When a PHP application makes a database connection it of course generally needs to pass a login and password. If I'm using a single, minimum-permission login for my application, then the PHP needs to know that login and password somewhere. What is the best way to secure that password? It seems like just writing it in the PHP code isn't a good idea.
Several people misread this as a question about how to store passwords in a database. That is wrong. It is about how to store the password that lets you get to the database.
The usual solution is to move the password out of source-code into a configuration file. Then leave administration and securing that configuration file up to your system administrators. That way developers do not need to know anything about the production passwords, and there is no record of the password in your source-control.
If you're hosting on someone else's server and don't have access outside your webroot, you can always put your password and/or database connection in a file and then lock the file using a .htaccess:
<files mypasswdfile>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
The most secure way is to not have the information specified in your PHP code at all.
If you're using Apache that means to set the connection details in your httpd.conf or virtual hosts file file. If you do that you can call mysql_connect() with no parameters, which means PHP will never ever output your information.
This is how you specify these values in those files:
php_value mysql.default.user myusername
php_value mysql.default.password mypassword
php_value mysql.default.host server
Then you open your mysql connection like this:
<?php
$db = mysqli_connect();
Or like this:
<?php
$db = mysqli_connect(ini_get("mysql.default.user"),
ini_get("mysql.default.password"),
ini_get("mysql.default.host"));
Store them in a file outside web root.
For extremely secure systems we encrypt the database password in a configuration file (which itself is secured by the system administrator). On application/server startup the application then prompts the system administrator for the decryption key. The database password is then read from the config file, decrypted, and stored in memory for future use. Still not 100% secure since it is stored in memory decrypted, but you have to call it 'secure enough' at some point!
This solution is general, in that it is useful for both open and closed source applications.
Create an OS user for your application. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege
Create a (non-session) OS environment variable for that user, with the password
Run the application as that user
Advantages:
You won't check your passwords into source control by accident, because you can't
You won't accidentally screw up file permissions. Well, you might, but it won't affect this.
Can only be read by root or that user. Root can read all your files and encryption keys anyways.
If you use encryption, how are you storing the key securely?
Works x-platform
Be sure to not pass the envvar to untrusted child processes
This method is suggested by Heroku, who are very successful.
if it is possible to create the database connection in the same file where the credentials are stored. Inline the credentials in the connect statement.
mysql_connect("localhost", "me", "mypass");
Otherwise it is best to unset the credentials after the connect statement, because credentials that are not in memory, can't be read from memory ;)
include("/outside-webroot/db_settings.php");
mysql_connect("localhost", $db_user, $db_pass);
unset ($db_user, $db_pass);
If you are using PostgreSQL, then it looks in ~/.pgpass for passwords automatically. See the manual for more information.
Previously we stored DB user/pass in a configuration file, but have since hit paranoid mode -- adopting a policy of Defence in Depth.
If your application is compromised, the user will have read access to your configuration file and so there is potential for a cracker to read this information. Configuration files can also get caught up in version control, or copied around servers.
We have switched to storing user/pass in environment variables set in the Apache VirtualHost. This configuration is only readable by root -- hopefully your Apache user is not running as root.
The con with this is that now the password is in a Global PHP variable.
To mitigate this risk we have the following precautions:
The password is encrypted. We extend the PDO class to include logic for decrypting the password. If someone reads the code where we establish a connection, it won't be obvious that the connection is being established with an encrypted password and not the password itself.
The encrypted password is moved from the global variables into a private variable The application does this immediately to reduce the window that the value is available in the global space.
phpinfo() is disabled. PHPInfo is an easy target to get an overview of everything, including environment variables.
Your choices are kind of limited as as you say you need the password to access the database. One general approach is to store the username and password in a seperate configuration file rather than the main script. Then be sure to store that outside the main web tree. That was if there is a web configuration problem that leaves your php files being simply displayed as text rather than being executed you haven't exposed the password.
Other than that you are on the right lines with minimal access for the account being used. Add to that
Don't use the combination of username/password for anything else
Configure the database server to only accept connections from the web host for that user (localhost is even better if the DB is on the same machine) That way even if the credentials are exposed they are no use to anyone unless they have other access to the machine.
Obfuscate the password (even ROT13 will do) it won't put up much defense if some does get access to the file, but at least it will prevent casual viewing of it.
Peter
We have solved it in this way:
Use memcache on server, with open connection from other password server.
Save to memcache the password (or even all the password.php file encrypted) plus the decrypt key.
The web site, calls the memcache key holding the password file passphrase and decrypt in memory all the passwords.
The password server send a new encrypted password file every 5 minutes.
If you using encrypted password.php on your project, you put an audit, that check if this file was touched externally - or viewed. When this happens, you automatically can clean the memory, as well as close the server for access.
Put the database password in a file, make it read-only to the user serving the files.
Unless you have some means of only allowing the php server process to access the database, this is pretty much all you can do.
If you're talking about the database password, as opposed to the password coming from a browser, the standard practice seems to be to put the database password in a PHP config file on the server.
