Mixing secure and non-secure pages - apache

I am using the Drupal Secure Pages module to secure sensitive pages (such as login and admin pages). I am running into two issues with this:
I am able to login securely on the login page using https. However when I traverse to a non-secure page such as the home page, the browser completely forgets that I am logged in (instead of my username, the login link shows up). (The problem goes away as soon as I disable the Secure Pages module.)
Since the secure pages are getting their images using non-secure URLs, the browsers are showing warning messages. For example, "The site uses SSL, but Google Chrome has detected insecure content on the page."
Is there any clean solution to these issues?
The recommendation here was to make the entire site secure, which seems like an overkill for my site (essentially an open source community). Having said that, how much of a performance hit does something like this incur, roughly?
Thanks.

I was able to solve the issue with non-secure pages not remembering the login state. The solution was to add this line to sites/default/settings.php: $conf['https'] = TRUE; You can see the details here.
As far as I can tell, issue #2 was a browser caching issue. I cleared all the caches and cookies and the problem seems to have gone away!

Related

How can I resolve SSL Mixed Content issue caused by Gravatar?

Gravatar is causing mixed content issue especially when a user is logged in. For logged out users, there is no issue. My site loses the green Security (SSL) padlock on the browser. For all the pages which logged in Users visit, there is Mixed content. The message on display by Chrome/Firefox usually
that the page was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure image 'http://gravatar.com/avatar/b87daeb6292d165f7bd8db0dbb2e0a8b?s=400&d=identicon'. This content should also be served over HTTPS.
Is there any way to resolve this pls?
This does not happen with my blog. Check out the attached image for more information.
Yes, I faced this error two month back but I resolved it using cloudflare. I made the following two changes to load all the resources including image on https.
In Crypto Page of Cloudflare, changed the setting to always HTTPS and Automatic Redirect.
Made similar change in Cloudflare plugin active in WordPress.
You will find the detailed step by step tutorial on acheving this at below article
How to Fixed Mixed Content Error in WordPress?

non secure items on secure page

I have an e-commerce site with an SSL installed. I have made sure all links are https:// to avoid getting the browser error saying there are non secure items on the page.
However, I have a news and press feed in my footer which links to another websites which is not secure and do not have https:// available. Is there any way to fix this or are there any tricks to making this work?
Links to HTTP URLs should not cause browser errors about non-secure items on a page. Check your browser console (F12) to see what specific items are triggering the non-secure warnings.
Your page is loading three images from https://192.99.37.125/ which is the wrong url, as it does not match to the used certificate. That is causing the error.

Umbraco - use HTTPS for some pages

I'm building a site with Umbraco, and there are a couple of pages that need to be visited over HTTPS instead of HTTP (e.g. a login page).
I've seen a couple of macros that get put on the page that needs to use HTTPS, and essentially just check the protocol used and do a Response.Redirect with the correct protocol if necessary. This seems like a terrible way of achieving what seems to be a fairly basic requirement - ideally I'd want Umbraco to render any links to these pages as <a href="https://...", not do a redirect when the user goes to a page.
With these redirecting macros, there's also the possibility of a browser displaying a warning if the user's on an HTTPS page and navigates to a HTTP one. If the links are relative, the user will be redirected from HTTPS to HTTP, and the browser may warn about this.
Is there a way to achieve this without modifying any Umbraco framework code?
There's currently no built-in way to make a few pages in Umbraco return a https url.
The only way I can think of doing this at the moment is just by making sure that you set up your links correctly.
But there's no way of stopping people from entering the insecure link. That is where the redirects come in handy though, it will make sure you don't get to a secure page insecurely.
I would recommend running the whole site in https mode. In the past, performance would have been an objection to running your full site in https mode. However with modern servers, this really shouldn't be a problem any more.

Images on SSL enabled site with Internet explorer

I have a problem with my site after implementation of SSL that images do not appear. The scenario is that images come from images.domain.com (hosted on Amazon S3) and my certificate is for www.domain.com.
This problem only seems to happen in IE and not in any other browsers.
The issue is related to "mixed content" - HTTPS pages which have HTTP resources (images, scripts, etc) embedded.
The point of using HTTPS is to ensure that only the originating server and the client have access to the secured page. However, in theory it might be possible for this security to be compromised if HTTP resources are embedded - a server might intercept an unsecured javascript file and inject some code to alter the secured page onload.
Most browsers will indicate that a secure page has mixed content by altering the "secure lock" icon, either by showing the lock as open or broken, or by making the icon red (Chrome displayed a skull and crossbones for a short time, but they realised that this was a bit serious for the potential threat level).
Internet Explorer (depending on the version) will display a message either asking whether the insecure content should be shown (IE<=7), or whether only the secure content should be shown (IE>=8). It sounds like you have somehow disabled this message to always hide the insecure content, however that's not the default behaviour.
I think the best solution for you is to replace your S3 links with HTTPS versions.
I am not a web developer, but someone who often deals with the crap experience that is IE. I am not sure what version you are using, but you do not have a wildcard SSL cert (i.e. *.domain.com), so does it have something to do with an old-school limitation in 3rd party images?
See here for what I allude to above and a very good explanation of how IE caches cross-domain HTTPS content, specifically images. I am not sure what the solution is, but I was curious so I researched a little myself and this might help.

