Use of hash metadata in yara - hash

The metadata section of a yara rule often has one or more hashes. Ex:
hash = "27a0a98053f3eed82a51cdefbdfec7bb948e1f36"
there can sometimes be 100 or more of these. How are they used, if at all? The yara docs and google searches make no mention of them. Are they MD5's, SHA-1's or something else? Will yara flag files with hashes that match? Automatically without the rule telling it to? Yara as a hash library and a hash.md5() ftn for this purpose so why are these in the metadata? Thanks for any help.

According to http://yara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/writingrules.html#metadata
Note that identifier/value pairs defined in the metadata section can not be used in the condition section, their only purpose is to store additional information about the rule.
So in the cases you refer to, Yara itself doesn't use them. However, another application (such as python-yara) might interpret them and base its own actions on meta data.

Related

How to design a query where I retrieve last data from resource that I want to apply filter to in RESTful way?

How should a query look like when I want to retrieve last measurements from installations that aren't removed?
Something like that?
/my-web-service/installations/measurements/last?removed=false
The thing is, I don't want to retrieve last measurements that weren't removed from installations. I want to retrieve last measurements from installations that weren't removed.
I see a couple possibilities here:
If you need to read the data from the endpoint transactionally, the way you designed it is the way to go. What I'd change is the name of the param from removed to installationRemoved since it's more descriptive and shorten the endpoint to /my-web-service/measurements/ - since with installations it's unclear in which scope does the client operate. Also, don't you need since param to filter the last measurements?
It there's a chance to split the two endpoints I'd add:
/my-web-service/installations/?removed=false
/my-web-service/measurements/?since=timestamp&installations=<array>
It does not make it better (when it comes to better or worse) but easier and more predictive for the users.
In general try to add more general endpoints with filtering options rather then highly dedicated - doing one particular thing. This way leads to hard to use, loose API. Also, on filtering.
And final notice, your API is good if your clients use it not because they have to but when they like it ;)
According to this best practices article, you could use "aliases for common queries":
To make the API experience more pleasant for the average consumer,
consider packaging up sets of conditions into easily accessible
RESTful paths. For example, the recently closed tickets query above
could be packaged up as GET /tickets/recently_closed
So, in your case, it could be:
/my-web-service/installations/non_removed/measurements/last
where non_removed would be an alias for querying installations that weren't removed.
Hope it helps!

REST API - string or numerical identifier in URL

We're developing a REST API for our platform. Let's say we have organisations and projects, and projects belong to organisations.
After reading this answer, I would be inclined to use numerical ID's in the URL, so that some of the URLs would become (say with a prefix of /api/v1):
/organisations/1234
/organisations/1234/projects/5678
However, we want to use the same URL structure for our front end UI, so that if you type these URLs in the browser, you will get the relevant webpage in the response instead of a JSON file. Much in the same way you see relevant names of persons and organisations in sites like Facebook or Github.
Using this, we could get something like:
/organisations/dutchpainters
/organisations/dutchpainters/projects/nightwatch
It looks like Github actually exposes their API in the same way.
The advantages and disadvantages I can come up with for using names instead of IDs for URL definitions, are the following:
Advantages:
More intuitive URLs for end users
1 to 1 mapping of front end UI and JSON API
Disadvantages:
Have to use unique names
Have to take care of conflict with reserved names, such as count, so later on, you can still develop an API endpoint like /organisations/count and actually get the number of organisations instead of the organisation called count.
Especially the latter one seems to become a potential pain in the rear. Still, after reading this answer, I'm almost convinced to use the string identifier, since it doesn't seem to make a difference from a convention point of view.
My questions are:
Did I miss important advantages / disadvantages of using strings instead of numerical IDs?
Did Github develop their string-based approach after their platform matured, or did they know from the start that it would imply some limitations (like the one I mentioned earlier, it seems that they did not implement such functionality)?
It's common to use a combination of both:
/organisations/1234/projects/5678/nightwatch
where the last part is simply ignored but used to make the url more readable.
In your case, with multiple levels of collections you could experiment with this format:
/organisations/1234/dutchpainters/projects/5678/nightwatch
If somebody writes
/organisations/1234/germanpainters/projects/5678/wanderer
it would still map to the rembrandt, but that should be ok. That will leave room for editing the names without messing up url:s allready out there. Also, names doesn't have to be unique if you don't really need that.
Reserved HTTP characters: such as “:”, “/”, “?”, “#”, “[“, “]” and “#” – These characters and others are “reserved” in the HTTP protocol to have “special” meaning in the implementation syntax so that they are distinguishable to other data in the URL. If a variable value within the path contains one or more of these reserved characters then it will break the path and generate a malformed request. You can workaround reserved characters in query string parameters by URL encoding them or sometimes by double escaping them, but you cannot in path parameters.
https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog/path-and-query-string-parameter-calls-to-a-restful-web-service
Numerical consecutive IDs are not recommended anymore because it is very easy to guess records in your database and some might use that to obtain info they do not have access to.
Numerical IDs are used because the in the database it is a fixed length storage which makes indexing easy for the database. For example INT has 4 bytes in MySQL and BIGINT is 8 bytes so the number have the same length in memory (100 in INT has the same length as 200) so it is very easy to index and search for records.
If you have a lot of entries in the database then using a VARCHAR field to index is a bad idea. You should use a fixed width field like CHAR(32) and fill the difference with spaces but you have to add logic in your program to treat the differences when searching the database.
Another idea would be to use slugs but here you should take into consideration the fact that some records might have the same slug, depends on what are you using to form that slug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug
I would recommend using UUIDs since they have the same length and resolve this issue easily.