You just need to be sure that the php file containing the password has appropriate permissions on it. I.e. it should be readable only by the web server and by your user account.
An additional trick is to use a PHP separate configuration file that looks like that :
<?php exit() ?>
[...]
Plain text data including password
This does not prevent you from setting access rules properly. But in the case your web site is hacked, a "require" or an "include" will just exit the script at the first line so it's even harder to get the data.
Nevertheless, do not ever let configuration files in a directory that can be accessed through the web. You should have a "Web" folder containing your controler code, css, pictures and js. That's all. Anything else goes in offline folders.
Just putting it into a config file somewhere is the way it's usually done. Just make sure you:
disallow database access from any servers outside your network,
take care not to accidentally show the password to users (in an error message, or through PHP files accidentally being served as HTML, etcetera.)
Best way is to not store the password at all!
For instance, if you're on a Windows system, and connecting to SQL Server, you can use Integrated Authentication to connect to the database without a password, using the current process's identity.
If you do need to connect with a password, first encrypt it, using strong encryption (e.g. using AES-256, and then protect the encryption key, or using asymmetric encryption and have the OS protect the cert), and then store it in a configuration file (outside of the web directory) with strong ACLs.
Actually, the best practice is to store your database crendentials in environment variables because :
These credentials are dependant to environment, it means that you won't have the same credentials in dev/prod. Storing them in the same file for all environment is a mistake.
Credentials are not related to business logic which means login and password have nothing to do in your code.
You can set environment variables without creating any business code class file, which means you will never make the mistake of adding the credential files to a commit in Git.
Environments variables are superglobales : you can use them everywhere in your code without including any file.
How to use them ?
Using the $_ENV array :
Setting : $_ENV['MYVAR'] = $myvar
Getting : echo $_ENV["MYVAR"]
Using the php functions :
Setting with the putenv function - putenv("MYVAR=$myvar");
Getting with the getenv function - getenv('MYVAR');
In vhosts files and .htaccess but it's not recommended since its in another file and its not resolving the problem by doing it this way.
You can easily drop a file such as envvars.php with all environment variables inside and execute it (php envvars.php) and delete it. It's a bit old school, but it still work and you don't have any file with your credentials in the server, and no credentials in your code. Since it's a bit laborious, frameworks do it better.
Example with Symfony (ok its not only PHP)
The modern frameworks such as Symfony recommends using environment variables, and store them in a .env not commited file or directly in command lines which means you wether can do :
With CLI : symfony var:set FOO=bar --env-level
With .env or .env.local : FOO="bar"
Documentation :
Related
I am currently using golang pq library to connect to postgres database. I am successfully connecting using kerberos principal, but i can't figure out where can i specify keytab file to use to. In the source code it kinda happens magically, using some third-party library. It actually works, but i need to know for sure how does it know where my keytab is stored, so it can request initial ticket.
Usually Kerberos clients do not directly use a keytab; they expect the initial ticket to be already acquired and present in the environment. That is, you're expected to kinit before running the program, and afterwards the client's GSSAPI library looks for the KRB5CCNAME environment variable, which points at a file containing the ticket cache left by kinit.
(Normally with MIT Kerberos or Heimdal it could be many other things besides a file... but the 'pq' library uses a very minimal pure-Go Kerberos implementation which only accepts a traditional file-based ccache. So be careful if Krb5 on your distro was set up to use 'DIR' or 'KEYRING' or 'KCM' cache types, those aren't going to work here.)
If the initial ticket isn't present, the MIT Krb5 implementation will in fact automatically use a keytab to acquire the ticket if the KRB5_CLIENT_KTNAME environment variable is pointing to one. Unfortunately, the 'pq' library doesn't use the system Kerberos library, so that won't work here either. (But it also wouldn't work if your OS was using Heimdal Kerberos; it's a MIT-specific extension.)
So the approach that will always work is to set KRB5CCNAME to a temporary path, then use either kinit or k5start to acquire a ticket from the keytab, before running your program. (The k5start tool will also keep automatically renewing or re-acquiring the ticket before it expires, without needing to use cron.)
Really, the whole krb_unix.go file is disappointing. If they can call the native SSPI on Windows, surely they could call the native GSSAPI on Linux...
I am required to utilize an old version of ClearQuest 7, and the only APIs that are enabled in our installation are for VBA (Excel) and RatlPERL. (The REST API isn't an option for us - although it suffers the same cleartext credential problem.)
I've written a ratlperl script that executes queries into the defect database, and produces csv output. Note that ratlperl requires cleartext user credentials for authentication.
ratlperl query.cqpl -u %userid% -p %password% -q "%query%" -c %outfile%
That script is called from a Windows Batch file. When run from the Windows command line with no parameters, the batch file requests user credentials, but they can also be provided as parameters.
query.bat %userid% %password%
I trigger daily queries, with the user credentials passed as parameters for the batch file.
This all works well, but I'd rather not store the cleartext password in this way. The registry would be one possibility, but anyone with access to the machine would have access to those credentials.
How can I store these credentials in a somewhat secure way?