Avoiding SSL "You are about to be redirected to a connection that is not secure." message

I have a login screen which I'm serving over SSL. The user fills in their login/password, this gets POSTed to the server. At this point I want to jump out of SSL, so I redirect them back to the same page with no SSL.
This causes the browser to show a warning dialog "You are about to be redirected to a connection that is not secure". How can I avoid this? I've been plenty of sites like yahoo mail, and gmail that give you an SSL page for login, then send you to a non-SSL page after this.
Secondary question: what's the purpose of this dialog? It's trying to warn me about some nefarous purpose - but what's so bad about redirecting someone to a non-SSL page? I don't get a warning when I'm on an SSL page and click a non-SSL link. What's different about redirecting someone?
I'm doing this in ASP.NET 2.0 - but I figure this is a generic web-dev question.
UPDATE SUMMARY: It seems the popular answer is "DON'T AVOID IT". I can understand that a user should get a message when security it being removed. But I don't get a dialog when I follow a link and security is removed, so at the very least I'd say this is inconsistent.
The dialog / browser versions. I actually don't see the dialog in IE7/FF3 (maybe I've clicked a checkbox preventing it). More importantly the client DOES see it in IE6 - with no checkbox to remove it (yes, I know IE6 is old and crap).
Firefox2: FF2 http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/8455/sslwarning.jpg
IE6:
The alternative: make the entire site SSL, never redirect the user out of SSL. I could handle that. But I've got a semi-technical client who has some fairly good points:
"SSL is going to cause an increase in traffic / processing power". I don't really buy this, and I don't think his site is every going to require more than one box to serve it.
"Yahoo does it. Yahoo is a big technical company. Are you smarter than Yahoo?"
I'm going to try sway the client over to an entirely SSL site. I'll argue Yahoo's approach made sense in 1996, or for a site that is MUCH more popular. Some official links explaining why this dialog happens would help (i.e Jakob Nielsen level of authenticity).
I've hit this same problem a while back. So I had a look inside fiddler to see how yahoo mail does it. Here's the step I saw (and used on my site):
User fills in SSL encrypted form, and POSTs to the server. Server authenticates, and spits out some script to redirect the client
<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
window.location.replace("~~ non-SSL URL ~~");
// -->
</script>
I figure the client side code is there to avoid this dialog.
"How can I avoid this?"
You shouldn't!
Although you could try that with JavaScript. This might work on some browsers and fail on others.
"What's the purpose of this dialog?"
It warns because switching between SSL and non-SSL on websites is usually unexpected by the user. A warning about the "non-SSL to SSL" is not emitted since it increases security and privacy. However, when security is suddenly decreased, the user should notice that quickly, in order to avoid a false feeling of security. In fact, redirecting to a non-SSL site is sometimes used in XSS/MITM attacks.
"SSL is going to cause an increase in traffic / processing power"
This is nonsense. It might be true for sites full of big, static content. However, for normal dynamic web applications, encryption is very cheap compared to business logic, database access, etc.
There is an urban legend saying that SSL-content is not chached by browsers. See "Will web browsers cache content over https" for more information.
"Yahoo does it. Yahoo is a big technical company. Are you smarter than Yahoo?"
Some rhetoric counter-questions:
Are you a big technical company like Yahoo?
Did being a big technical company prevent Microsoft from producing crappy software?
Do you have to support crappy old (SSL-broken) browsers, as Yahoo has to?
The attack this is preventing against is a man-in-the-middle SSL session strip. The message is there with good cause.
As for the purpose: It's to make you aware that your connection won't be SSL encrypted anymore. You may have seen before that the connection is encrypted and may think that it still is, so this warning says "Just to be clear, whatever data you send from here on will be plaintext".
As for how to suppress it: AFAIK you can't, it's a browser thing, what would be the point of the message otherwise? Even though there are workarounds like client-side redirects, I don't think you should try to work around client "problems" like this. If the browser chooses to be verbose, let it. There's a "Don't show this again" checkbox on the dialog after all If the user wishes to suppress this message he can easily do so, and maybe he actually likes to see it.
Also, IMHO, if the browser was worth its salt it would still pop up this warning, even if you employed client-side redirect tricks.
Use SSL for the whole page in the first place!
There's nothing wrong with SSL. You should provide user privacy everywhere, not only on login. It makes sense an the whole site. So simply redirect all non-SSL pages to SSL pages and keep everything SSL.
Just point your client to the latest attacks against mixed mode content (lookup CookieMonster on fscked.org) and proxy attacks (against sites available both in http and https, lookup Pretty-Bad-Proxy). He might reconsider.
It is much easier to get security right if you only deal with one protocol without mixing the two. SSL adds a bit of overhead, but it is nothing compared to the cost of a breach.
Gmail, yahoo, etc. use SSL for an encrypted iframe, which authenticates, but there's none of the in-page redirection you're talking about. The whole page isn't encrypted for these login systems.
read:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/883740
which says that this is fixed in a hotfix or with a changed registry setting. However, not all the IE6 cpu's we use have this problem, nor do their registry settings correspond to what this article says they should. Also some that give the msg are XPsp3 and IE6 sp3.
We have an https log in screen that uses code to log into 15 other (http) domains and some of our IE6 users have to click 'Yes' 15 times. This is inacceptable to them.
No, we cannot control what browser all our users use. Some are not compatible with upgrade to IE7.
We are looking for some config attribute for each user to adjust that will suppress this msg. We've identically configed a 'bad' browser with settings that match one that does not give the msg. Internet and Intranet Security and Advanced settings and Proxies (none).Also Network connections. No joy so far.
Any ideas?