The normal MO for creating items in a database is to let the database control the generation of the primary key (id). That's usually true whether you're using auto-incremented integer ids or UUIDs.
I'm building a clientside app (Angular but the tech is irrelevant) that I want to be able to build offline behaviour into. In order to allow allow offline object creation (and association) I need the the client appplication to generate primary keys for new objects. This is both to allow for associations with other objects created offline and also to allow for indempotence (making sure I don't accidentally save the same object to the server twice due to a network issue).
The challenge though is what happens when that object gets sent to the server. Do you use a temporary clientside ID which you then replace with the ID that the server subsequently generates or you use some sort of ID translation layer between the client and the server - this is what Trello did when building their offline functionality.
However, it occurred to me that there may be a third way. I'm using UUIDs for all tables on the back end. And so this made me realise that I could in theory insert a UUID into the back end that was generated on the front end. The whole point of UUIDs is that they're universally unique so the front end doesn't need to know the server state to generate one. In the unlikely event that they do collide then the uniqueness criteria on the server would prevent a duplicate.
Is this a legitimate approach? The risk seems to be 1. Collisions and 2. any form of security that I haven't anticipated. Collisons seem to be taken care of by the way that UUIDs are generated but I can't tell if there are risks in allowing a client to choose the ID of an inserted object.
However, it occurred to me that there may be a third way. I'm using UUIDs for all tables on the back end. And so this made me realise that I could in theory insert a UUID into the back end that was generated on the front end. The whole point of UUIDs is that they're universally unique so the front end doesn't need to know the server state to generate one. In the unlikely event that they do collide then the uniqueness criteria on the server would prevent a duplicate.
Yes, this is fine. Postgres even has a UUID type.
Set the default ID to be a server-generated UUID if the client does not send one.
Collisions.
UUIDs are designed to not collide.
Any form of security that I haven't anticipated.
Avoid UUIDv1 because...
This involves the MAC address of the computer and a time stamp. Note that UUIDs of this kind reveal the identity of the computer that created the identifier and the time at which it did so, which might make it unsuitable for certain security-sensitive applications.
You can instead use uuid_generate_v1mc which obscures the MAC address.
Avoid UUIDv3 because it uses MD5. Use UUIDv5 instead.
UUIDv4 is simplest, it's a 122 bit random number, and built into Postgres (the others are in the commonly available uuid-osp extension). However, it depends on the strength of the random number generator of each client. But even a bad UUIDv4 generator is better than incrementing an integer.
Related
MongoDB => Holochain Rust DHT
How to import, if possible
If I am using a different app backend, like mongo, and I get my holochain set up correctly and configured, is there a way to get the data from mongo to holochain? How would I do that?
Here is the question in context
Definitely technologically possible; you could write a nodejs script, fire up a Holochain container with the holochain-nodejs library, and import all the data as one agent. Then when users join the HC-based network, they vouch for their identity in some way and 'claim' all the data as theirs.
Here's a sketch of how it could look:
you (let's call you 'agent 0') import all the data.
For each user, you create an 'anchor' with the user's ID (I'll explain anchors in a
sec) and link each piece of data to the anchor.
You also record that
user's password hash as a private entry on your own source chain. A
user joins the network and is required to prove continuity of
identity.
They do this by using node-to-node messaging to send their
user ID and their password hash to you privately. You authorise them
to claim their identity by publishing an entry that says that "agent
public key x = user ID". (You would probably want to link from your
authorisation entry to their user ID anchor and their public key too,
for convenience's sake.)
The user collects all their data by asking
for all the links to their user ID anchor.
The user then publishes
each piece of their data to their own source chain as a way of
'claiming' ownership of it.
Now, every redundant copy of the data in
the DHT has two authors in its metadata fields -- you and the user
that actually owns the data. Peers validate that piece of data by
saying, "Is agent 0 already the author of this piece of data?
If so,
has agent 0 published an authorisation entry that says that the new
author of this data is allowed to claim/republish it?"
