Should the HTML5 database be used to store any form of private information?
Say we have the following scenario;
You're browsing a web-mail client, that uses the web database to store mail drafts after you've written some information you close the web browser. What's to stop me from getting access to this information?
If the webpage tries to clean out old information when opened a user-script could easily prevent the website from fully loading and then search through the database. Furthermore the names of databases and tables are easily available through the web-mail client's source.
W3C Draft
The only way an external party could access the user's database is via direct access to the user's computer, or if your web app has a security vulnerability (such as XSS - Cross Site Scripting). Otherwise standard browser security dictates that only scripts running in web pages from a certain domain can access databases that were created/stored on that same domain (same origin-policy), same thing that stops you making cross-domain Ajax requests, or reading other website's cookies, all of which can be overcome via an XSS attack.
To me, storing a draft email seems reasonably sensible, whereas things like credit card details, passwords etc. should be stored exclusively server-side. You'll need to make a call as to what should be stored where, based on what you're going to store.
Should the HTML5 database be used to store any kind of private information?
Depends on how sensitive the information is. I wouldn't want to leave credit card details lying around anywhere.
You're browsing a web-mail client, that uses the web database to store mail drafts after you've written some information you close the web browser. What's to stop me to get access to this information?
Assuming you don't have physical access to the computer (in which case the user needs to take relatively extreme security measures) and you don't run the email service (in which case you need to have access to emails) then standard browser security stops you.
Related
I am making a Social Networking website and I want to provide APIs for developers to use. So, I am thinking of using REST API for this.
Now this question is not about how to create a REST API. That is well explained in many websites and SO questions.
My Question is:
When I give a developer this API (lets say which can be used to get user info).
Say USER 1 does not want his date of birth and email to be visible
Say USER 2 does not want his mobile number to be visible
Say USER 3 does not want anyone apart from his friends to see his info
... and so on (each user have their own privacy setting which I have already stored in DB)
Now, how do I authenticate properly to make sure:
1) Developers will not be able to access User info when they have not authenticated the Application to use API to access their info
2) Restrict Developers from accessing fields which has been set by the user as private
Do I have to make separate DBs for this? Is there any easy, professional and secure way to do this?
If you look at the documentation for the various Google+ and FB API's, you'll see what they do. Here's an example:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/authentication
Generally, you use https to connect, you supply a couple of different key codes (api key, etc.) to an authentication call of some sort, and you get back a session token, which you pass to all subsequent calls that require one (which potentially involve non-public data).
There isn't anything all that special about the authentication that is typically used for this kind of thing, any secure authentication method works as well as any other. All authentication does is establish the identity of the API caller and/or the identity of a user. It is then up to the API code to determine who can access what.
You could have a small group of trusted developers develop the API in a development environment, and then an even smaller group of trusted administrators deploy that API to production servers, and make sure no one else can access those servers except through the API. I believe that's essentially what FB and Twitter and so forth do.
But if you really want to prevent the developers who develop the API and the administrators who set up and maintain your production servers (and databases) from being able to get at user's private data, that data will have to be encrypted on the users' computers, before it is ever sent to the server, using keys that are never sent to the server. So neither the server nor anyone in the server environment will have any way at all to decrypt that data.
But the developers who develop the encryption program that runs on users' computers could make it send keys or decrypted versions of data to a computer somewhere, etc., so there isn't really any way to avoid having to trust at least some of the people involved.
By the way, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc., don't do that. They may store some private data in an encrypted form in their production databases, and they may restrict access to those databases to a small group of people, and even those people who have access to the databases may not be able to see the private information without decrypting it - but the data is sent to the servers using https; it is encrypted by a user's browser, but then decrypted on the web server, and it exists in an unencrypted form in the memory of the web server, at least for a short time, so it would certainly be theoretically possible for people at those companies who have the right expertise and the right access to get at users' private data. So our private data on Twitter / FB etc, isn't really 100% secure. (I doubt that any data anywhere is really 100% secure.)
While there are common practices that you can glean from reading their API docs, there aren't really any established standards or best practices that specifically relate to how to code authentication systems for social media APIs in PHP.
It's worth mentioning that many web sites that require user authentication, these days, allow users to authenticate using various external authentication systems, so that once they are signed into one place that uses that system, they're effectively signed into every place that uses it. One really popular external authentication system is GoogleID; for example, users of Stack Overflow can authenticate using their Google logins:
https://developers.google.com/identity/
https://developers.google.com/identity/choose-auth
GoogleID may have been inspired by OpenID. Here is a list of libraries for implementing an API that facilitates OpenID style authentication:
http://openid.net/developers/libraries/
That page includes a couple of php libraries which may be of interest.
