Good day,
I have a problem with converting a key-value pair within a request header into a cookie. The key-value pair is set in the header by a third-party custom apache module that I cannot access. It intercepts the request like so:
User requests www.my.domain.com/my-app/
Third-party module redirects to third-party site appends special_key=foo to the header of the original request.
Third-party redirects original request back to the original URL.
I want to then read the modified header in the now modified request and add the special_key=foo as a cookie.
How can this be accomplished?
I have tried to use the RewriteRule like so:
RewriteRule ^/apps/my-app/ - [CO=special_key:%{special_key}i:.my.domain.com:0:/:1:0]
In Javascript, the cookie's value is printed as cyin="i". Checking the cookie storage in firefox I see this value: cyin=i. Which is not correct.
I have also tried this method:
<FilesMatch "\.(html)$">
Header set Set-Cookie: "special_key=%{special_key}i; path=/; Domain=.my.domain.com; SameSite=Lax; Secure"
</FilesMatch>
In Javascript, the cookie's value is printed as cyin="i". Checking the cookie storage in firefox I see this value: cyin="i=96" or cyin="i=98". Which are not correct.
I can log the value of %{special_key}i, but I can't figure out how to get it into a cookie.
Perhaps the value isn't getting set by the time I want to put it in the cookie. Is there a way I can ensure that the value is set? Add one of these to my specific <LocationMatch "/apps/my-app/">?
Apologies if I've missed something obvious, I am still relatively new to using apache.
Thank you for any assistance.
Lets say I have my website named SiteA.com running on an Apache web server. I have defined the ff. below on my httpd.conf file:
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "CustomBank.com"
Questions:
Does this mean only CustomBank.com can access my site (SiteA.com) directly? or does it mean only my site (SiteA.com) can access the CustomBank.com domain directly? I am confused if this setting is for inbound or outbound.
In reality I don't have any CORS requirement needed for my site, so I didn't implement the setting mentioned above, the one below shows up in my response header.
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Penetration Testing team said this setting is overly permissive. Do I just need to remove it? if not what should I do?
It means javascript loaded from CustomBank.com can make requests to your site (the site whose configuration has changed) via XMLHTPRequest in the background.
Since XMLHTTPRequest will send a users existing session cookie with your site, malicious scripts could do all kinds of nefarious/misleading things on behalf of your user. That's why * is not normally a suitable fix.
The restrictions apply to other script-like invocations that are more esoteric that you can read about in the specs.
I'm trying to get my website as secure as possible. I'm reading about headers and I should add a Referrer-Policy. However, I'm not sure to understand how this header can make my website more secure.
To be honest, I'm not sure to know how it works. I think the browser get as referrer the previous link.
My website use HTTP not yet HTTPS and I don't know which referrers should I use. I think the default is Referrer-Policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade, but my website use HTTP so that's useless.
its been a while utile you ask but your best answer is here
and according to this blog its how Referrer-Policy works :
When
a user clicks a link on one site, the origin, that takes them to
another site, the destination, the destination site receives
information about the origin the user came from. This is how we get
metrics like those provided by Google Analytics on where our traffic
came from. I know that 4,000 users came from Twitter this week because
when they visit my site they set the referer[sic] header in their
request.
in simple word, it's about users privacy!
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.
I have (hopefully) set apache to issue an STS header for all HTTPS traffic as described in How to set HSTS header from .htaccess only on HTTPS
I was hoping to be able to verify that this was working by looking at the response header in chrome dev tools but there doesn't seem to be anything in there related to it:
Is there a way to check that this is functioning correctly? Any help much appreciated.
You can check this is working correctly by looking for the strict-transport-security header in the response headers (in the dev tools where you have taken your screenshot).
If you try the same request you've made with the dev tools with https://accounts.google.com/, for example, you should see an entry like this:
strict-transport-security:max-age=10893354; includeSubDomains
You were already on the right track, but there's probably something wrong with the way you've configured your server.