Problems with this approach (not insurmountable):
Agent 0 has to be online all the time cuz they never know when a new
user is going to sign up and try to claim their data. Agent 0 has to
import a ton of data. (I don't think it'd be vastly
time-prohibitive though)
For relational data, there's the chicken-and-egg problem of how to
create links if the data doesn't exist. I'm thinking not of linking
data to data -- that can be done on initial import -- but linking
data to humans, who now have a public key which might not exist on
the DHT yet because they haven't joined the network. That would
always have to happen per-user once they join, and it could create
some cyclic dependency problems.
Anchors
Re: anchors, an anchor is just a pattern that consists of a base and a link -- the base is a simple string, so it's easy for anyone who knows the string to find it by hash. It acts as, well, an anchor to hang links off of. That's why I'm recommending using it to connect legacy user IDs to pieces of content. You can get sample source code for implementing the anchor pattern at https://github.com/holochain/mixins/tree/master/anchors (note that this is for the legacy version of Holochain, so it's written in JavaScript).
( answer provided by
pauldaoust )
what are the mitigation techniques for preventing horizontal privilege escalation through insecure direct object reference other than securing the session ? In other words, how do we achieve access controls on horizontal level, I mean the functionality, data, etc is accessible to everyone on the same level, if we are breaching privilege I feel the only possible way other than hijacking session is through Insecure direct object reference or is there any other way that I'm not aware of ?
may be use below link to prevent the Insecure Direct Object Reference: http://owasp-esapi-java.googlecode.com/svn/trunk_doc/latest/org/owasp/esapi/AccessReferenceMap.html
Apart from horizontally or vertically, IDOR occurs when the authorization check has forgotten to reach an object in the system. It is critical if the reached object is sensitive like displaying an invoice belongs to users in the system.
So, I advise using randomly generated IDs or UUIDs to avoid IDOR in total. The attacker has to find valid random ID values that belong to another user.
Or if this sounds hard to apply cus it's possible. Even if you use auto-incremented object IDs you can apply a hash function with salt and put in a hash map like key-value pair. Then you’ll store the key-value map in the Session.
Instead of exposing auto-increment IDs to the user, you can use hash values of corresponding IDs. When you get the value back from the user, you can find an actual ID value by looking up the key-value map in the Session. So that means, even if the attacker spoof the generated value it’s not going to exist on the map. Basically that means IDOR is not going to exploitable anymore.
To read all about IDOR and mitigation here is a post I wrote about it considering every possible aspect: https://medium.com/#aysebilgegunduz/everything-you-need-to-know-about-idor-insecure-direct-object-references-375f83e03a87
I have a restful service for the documents, where the documents are stored in mongodb, the restful api for the document is /document/:id, initially the :id in the api is using the mongodb 's object id, but I wonder deos this approach reveal the database id, and expose the potential threat, should I want to replace it with a pseudonymity id.
if it is needed to replace it the pseudonymity id, I wonder if there is a algorithmic methods for me to transform the object id and pseudonymity id back and forth without much computation
First, there is no "database id" contained in the ObjectID.
I'm assuming your concern comes from the fact that the spec lists a 3 byte machine identifier as part of the ObjectID. A couple of things to note on that:
Most of the time, the ObjectID is actually generated on the client side, not the server (though it can be). Hence this is usually the machine identifier for the application server, not your database
The 3 byte Machine ID is the first three bytes of the (md5) hash of the machine host name, or of the mac/network address, or the virtual machine id (depending on the particular implementation), so it can't be reversed back into anything particularly meaningful
With the above in mind, you can see that worrying about exposing information is not really a concern.
However, with even a small sample, it is relatively easy to guess valid ObjectIDs, so if you want to avoid that type of traffic hitting your application, then you may want to use something else (a hash of the ObjectID might be a good idea for example), but that will be dependent on your requirements.
I have been using POST in a REST API to create objects. Every once in a while, the server will create the object, but the client will be disconnected before it receives the 201 Created response. The client only sees a failed POST request, and tries again later, and the server happily creates a duplicate object...
Others must have had this problem, right? But I google around, and everyone just seems to ignore it.
I have 2 solutions:
A) Use PUT instead, and create the (GU)ID on the client.
B) Add a GUID to all objects created on the client, and have the server enforce their UNIQUE-ness.
