Sigh. The header says it all, really. I'm trying to go to paypal.com through a proxy of mine. And the result is a 502 error. There's a long waiting time before that happens. And it's the same on some other secure sites. Yes, of course, paypal uses https. So does stackoverflow, but I have no trouble going to SO through my proxy. What's going on here? I suspect paypal uses a firewall and tries to detect bots accessing from web servers. But is it somehow against the rules to access through a proxy? How does paypal see the difference between a person surfing from a browser and a script running on a server? I mean I can't even get at the home page; this has nothing to do with logging in.
I haven't investigated much so far because I'm hoping that some hacker out there already knows all about this and can guide me along. I'm only speculating. Are the request headers sent to paypal somehow incompatible? I impersonate a user agent that possibly contradicts some header that the server adds without my knowledge? Does paypal check the ip address and decide that it's a web server? Can you see that even from the headers? The proxy uses https - it doesn't tunnel. Does that lead to paypal seeing the certificate of the web server?
I'm sure paypal has lots of protective software sniffing at the requests coming in. To prevent DDOS attacks? To defeat hackers? To exclude bots? A proxy is not exactly a bot, it just relays requests from a human user. Anyway, what's the difference, as seen by paypal, between a request from a browser and from a proxy?
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I am hosting a script on my site, it will call the site from the domain name, using Curl and REST API,
I can't get the REST API working with the SSL Cert, I am not sure why.
But if I don't use the SSL and just send it unencrypted, does that mean someone on another pc somewhere can intercept my calls? Or would they need access to my sever to be able to "listen in"?
Basically I want to know how risky it is (will i get hacked) if I don't encrypted the calls?
If you are not using TLS while making calls to the REST API upstream, all the requests and responses will be sent as plaintext.
Since, you are making the calls upstream, whoever is present in the network path upstream, will be able to intercept your traffic. That typically means your site (or VPS) host, the ISP they use and whomever present in the logical network path up until the server hosting the service. If they are malicious they can tamper the data or log confidential information you send or receive.
does that mean someone on another pc somewhere can intercept my calls?
No, it is not like anyone on the internet can intercept your data. It is only the devices through which your packets are getting routed through will have the powers to intercept them.
Or would they need access to my sever to be able to "listen in"?
No, they do not need access to your server to do that. They can passively intercept the incoming and outgoing data.
Summary
It is always risky when you do not make use of TLS. But, you must already trust your host and the ISP they use, to have signed up with them. Although the attack surface is reduced in your case, it is not zero. So, I would highly recommend going with the TLS version of the API.
Better safe than to be sorry.
I am currently working on a website built with Backbone.js. The site has a RESTful API built in Symfony with FOSRestBundle. Developing was going fine, until I stumbled in to some user-related tickets.
From what I understand, the best way to handle this type of problem is with a token based system, where the user gets an access token after an approved login. I will describe my current perception of the workflow, and ask questions along the way. More importantly, please correct me if I have misunderstood.
First, the user the accesses the login form, then the user types in credentials, and an AJAX request is send to the server. From what I understand this should all be handled with SSL, but with Backbonejs, you can't simply say that the login page should be accessed with HTTPS, as Backbone is a one-page framework. So will this force me to use HTTPS through out the application?
In the next step, the REST server validates the credentials, and they are approved, then the REST server sends an access token to the client. Is this token saved (on the client-side) in local storage or a cookie?
Also is the login stored at the server, so that the REST server can log the user out after a certain amount of time?
Now, the client sends this access token along with other request, so that the server can identify the client, and approve the request or not. So the access token is also stored on the REST server?
Lastly is this what the smart people call "oauth", or does it relate to it?
Thank you.
Let's take your questions one at a time.
From what I understand this should all be handled with SSL, but with Backbonejs, you can't
simply say that the login page should be accessed with HTTPS, as Backbone is a one-page
framework. So will this force me to use HTTPS through out the application?
Ok, there's a lot to unpack there. Let's start with SSL/HTTPS. HTTPS is a protocol; in other words it defines how you send packets to/from the server. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether your application is single or multi-page; either type of site can use either HTTP or HTTPS.
Now, that being said, sending login info (or anything else containing passwords) over HTTP is a very bad idea, because it makes it very easy for "bad people" to steal your users' passwords. Thus, whether you're doing a single-page or a multi-page app, you should always use HTTPS when you are sending login info. Since it's a pain to have to support both HTTP and HTTPS, and since other, non-login data can be sensitive too, many people choose to just do all of their requests through HTTPS (but you don't have to).
So, to answer your actual question, Backbone isn't forcing you to use HTTPS for your login at all; protecting your users' passwords is forcing you.
In the next step, the REST server validates the credentials, and they are approved, then
the REST server sends an access token to the client. Is this token saved (on the
client-side) in local storage or a cookie?
While any given framework might do it differently, the vast majority use cookies to save the token locally. For a variety of reasons, they're the best tool for that sort of thing.
Also is the login stored at the server, so that the REST server can log the user out
after a certain amount of time?
You've got the basic right idea, but the server doesn't exactly store the login ... it's more like the server logs the user in and creates a "session". It gives that session an ID, and then whenever the user makes a new request that session ID comes with the request (because that's how cookies work). The server is then able to say "oh this is Bob's session" and serve the appropriate content for Bob.