Regarding flux conventions, why a single file per action?

I've noticed that a lot of the sample flux projects follow the convention of a single file per action rather than grouping them together. What is the reason for that, is that a strong convetion?
My preference is to group related actions together into single files, e.g. wishlistActions.js would include, create, addProduct, removeProduct, and delete.
Does that go against the grain? If so, why?
I don't think that goes against the grain and I don't know if Flux prescribes any singular way to do that.
In fact, Ryan Florence (one of the authors of react-router) has a demo repo where he has a Constants.js file listing all his actions. And then he has individual actionCreator classes.
https://github.com/FrontendMasters/2015-02-13-React/tree/master/excercises/5-flux/app

Can I use claims to secure EF fields using PostSharp?

It it possible to use claims based permissions to secure EF fields using post sharp. We have a multi-tenanted app that we are moving to claims and also have issues of who can read/write to what fields. I saw this but it seems role based http://www.postsharp.net/aspects/examples/security.
As far as I can see it would just be a case of rewriting the ISecurable part.
We were hoping to be able to decorate a field with a permission and silently ignore any write to if if the user did not have permission. We were also hopping that if they read it we could swap in another value e.g. Read salary and get back 0 if you don't have a claim ReadSalary.
Are these standard sort of things to do I've never done any serious AOP. So just wanted a quick confirmation before I mention this as an option.
Yes, it is possible to use PostSharp in this case and it should be pretty easy to convert given example from RBAC to claims based.
One thing that has to be considered is performance. When decorated fields are accessed frequently during processing an use-case (e.g. are read inside a loop) then a lot of time is wasted in redundant security checks. Decorating a method that represent an end-user's use-case would be more appropriate.
I would be afraid to silently swapping values of fields when user has insufficient permission. It could lead to some very surprising results when an algorithm is fed by artificial not-expected data.

REST best practice for getting a subset list

I read the article at REST - complex applications and it answers some of my questions, but not all.
I am designing my first REST application and need to return "subset" lists to GET requests. Which of the following is more "RESTful"?
/patients;listType=appointments;date=2010-02-22;user_id=1234
or
/patients/appointments-list;date=2010-02-22;user_id=1234
or even
/appointments/2010-02-22/patients;user_id=1234
There will be about a dozen different lists that I need to return. In some of these, there will be several filtering parameters and I don't want to have big 'if' statements in my server code to select the subsets based on which parameters are present. For example, I might need all patients for a specific doctor where the covering doctor is another and the primary doctor is yet another. I could select with
/patients;rounds=true;specific_id=xxxx;covering_id=yyyy;primary_id=zzzz
but that would require complicated branching logic to get the right list, where asking for a specific subset (rounds-list) will achieve that same thing.
Note that I need to use matrix parameters instead of query parameters because I need to do filtering at several levels of the URL. The framework I am using (RestEasy), fully supports matrix parameters.
Ralph,
the particular URI patterns are orthogonal to the question how RESTful your application will be.
What matters with regard to RESTfulness is that the client discovers how to construct the URIs at runtime. This can be achieved either with forms or URI templates. Both hypermedia controls tell the client what parameters can be used and where to put them in the URI.
For this to work RESTfully, client and server must know the possible parameters at design time. This is usually achieved by making them part of the specification of the link relationship.
You might for example define a 'my-subset' link relation to have the meaning of linking to subsets of collections and with it you would define the following parameters:
listType, date, userID.
In a link template that spec could be used as
<link rel="my-subset' template="/{listType}/{date}/patients;user_id={userID}"/>
Note how the actual parameter name in the URI is decoupled from the specified parameter name. The value for userID is late-bound to the URI parameter user_id.
This makes it possible for the URI parameter name to change without affecting the client.
You can look at OpenSearch description documents (http://www.opensearch.org) to see how this is done in practice.
Actually, you should be able to leverage OpenSearch quite a bit for your use case. Especially the ability to predefine queries would allow you to describe particular subsets in your 'forms'.
But see for yourself and then ask back again :-)
Jan
I would recommend that you use this URL structure:
/appointments;user_id=1234;date=2010-02-22
Why? I chose /appointments because it is simple and clear. (If you have more than one kind of appointment, let me know in the comments and I can adjust my answer.) I chose the semicolons because they don't imply hierarchy between user_id and date.
One more thing, there is no reason why you should limit yourself to just one URL. It is just fine to have multiple URL structures that refer to the same resource. So you might also use:
/users/1234/appointments;date=2010-02-22
To return a similar result.
That said, I would not recommend using /dates/2010-02-22/appointments;user_id=1234. Why? I don't think, in practice, that /dates refers to a resource. Date is an attribute of an appointment but is not a noun on its own (i.e. it is not a first-class kind of thing).
I can relate to what David James answered.
The format of your URIs can be like he suggested:
/appointments;user_id=1234;date=2010-02-22
and / or
/users/1234/appointments;date=2010-02-22
while still maintaining the discoverability (at runtime) of your resource's URIs (like Jan Algermissen suggested).