A doesn't match existing frameworks very well, and B feels like a hack. How does other people solve this, in the real world?
Edit:
With Backbone.js, you can set a GUID as the id when you create an object on the client. When it is saved, Backbone will do a PUT request. Make your REST backend handle PUT to non-existing id's, and you're set.
Another solution that's been proposed for this is POST Once Exactly (POE), in which the server generates single-use POST URIs that, when used more than once, will cause the server to return a 405 response.
The downsides are that 1) the POE draft was allowed to expire without any further progress on standardization, and thus 2) implementing it requires changes to clients to make use of the new POE headers, and extra work by servers to implement the POE semantics.
By googling you can find a few APIs that are using it though.
Another idea I had for solving this problem is that of a conditional POST, which I described and asked for feedback on here.
There seems to be no consensus on the best way to prevent duplicate resource creation in cases where the unique URI generation is unable to be PUT on the client and hence POST is needed.
I always use B -- detection of dups due to whatever problem belongs on the server side.
Detection of duplicates is a kludge, and can get very complicated. Genuine distinct but similar requests can arrive at the same time, perhaps because a network connection is restored. And repeat requests can arrive hours or days apart if a network connection drops out.
All of the discussion of identifiers in the other anwsers is with the goal of giving an error in response to duplicate requests, but this will normally just incite a client to get or generate a new id and try again.
A simple and robust pattern to solve this problem is as follows: Server applications should store all responses to unsafe requests, then, if they see a duplicate request, they can repeat the previous response and do nothing else. Do this for all unsafe requests and you will solve a bunch of thorny problems. Repeat DELETE requests will get the original confirmation, not a 404 error. Repeat POSTS do not create duplicates. Repeated updates do not overwrite subsequent changes etc. etc.
"Duplicate" is determined by an application-level id (that serves just to identify the action, not the underlying resource). This can be either a client-generated GUID or a server-generated sequence number. In this second case, a request-response should be dedicated just to exchanging the id. I like this solution because the dedicated step makes clients think they're getting something precious that they need to look after. If they can generate their own identifiers, they're more likely to put this line inside the loop and every bloody request will have a new id.
Using this scheme, all POSTs are empty, and POST is used only for retrieving an action identifier. All PUTs and DELETEs are fully idempotent: successive requests get the same (stored and replayed) response and cause nothing further to happen. The nicest thing about this pattern is its Kung-Fu (Panda) quality. It takes a weakness: the propensity for clients to repeat a request any time they get an unexpected response, and turns it into a force :-)
I have a little google doc here if any-one cares.
You could try a two step approach. You request an object to be created, which returns a token. Then in a second request, ask for a status using the token. Until the status is requested using the token, you leave it in a "staged" state.
If the client disconnects after the first request, they won't have the token and the object stays "staged" indefinitely or until you remove it with another process.
If the first request succeeds, you have a valid token and you can grab the created object as many times as you want without it recreating anything.
There's no reason why the token can't be the ID of the object in the data store. You can create the object during the first request. The second request really just updates the "staged" field.
Server-issued Identifiers
If you are dealing with the case where it is the server that issues the identifiers, create the object in a temporary, staged state. (This is an inherently non-idempotent operation, so it should be done with POST.) The client then has to do a further operation on it to transfer it from the staged state into the active/preserved state (which might be a PUT of a property of the resource, or a suitable POST to the resource).
Each client ought to be able to GET a list of their resources in the staged state somehow (maybe mixed with other resources) and ought to be able to DELETE resources they've created if they're still just staged. You can also periodically delete staged resources that have been inactive for some time.
You do not need to reveal one client's staged resources to any other client; they need exist globally only after the confirmatory step.
Client-issued Identifiers
The alternative is for the client to issue the identifiers. This is mainly useful where you are modeling something like a filestore, as the names of files are typically significant to user code. In this case, you can use PUT to do the creation of the resource as you can do it all idempotently.
The down-side of this is that clients are able to create IDs, and so you have no control at all over what IDs they use.
