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?
Related
There are numerous stackoverflow answers saying you should never put your login form on an HTTP page but always use HTTPS. But I see many large sites do it anyway such as The New York Times. Is it considered OK to do so if I have absolutely no valuable information on my site? There are no transactions involved and no private information. It's equivalent to a blog or news website. I would really like to sign users in with a box on the front page like The New York Times.
No it's not ok.
If your users reuse the same password, then it may compromise more important accounts
Because it's insecure, Firefox warns in the console log that it's not secure.
If you want a login in your front page, why not just using https everywhere? It's easier to configure, and faster (with spdy/http2) than http, and you are sure that nobody insert ads in your website (some ISP do than on http...)
And, a login/password is a personal information. In most country, like in Europe, you have an obligation of protection.
About the New York Times, yes, they do use http, but it's harder for a big website to migrate. But yes, they should use https.
Note that https alone is not sufficient: Your website may still be vulnerable to sslstrip attacks. When asking for passwords or personal information, you should use HSTS, the only protection against that attack. (It will force the https connection, but for that you must activate https for the whole domain)
Currently Azure Websites don't allow custom SSL certificates, but they have wildcard SSL enabled for the *.azurewebsites.net domain. I need a secure login form for my web app, but with no custom SSL, it appears that I'm SOL.
Is there any kind of workaround for this? Would it be possible somehow to have a login form at https://mydomain.azurewebsites.net that creates a forms authentication ticket that will then work at http://mydomain.com?
Couple of months ago I had exactly the same problem i.e. application was built on Azure Websites, had to run on custom domain other than *.azurewebsites.net and had to allow secure login process.
Workaround for that we used was to embed an iframe (using secure protocol and .azurewebsites.net domain name e.g. https://oursite.azurewebsites.net/login) into non-secure page on custom domain (e.g. http://mysite.com/login). And entire login process was performed in the iframe.
There is one thing which you should be aware of, namely, lots of customers checks whether the page where they provide their credentials was using secure connection or not. In our case, secure iframe in non-secure page was causing lots of customer complains. Workaround for that problem was to put a message confirming that the login process uses secure connection. The message made some improvements, however, still certain number of customers complains remained.
I hope that will help.
This isn't really an answer to your question, but Microsoft are very aware that custom mapped SSL to websites is one of the most requested features for Azure websites and they have said they are working on it.
Scott Hanselman himself confirms it here
In the meantime, Tom's answer is a perfectly valid workaround.
One thing I would be very wary of though is with something Tom brings up: the security warning that the browser will present. You'd be amazed how many people freak out when they see that message and don't go any further! We have a fairly active ecommerce site and there have been occasions where we have accidentally used a none secure image path on an SSL page and we have always received emails from customers asking if our site has been hacked or similar!
The disclaimer that Tom mentions is a good idea, but I think it will still put some people off.
I am working directly with the WAWS team right now to produce some public guidance for this. A GitHub repository with the requirements is currently being evaluated by the team (I sent it over to them literally 1 hour ago). Hopefully, the solution will be approved and made public within a few weeks.
I can say this - the workaround won't be fully supported or much custom guidance given on its usage aside from the repository and accompanying documentation. SSL is, literally, the #1 priority for the product, and hundreds of people are working insane hours to make it happen for everyone. This workaround should also be considered temporary, as you'll no longer need it once the full SSL functionality is launched.
The Question
Is there a way to detect wether a visitor trusts the SSL connection/certificate? I really could not find anything on the web or on stackoverflow. I think it's a pretty uncommon question.
A Use-Case
I'm using a certificate from StartSSL. It works fine for most common and modern browsers. But on my Windows Phone using IE I get a warning. That's because the root certificate is not known to IE on Windows Phone by default.
The solution is easy: just download the certificate - two clicks/taps. I would like to provide a tiny guide to the common visitor on how to do this. However, only visitors with problems should get the message.
Visitors who connect to your site via HTTPS simply won't get to your site if they don't trust your certificate. Once an exception has been added, there's no way for you to determine whether or not it's generally trusted or an exception.
Perhaps you could try to build a list of user-agents and make a guess as to what their default CAs should be, so as to be able to display an additional message in this case. It's not a perfect rule (since you can never full control what the client trusts, it's the user/admin's responsibility), and has the disadvantages of user-agent specific content; in particular, it's not necessarily reliable, you won't have a complete database, and users who've already added the exception or imported the certificate permanently would see this additional message (unless you use something like a cookie to remember).
If your initial page is over plain HTTP, you might be able to try an XHR request to your HTTPS site and report whether it worked at all. (You might need to take into account the Same Origin Policy.)
I am not sure whether there is a foolproof way to auto-detect this condition. You may have to rely on a workaround.
Detect whether the request is from a phone by inspecting user-agent in the header, check whether it's the first time they are accessing your site (absence of your site's cookie etc.) and if they are first time user, redirect response to (HTTP) page with instructions to install the certificate. You can provide a check box on that page for users to supress that redirect behavior in furture. If they want it to be supressed, set a cookie, or store their preference on server (if there is authentication).
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!
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.