By the way, speaking of data security in the context of a social media site, here's an introductory wiki page about the general legal requirements, in the US, for companies that process (potentially) personally identifying information:
https://termsfeed.com/blog/privacy-policies-are-mandatory-by-law/
I don't want to store passwords on my server and I don't want to force my end users to create yet another account, that's why I'd like to use single sign-on. I'm looking for a widely accepted solution for the authentication, I think about OpenID and OpenID Connect, the former seems to be more widespread but obsoleted and no longer used by Google, the latter seems to be faster (thanks to JSON?), safer but less widely adopted.
I'd like to share some documents on Internet. I want to control who can view them. I have looked at OwnCloud but it seems to be too much for my needs.
My website contains some photos and some articles, I want to show some of them to everybody, I want to show some of them only to my family and my best friends but not my colleagues, I want to show some of them to all logged users but not everybody and finally, I want to show some of them to … nobody.
I use Apache HTTP Server, I want to be able to manage file access rights for my end users with their own means of authentication. I have looked at mod_auth_oid and mod_auth_oid_file, it handles the authentication with OpenID 2.0, it allows to define a mapping between OpenID and local user ids. Does it mean that I still have to store a password for each local user anywhere on my server?
A graceful server restart is required in order to load new mapping definitions
It's a bit annoying as I don't want to restart the server each time I edit the mapping. It's unclear to me whether it is still true when using mod_auth_oid_ldap. I really need an open source software that I can install on my server and adapt to my needs. I plan to use openid-selector with the Apache modules I mentioned earlier and some JavaScript code to handle gracefully the display of the forbidden content. Am I missing a more obvious solution? I'm not a big fan of Facebook but is this bridge working?
Is it possible that a website uses the models of another lavarel website to access the database, without the first website having the sql credentials hardcoded. But with the credentials to log into the second lavarel website hardcoded.
This way the first website doesn't have to have the sql credentials on it's ftp server, but can still access the databases through the other website (with their personal login of that website).
If that is impossible, I am wondering, is there a way to access a databases without having to hardcode the credentials anywhere.
UPDATE (the actual problem)
Only a part of the database should be visible to a particular user, so i can provide different users with different credentials and they all see something different in the database
What you are talking about is an API. So you'd build out the entire infrastructure on the first website, then on the second website, it would make some kind of calls to the first website to get back the information it needs, usually using some kind of credentials or access token.
This way, you can allow anyone in the world to communicate with your website, kind of like how Facebook, or Twitter does.
As far as accessing your database, you would need to tell your app somewhere the credentials to use, so technically, you do need to hardcode them somewhere as they can't just magically make up some credentials somehow to access a database.
if your different users are defined:
use laravel model/db event to replicate the data to a database by
user.
Or sync each database with a cron job..
These have benefits to avoid security transport problems.
I wish to create a functionality that is very similar to facebook or pokerstars if you have used them before. Basically the apps require the user to login and their information can be accessed from both browsers and native and web apps.
How can I go about achieving this? Please advice on what services to research on to accomplish this. To my current understanding. I would be creating the website in html and php and creating a webservice using RESTful protocols and hosting them on amazon aws servers. I can then connect to these servers in the native apps? I am not very clear on how the native apps will interact with the servers
If you know of any particular protocol or a better server hosting service please let me know.
If I'm interpreting your question correctly, you are looking for something like this:
The user starts either your browser app or your native app (perhaps a mobile app)
Since the user does not have an account yet, you present them with the appropriate dialog to create said account.
You then ask the "Identity Service" to create a profile for that user
The identity service returns a token for access
This is something we do in the mobile network industry all the time. Technically, we have TAC/ACS or HSS profile services, but in either case, it's the same thing -- a dedicated service and network process that:
Accepts connections from various clients (web, mobile, desktop...)
Has various primitives along the database CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) model
Answers requests the database
If you want a pre-configured solution, you could just use any networked database with a RESTstyle connector for example (MongoDB maybe?) But you could also just through this in a process that talks to a NoSQL or SQLLite database. The end result is the same.
For commercial solutions, I might like at OpenStack as you can run your code on it and they have identity brokers you might be able to CoOpt.
Personally, I'd just have a datastore running on a cloud somewhere like Amazon's EC2 which answers RESTful requests such as:
Create a user with a given profile set, return a unique token
Delete a user given a token
Update elements of the profile for a given token
I'm leaving out the necessary things like security here, but you get the idea.
This also has the advantage that you can have a single identity service for all of your applications/application services. The specifics for a given application element are just sub-fields in the profile. This gives you, not only a common identity broker for web, desktop and mobile, but a single-sign-on for all your applications. The user signs in once and is authenticated for everything you have. Moving from site to site, now just became seamless.