There is another variation of this problem. Having a client generate a unique id indicates that we are asking a customer to solve this problem for us. Consider an environment where we have a publicly exposed APIs and have 100s of clients integrating with these APIs. Practically, we have no control over the client code and the correctness of his implementation of uniqueness. Hence, it would probably be better to have intelligence in understanding if a request is a duplicate. One simple approach here would be to calculate and store check-sum of every request based on attributes from a user input, define some time threshold (x mins) and compare every new request from the same client against the ones received in past x mins. If the checksum matches, it could be a duplicate request and add some challenge mechanism for a client to resolve this.
If a client is making two different requests with same parameters within x mins, it might be worth to ensure that this is intentional even if it's coming with a unique request id.
This approach may not be suitable for every use case, however, I think this will be useful for cases where the business impact of executing the second call is high and can potentially cost a customer. Consider a situation of payment processing engine where an intermediate layer ends up in retrying a failed requests OR a customer double clicked resulting in submitting two requests by client layer.
Design
Automatic (without the need to maintain a manual black list)
Memory optimized
Disk optimized
Algorithm [solution 1]
REST arrives with UUID
Web server checks if UUID is in Memory cache black list table (if yes, answer 409)
Server writes the request to DB (if was not filtered by ETS)
DB checks if the UUID is repeated before writing
If yes, answer 409 for the server, and blacklist to Memory Cache and Disk
If not repeated write to DB and answer 200
Algorithm [solution 2]
REST arrives with UUID
Save the UUID in the Memory Cache table (expire for 30 days)
Web server checks if UUID is in Memory Cache black list table [return HTTP 409]
Server writes the request to DB [return HTTP 200]
In solution 2, the threshold to create the Memory Cache blacklist is created ONLY in memory, so DB will never be checked for duplicates. The definition of 'duplication' is "any request that comes into a period of time". We also replicate the Memory Cache table on the disk, so we fill it before starting up the server.
In solution 1, there will be never a duplicate, because we always check in the disk ONLY once before writing, and if it's duplicated, the next roundtrips will be treated by the Memory Cache. This solution is better for Big Query, because requests there are not imdepotents, but it's also less optmized.
HTTP response code for POST when resource already exists
I'm writing an app which main purpose is to keep list of users
purchases.
I would like to ensure that even I as a developer (or anyone with full
access to the database) could not figure out how much money a
particular person has spent or what he has bought.
I initially came up with the following scheme:
--------------+------------+-----------
user_hash | item | price
--------------+------------+-----------
a45cd654fe810 | Strip club | 400.00
a45cd654fe810 | Ferrari | 1510800.00
54da2241211c2 | Beer | 5.00
54da2241211c2 | iPhone | 399.00
User logs in with username and password.
From the password calculate user_hash (possibly with salting etc.).
Use the hash to access users data with normal SQL-queries.
Given enough users, it should be almost impossible to tell how much
money a particular user has spent by just knowing his name.
Is this a sensible thing to do, or am I completely foolish?
I'm afraid that if your application can link a person to its data, any developer/admin can.
The only thing you can do is making it harder to do the link, to slow the developer/admin, but if you make it harder to link users to data, you will make it harder for your server too.
Idea based on #no idea :
You can have a classic user/password login to your application (hashed password, or whatever), and a special "pass" used to keep your data secure. This "pass" wouldn't be stored in your database.
When your client log in your application I would have to provide user/password/pass. The user/password is checked with the database, and the pass would be used to load/write data.
When you need to write data, you make a hash of your "username/pass" couple, and store it as a key linking your client to your data.
When you need to load data, you make a hash of your "username/pass" couple, and load every data matching this hash.
This way it's impossible to make a link between your data and your user.
In another hand, (as I said in a comment to #no) beware of collisions. Plus if your user write a bad "pass" you can't check it.
Update : For the last part, I had another idea, you can store in your database a hash of your "pass/password" couple, this way you can check if your "pass" is okay.
Create a users table with:
user_id: an identity column (auto-generated id)
username
password: make sure it's hashed!
Create a product table like in your example:
user_hash
item
price
The user_hash will be based off of user_id which never changes. Username and password are free to change as needed. When the user logs in, you compare username/password to get the user_id. You can send the user_hash back to the client for the duration of the session, or an encrypted/indirect version of the hash (could be a session ID, where the server stores the user_hash in the session).
