assets in a facility. This provides only search capability, no CRUD operations allowed from the application (except for READ). This web application is always kept open in a touchscreen device (ie workstation) and this could be used by any of the facility staff. The user does not want to initiate login and logout for each of the search operation.
We are planning on deploying the web application onto the cloud. Although it is not a need to authenticate the user who is accessing the web-application, it is still a need to ensure that information about assets in the facility are not accessible by others. How do I build this authentication layer? The various options I can think of are:
1. Include userid/password in the URL as parameters. I could create a userid/password for each of the facility. Simple, but userid/password area always visible.
2. Certificate based approach. Certificates are created for each of these workstations and deployed on those workstations. Quite secure, but has the challenge of managing the certs life-cycle. As well challenge of configuring the web-servers with certs from different facilities???
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Prasanna
A simple, but not secure thing. Do an IP check and if the IP is from your facility then grant access.
The second, but secure method is to do a verification at the start of the application with just a password and store a session , so that you will know that people from your facility are accessing the site..

Implementing "true" Single Sign-On: OpenID, something else, or custom hack?

We're trying to evaluate a solution to implement "true" SSO for multiple (already existing) web solutions. True SSO here means to login on any service, and be authenticated on all, without further actions from the user.
All of the applications we're going to use support OpenID and/or have plugins that allow OpenID, so this seems like something worth looking into. However, as I understand OpenID, the users would still be required to enter their OpenID credentials in each service.
Is there a sane way to implement SSO with automatic login once the OpenID provider has authenticated the user?
In an earlier project, we hacked up the PHP session data in the login procedures of two applications (both running on the same domain and server) so a login in the first application creates the session data for the other application as well. However, this is a very hacky solution and is prone to break when either application is updated, so we're trying to avoid it this time.
Are there any other SSO solutions that we could look into?
i am assuming that you have the control on the SSO implementation
there are some things you can do to make sure that once the user has been recognized by the SSO application, he will virtually automatically be logged in to your other applications
in your SSO application, create a whitelist of service providers. authentication request from those websites will be automatically approved. thus, user won't be asked to approve the request manually
in your application, set the return_to parameter as the page the user is intending to immediately open. don't simply set the return_to to that application homepage
by the way, the most standard openid implementation accepts any url. however, if you want to use the sso in a controlled environment, you can set the service provider to have a whitelist of trusted identity providers. after all, it's the service provider which initiated openid authentication.
Yes, there is a means to do this. Run an Application Server, Node Based, and register cross-domain techniques to offer cookie-credentialed (backed up by site-handshakes as each new user arrives, to scale better and minimize resource expenditure per-session).
I am working on such a beast right now, and I'm 5/6th done.
I have taken care of several annoying variables up front- including the means to assure unique user logon- and I've taken a stand on other issues- one just can't get everything done in one system. However, one can have a true SSO if one is willing to pull out some stops. It is YOUR stops which will define your solution. If you have not accurately portrayed your limitations then there isn't a solution which can be offered for implementation here, and the nature of your problem is ENTIRELY implementation- not theory. In theory you have 4-5 different options. In practice you will find your answers.