Lastly, you place your identity management, backup, security token management, etc OUTSIDE of your application. If you later want to add Google Authenticator for second-factor authentication, you don't have to add it to every application you have.
I should also add that you don't want to keep the identity database on the direct internet connection point. Someone could make your life difficult and get ahold it later on. Rather, you want your identity server to have a private link to it. Then do something like this:
When the account is created, don't store passwords, store hashes -- much safer
Have your application (web or otherwise) compute a key as the login
In this case, the user might enter a username and password, but the application or website would convert it into a token. THAT is what you send across.
Next, using that token (and suitable security magic), use THAT as the owner key
Send that key to the datastore and retrieve any needed values
Encrypt them back into a blob with the token
Send the block
THe application decrypts the blob to get at values
Why do we do this?
First, if someone were to try to get at your identity database, there's nothing useful. It contains only opaque tokens for logins, and blobs of encrypted data. Go ahead -- take the database. We don't care.
Second, sniffing the transport gets an attacker nothing -- again, it's all encrypted blobs.
This means later on, when you have five applications using the broker, and someone hacks the network and steals the database, you don't care, because your users never gave out logins and passwords in the first place, and even if they did, the data itself is garbage to anyone without the user key.
Does this help?
Background research:
User Signup in Couchapp/CouchDB through jquery.couch.js or Otherwise
http://blog.couchbase.com/what%E2%80%99s-new-couchdb-10-%E2%80%94-part-4-security%E2%80%99n-stuff-users-authentication-authorisation-and-permissions
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1175 - specifically "Ari Najarian" 's posts
Question:
To paraphrase the SO question I posted above:
"Essentially I want to have a signup form for registering an account in couchdb for a couchapp. This would entail creation of a new user in the couchdb _users database, and the creation of a new database, with the new user assigned the role of database admin. All that requires server admin credentials."
The answer to the previous question involved using an external separate server that was logged in to couchdb as admin to monitor couchdb and modify couchdb as desired in response to certain data events coming from a client.
My question is - is that the only way? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of couchdb's 2-tier web stack? Is there some way to modify a couchdb database from within a validation function which checks for "type == user" document while "internally"/separately logged in as an admin maybe?
I apologize if there is some straightforward way to do this and I just didn't find the right documentation.
Extra Problem Clarification:
There is the couchdb instance sitting at an internet address.
This couch database serves to a random client an html page and embedded javascript script that contains a signup/login form.
The client enters signup info (name, password) and submits
The JS script uses the XMLHttpRequest object to open a connection to the couchdb instance and sends...PROBLEM!
Problem #1 - If the credentials are stored in the code (to be sent as verification for new user database), then anyone could "view html source" and take over the database.
-OR-
Problem #2 - If credentials are not supplied and the request is sent anonymously, then a new user will be created in the _users database and a success reply message will be sent. But no new database was created for the user (and can't be without admin credentials) which the user can interact with for application-specific purposes (e.g. add/delete data). And - from the above couchbase blog link - if you have secured your database with roles/names against anonymous readers and validation functions to prevent anonymous writes, then an anonymous-made user account (e.g. a client who wants to register database space to use the app) can not do anything because an anonymous user cannot, for obvious security reasons, specify whatever roles they wish to have. Which means that the only way to have -functional- users is to create user accounts + associated databases as admin beforehand and then hand out these user credentials - so like a private invite system, yes?
To reiterate, is there any way, using ONLY couchdb and some combination of couchdb's authentication handlers, design document functions, client-side ajax, etc. for a connecting client to register and get a personal database (and ONLY that database obviously) they have access to and can interact with?
This isn't a PURE couch solution, but it's couch + node, and solves your problem:
Hi I haven't been around in awhile and didn't realize this was edited / link removed (plus policy of links not being answers! sorry...). I have been using couchdb on a project very similar to what you are trying to do, and unfortunately there is no way to do what you want to accomplish without tacking on another service to handle the admin-level access and creation of user database. Syncpoint-API can be used to facilitate this, but it is actually a nodejs service handling the signup/login and dedicated database setup.
So far though, Syncpoint has proven to not be 100% reliable and it does appear to be an abandoned project, due to CouchBase sucking all the r+d resources away from CouchDB dev.
I'm now moving to nodejs + socket.io as a transport layer, using node to handshake and assign a DB, and then further watching the couch _changes api on the server (via yet another node process) to then forward _changes through socket.io to the client. Also I have some "pure" couchapps running that serve public data mixed in with the private data.
My conclusion? CouchDB is a great product and has some great features, but for the more complex login/authorization schemes and other general application needs required in real-world dev, it's just not ready yet.