Now you need a way to hash the user_id into user_hash and keep it protected.
If you do it client-side as #no suggested, the client needs to have user_id. Big security hole (especially if it's a web app), hash can be easily be tampered with and algorithm is freely available to the public.
You could have it as a function in the database. Bad idea, since the database has all the pieces to link the records.
For web sites or client/server apps you could have it on your server-side code. Much better, but then one developer has access to the hashing algorithm and data.
Have another developer write the hashing algorithm (which you don't have access to) and stick in on another server (which you also don't have access to) as a TCP/web service. Your server-side code would then pass the user ID and get a hash back. You wouldn't have the algorithm, but you can send all the user IDs through to get all their hashes back. Not a lot of benefits to #3, though the service could have logging and such to try to minimize the risk.
If it's simply a client-database app, you only have choices #1 and 2. I would strongly suggest adding another [business] layer that is server-side, separate from the database server.
Edit:
This overlaps some of the previous points. Have 3 servers:
Authentication server: Employee A has access. Maintains user table. Has web service (with encrypted communications) that takes user/password combination. Hashes password, looks up user_id in table, generates user_hash. This way you can't simply send all user_ids and get back the hashes. You have to have the password which isn't stored anywhere and is only available during authentication process.
Main database server: Employee B has access. Only stores user_hash. No userid, no passwords. You can link the data using the user_hash, but the actual user info is somewhere else.
Website server: Employee B has access. Gets login info, passes to authentication server, gets hash back, then disposes login info. Keeps hash in session for writing/querying to the database.
So Employee A has user_id, username, password and algorithm. Employee B has user_hash and data. Unless employee B modifies the website to store the raw user/password, he has no way of linking to the real users.
Using SQL profiling, Employee A would get user_id, username and password hash (since user_hash is generated later in code). Employee B would get user_hash and data.
Keep in mind that even without actually storing the person's identifying information anywhere, merely associating enough information all with the same key could allow you to figure out the identity of the person associated with certain information. For a simple example, you could call up the strip club and ask which customer drove a Ferrari.
For this reason, when you de-identify medical records (for use in research and such), you have to remove birthdays for people over 89 years old (because people that old are rare enough that a specific birthdate could point to a single person) and remove any geographic coding that specifies an area containing fewer than 20,000 people. (See http://privacy.med.miami.edu/glossary/xd_deidentified_health_info.htm)
AOL found out the hard way when they released search data that people can be identified just by knowing what searches are associated with an anonymous person. (See http://www.fi.muni.cz/kd/events/cikhaj-2007-jan/slides/kumpost.pdf)
The only way to ensure that the data can't be connected to the person it belongs to is to not record the identity information in the first place (make everything anonymous). Doing this, however, would most likely make your app pointless. You can make this more difficult to do, but you can't make it impossible.
Storing user data and identifying information in separate databases (and possibly on separate servers) and linking the two with an ID number is probably the closest thing that you can do. This way, you have isolated the two data sets as much as possible. You still must retain that ID number as a link between them; otherwise, you would be unable to retrieve a user's data.
In addition, I wouldn't recommend using a hashed password as a unique identifier. When a user changes their password, you would then have to go through and update all of your databases to replace the old hashed password IDs with the new ones. It is usually much easier to use a unique ID that is not based on any of the user's information (to help ensure that it will stay static).
This ends up being a social problem, not a technological problem. The best solutions will be a social solution. After hardening your systems to guard against unauthorized access (hackers, etc), you will probably get better mileage working on establishing trust with your users and implementing a system of policies and procedures regarding data security. Include specific penalties for employees who misuse customer information. Since a single breach of customer trust is enough to ruin your reputation and drive all of your users away, the temptation of misusing this data by those with "top-level" access is less than you might think (since the collapse of the company usually outweighs any gain).
The problem is that if someone already has full access to the database then it's just a matter of time before they link up the records to particular people. Somewhere in your database (or in the application itself) you will have to make the relation between the user and the items. If someone has full access, then they will have access to that mechanism.
There is absolutely no way of preventing this.