There's two things to watch out for. One is having your process list "show up" the auth credentials.
Particularly on Unix - if you run ps it'll show you the arguments, which might include a username and password. The way of handling this is mostly 'read from a file, not the arg list'. On Unix, you can also amend $0 to change how you show in ps (but that doesn't help command history, and it's also not perfect as there'll be a short period before it's applied).
The other is - storing the data at rest.
This is a bit more difficult. Pretty fundamentally, there aren't many solution that let your script access the credentials that wouldn't allow a malicious user to do so.
After all, by the simple expedient of inserting a print $password into your script... they bypass pretty much any control you could put on it. Especially if they have admin access on your box, at which point... there's really nothing you can do.
Solutions I'd offer though:
Create a file with (plaintext) username and password. Set minimum permissions on it. Run the script as a user that has privileges, but don't let anyone else access that user account.
That way other people can 'see' your script (and may need to to run it) but can't copy it/hack it/run it themselves.
I would suggest sudo for this on Unix. For Windows, I'm not sure how much granularity you have over RunAs - that's worth a look, or alternatively have a scheduled task that runs as your service account, and picks up 'request files' for processing that can be generated by anyone.
As the level of security doesn't need to be so high, perhaps consider to create a simple exe? The password could possibly be read out of the memory somehow, but I guess this way creates a big enough barrier.
Or something like this could be helpful?
http://www.battoexeconverter.com/
HTH
Is there any way of changing Wildfly's Management Realm's password through config files of some sort? I kinda lost my password (my LastPass add-on for Firefox is kinda messing up with me). If there is, how?
Passwords by default are stored in
$WILDFLY_HOME/standalone/configuration/mgmt-users.properties
but passwords are hashed.
Best thing you can do is to remove the user you want and then re-add it via add-user.sh/.bat script you can find in bin folder.
If you are using WildFly the add-user utility has the ability to replace existing passwords, just run it again for a user with the same username and it should give you the option to replace the password.
I'm using Apache on Ubuntu. I have a Perl script which basically read the files names of a directory, then rewrites a text file, then sends a signal to a daemon. How can this be done, as secure as possible through a web-page?
Actually I can run a simplified cgi in the code below, but not if I remove the comments. I'm looking for advise considering any of:
Using HTTP Requests?
How about Apache file permissions on the directory shown in code?
Is htaccess enough to enable user/pass access to the cgi?
Should I use a database instead of writing to a file and run a cron querying the db with permission granted to write and send the signal?
Granting as less permissions as possible to the webserver.
Should I set a VPN?
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use CGI;
##fileList = </home/user/*>; #read a directory listing
my $query = CGI->new();
print $query->header( "text/html" ),
$query->p( "FirstFileNameInArray" ),
#$query->p( $fileList[0] ), #output the first file in directory
$query->end_html;
Presumably, the error you're getting from the commented lines is a permission denied when trying to read the /home/user directory. The way to fix this is (surprise, surprise) to give the apache user[1] to read that directory. There are three primary approaches to doing this:
In most environments, there's
really no good reason to hide all
filenames within a user's home
directory, so you could make the
directory world-readable with chmod
a+r /home/user. Unless you have a
specific reason to prevent the
general public from knowing the
names of the files in the user's
home directory, I'd tend to
recommend this approach.
If you want to be a bit more
restrictive about it, you could
change /home/user to be owned by a
group which the apache user belongs
to (or add the apache user to the
group that currently owns
/home/user) and then set
/home/user to be group-readable.
This will make it accessible to all
members of that group, but not the
general public.
If you need to have standard
filesystem permissions applied to
web access, you can look at
configuring suexec so that
individual requests can take on
permissions of users other than the
apache user. This is normally the
user who owns the code which is
being run to handle the request
(e.g., in this case, the user who
owns your directory-listing script),
but, if you're using htaccess-based
authentication, it may be possible
to configure suexec to decide
which user's permissions to take on
based on what user you log in as.
(I avoid suexec myself, so I'm not
100% certain if this can be done and
have no idea how to go about it if
it can.)
[1] ...by which I mean the user that apache is running as; depending on your system config, this user may be named "apache", "httpd", "nobody", "www-data", or something else entirely.
I know this is a very basic question.I am new to web programming.Im working with a CMS.My client has asked me to 'FTP' the site that i am manipulating on my local machine, so that he can view the changes too.He also gave a link on cliking which, the site pops up in its original form.I understand that its hosted on a server and i am suposed to make it look like the one i have modified on local.How do i do this?using an FTP client.What about the database?
And also what if something goes wrong during the process?Is it undoable?
I would have done much more research before asking this question, but i have got so little time to figure this out.Thnks
Encourage your client to use scp or sftp instead. It'll encrypt the login and traffic.
Get an FTP program like WSFTP.
What about the database? You need a copy of the database on the server (which is presumably where the link goes).
Get the login/pass from the client.
It's un-doable if you have a copy or backup of the original.
FTP copies files from one machine to another. Sounds like you need to install the CMS on the server.
Need more information: what CMS, is it already on the server, what database?