Now, the client sends this access token along with other request, so that the server can
identify the client, and approve the request or not. So the access token is also stored
on the REST server?
If you're running two separate servers they're not going to magically communicate; you have to make them talk to each other. For this reason your life will be easier if you can just have one (probably REST-ful) server for your whole app. If you can't, then your REST server is going to have to ask your other server "hey tell me about session SESSION ID" every time it gets a request.
Lastly is this what the smart people call "oauth", or does it relate to it?
Kind of, sort of, not really. OAuth is an authorization standard, so it's sort of tangentially related, but unless your login system involves a whole separate server you have no reason to use it. You could use OAuth to solve your "two servers, one REST-ful one not" problem, but that would probably be overkill (and regardless it's outside the scope of what I can explain in this one Stack Overflow post).
Hope that helps.
Is it possible to do optional kerberos authentication?
What I want is: if the client (browser) is not on the domain it is redirected to a username/password web login. Otherwise it will do SPNEGO do Kerberos authentication.
If I just send the WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate header to a non domain browser it just does nothing further.
Is there some option to tell the browser to try something different if it doesn't know how to authenticate? Or do I have to determine if user is part of the domain before sending the "WWW-Authenticate" header?
I haven't found anynone who has solved this publicly and in a standard way. Yes, as mentioned, one could fall back to Basic but that doesn't work for authentication schemes which involve requesting a username and password from a CGI form where, as far as the browser sees things, you're falling back to no authentication if Negotiate fails. Maybe that is suggestive that the authentication scheme is broken? I don't know.
I'll tell you what I know, first. Our site is, effectively, Cosign-protected, so we have a similar problem to you: only specially-configured machines respond to the WWW-Authenticate header, so by default we must send all users to our Cosign login page. The trick is that the Cosign server also allows authenticated GSSAPI/Kerberos hosts to complete the authentication process without entering login details, but only on certain browsers, by means of a workaround.
This workaround consists simply of a block of JavaScript within the login page which attempts a HEAD of an SPNEGO-protected resource; if successful, the script redirects the browser to an SPNEGO-protected version of the same page, which grants appropriate Cosign cookies and completes the process without password entry. If the browser lacks any one of JavaScript, Kerberos support or adequate credentials, then the user will see the cosign login page as usual.
So, the above alone might count as an answer to your question; personally though I don't think this goes far enough and what follows is more of a discussion...
The above seems unsatisfactory as it insists that any connecting user agent supports either JavaScript (unlikely to be the case for text-based browsers and HTTP client libraries) or knowledge of the arbitrary path to which we redirect Kerberos-capable users (useless to anything which has not been hard-coded for our site). I've come to the conclusion that there might be a better workaround, or if not, a gap where a standard should be. The best practical suggestion I have is this:
A normal part of the SPNEGO process is that the client attempt to retrieve a page whose initial response is an HTTP 401 but with the header WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate. This is the cue for a GSSAPI/Kerberised client to respond appropriately; a "regular" client will simply display the error page. Perhaps the solution is simply to modify the Cosign server to deliver the human-friendly login page as part of this error response?
It might be technically difficult with off-the-shelf Apache and modules, and might go against various standards (or at least principles). I'm no expert on the systems involved, so can only speculate unless (or until) I get a chance to try it out...
Send additionally WWW-Authenticate: Basic for username/password challenge.
It depends on the application server, for example in JBoss you can set <auth-method>SPNEGO,FORM</auth-method> in web.xml and it should fall back to a login form "in cases where Kerberos/SPNEGO tokens are not present":
See https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_jboss_enterprise_application_platform/7.2/html/how_to_set_up_sso_with_kerberos/additional_features
I would like to add security measurements against CSFR for my iphone app, which uses a server as backend, and the same server also serves web requests. server is written in ruby on rails.
for regular requests I'm using an special kind of authenticity token hidden inside the form, which is posted with every request from that page to establish trust.
my problem is I cannot simulate this behavior from iphone since it doesn't actually pull a form before posting.
I've thought of something along the lines of first sending request to server to generate some kind of token and then adding it to requests, but still given someone stills the token + authentication cookie etc from the iphone, sniffs it out or something. I'm still exposed to CSRF.
thoughts?
Here's an excellent post that should help to point you in the right direction.
I have an MVC3 web app that does auth to a customization of StarterSTS. I require the realm to be known and the authentication to require SSL.
It works, great.
The problem is when the user lands back onto my website they are browsing with https. This isn't really the experience I want. My site is not a bank or anything of the like. I feel the authentication conversation should be secure (I think) and the token encrypted (I'm sure). But if I manually change the url from https to http on my replying party web app after authenticating it says I'm not authorized.
1) why?
2) Is it possible to fall back to http ? or ... Should I not require https for the authentication, but leave the token encrypted?
Well - what's wrong with SSL?`
The token should be always transmitted using SSL - even when it is encrypted, it could be replayed etc.
Also the resulting session token needs to be protected. So I would go for SSL (easy to setup) and not worry about possible attacks that result from not using it (hard to implement).
That all said - you can turn off the SSL requirement on the wsFederation (requireHttps="false") and nested cookieHandler (requireSsl="false") configuration element.