The reality is that by having full access we are in a position of trust. This means that the company managers have to trust that even though you can see the data, you will not act in any way on it. This is where little things like ethics come into play.
Now, that said, a lot of companies separate the development and production staff. The purpose is to remove Development from having direct contact with live (ie:real) data. This has a number of advantages with security and data reliability being at the top of the heap.
The only real drawback is that some developers believe they can't troubleshoot a problem without production access. However, this is simply not true.
Production staff then would be the only ones with access to the live servers. They will typically be vetted to a larger degree (criminal history and other background checks) that is commiserate with the type of data you have to protect.
The point of all this is that this is a personnel problem; and not one that can truly be solved with technical means.
UPDATE
Others here seem to be missing a very important and vital piece of the puzzle. Namely, that the data is being entered into the system for a reason. That reason is almost universally so that it can be shared. In the case of an expense report, that data is entered so that accounting can know who to pay back.
Which means that the system, at some level, will have to match users and items without the data entry person (ie: a salesperson) being logged in.
And because that data has to be tied together without all parties involved standing there to type in a security code to "release" the data, then a DBA will absolutely be able to review the query logs to figure out who is who. And very easily I might add regardless of how many hash marks you want to throw into it. Triple DES won't save you either.
At the end of the day all you've done is make development harder with absolutely zero security benefit. I can't emphasize this enough: the only way to hide data from a dba would be for either 1. that data to only be accessible by the very person who entered it or 2. for it to not exist in the first place.
Regarding option 1, if the only person who can ever access it is the person who entered it.. well, there is no point for it to be in a corporate database.
It seems like you're right on track with this, but you're just over thinking it (or I simply don't understand it)
Write a function that builds a new string based on the input (which will be their username or something else that cant change overtime)
Use the returned string as a salt when building the user hash (again I would use the userID or username as an input for the hash builder because they wont change like the users' password or email)
Associate all user actions with the user hash.
No one with only database access can determine what the hell the user hashes mean. Even an attempt at brute forcing it by trying different seed, salt combinations will end up useless because the salt is determined as a variant of the username.
I think you've answered you own question with your initial post.
Actually, there's a way you could possibly do what you're talking about...
You could have the user type his name and password into a form that runs a purely client-side script which generates a hash based on the name and pw. That hash is used as a unique id for the user, and is sent to the server. This way the server only knows the user by hash, not by name.
For this to work, though, the hash would have to be different from the normal password hash, and the user would be required to enter their name / password an additional time before the server would have any 'memory' of what that person bought.
The server could remember what the person bought for the duration of their session and then 'forget', because the database would contain no link between the user accounts and the sensitive info.
edit
In response to those who say hashing on the client is a security risk: It's not if you do it right. It should be assumed that a hash algorithm is known or knowable. To say otherwise amounts to "security through obscurity." Hashing doesn't involve any private keys, and dynamic hashes could be used to prevent tampering.
For example, you take a hash generator like this:
http://baagoe.com/en/RandomMusings/javascript/Mash.js
// From http://baagoe.com/en/RandomMusings/javascript/
// Johannes Baagoe <baagoe#baagoe.com>, 2010
function Mash() {
var n = 0xefc8249d;
var mash = function(data) {
data = data.toString();
for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
n += data.charCodeAt(i);
var h = 0.02519603282416938 * n;
n = h >>> 0;
h -= n;
h *= n;
n = h >>> 0;
h -= n;
n += h * 0x100000000; // 2^32
}
return (n >>> 0) * 2.3283064365386963e-10; // 2^-32
};
mash.version = 'Mash 0.9';
return mash;
}
See how n changes, each time you hash a string you get something different.
Hash the username+password using a normal hash algo. This will be the same as the key of the 'secret' table in the database, but will match nothing else in the database.
Append the hashed pass to the username and hash it with the above algorithm.
Base-16 encode var n and append it in the original hash with a delimiter character.
This will create a unique hash (will be different each time) which can be checked by the system against each column in the database. The system can be set up be allow a particular unique hash only once (say, once a year), preventing MITM attacks, and none of the user's information is passed across the wire. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing insecure about this.