I am trying to connect via SSL to a PostgreSQL using FireDac in Delphi. I have followed the instructions at the following site:
https://www.howtoforge.com/postgresql-ssl-certificates
I have created all the certificates. Configured the postgreql.conf as specified so it points to the required files. Copied the specified files to the client machine and installed the root.crt certificate.
Via FireDAC's connection params I have specified the following:
Params.values[SSL_ca']:=sslCertsPath+'root.crt';
Params.values['SSL_cert']:=sslCertsPath+'postgresql.crt.';
Params.values['SSL_key']:=sslCertsPath+'postgresql.key';
I am getting a connection error re invalid client certificate. I am not sure which certificate it is referring to and why it is invalid. Am I specifying the correct client certificates by way of the connection's params? If so, any suggestions as to why I may be getting the error please?
OpenSSL verify against the root.crt and postgresql.crt confirms the certificate is ok.
After over 3 weeks of frustration trying to set up PostgreSQL with SSL using FireDAC, I have finally figured out what the problem is and what the solution is.
For anyone wishing to connect using FireDAC, the howtoforge guide (see link in original post) works fine.
However, do not use the FireDAC parameters in my original post. PostgreSQL does not use them. You need to use the PGAdvanced parameter.
But even after figuring this out, I still could not get it to work for weeks until after testing I got an error message which finally made it clear what I was doing wrong. On Windows PostgreSQL strips out path delimiters unless you escape them (this is not mentioned in the PostgreSQL or FireDAC help files as far as I can see).
Below is an example of the correct way to connect using FireDac paramaters for ssl
Params.values['PGAdvanced']:='sslmode=verify-ca sslrootcert=C:\\ProgramData\\MWC\\Viewer\\Certs\\root.crt sslcert=C:\\ProgramData\\MWC\\Viewer\\Certs\\postgresql.crt sslkey=C:\\ProgramData\\MWC\\Viewer\\Certs\\postgresql.key';
If you don't wish to use a root certificate set sslmode to require.
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 :
I am trying to connect to an external SOAP service using PHP and have written a small php test script that just connects to the service and performs a simple request to check everything is working.
This all works correctly but when I run via a browser request, it is very slow taking somewhere in the region of 40s to establish the initial connection. When I do the same request using the exact same script on the command line, it goes through straight away.
Does anyone have any ideas as to why this might be?
Cheers
PHP caches the wsdl in /tmp. If you run from the command line first, the cache file will be owned by whatever user you're running the script as, and apache won't be able to read the cache. The wsdl will have to be downloaded and parsed every time which will be slow.
Check the permissions of /tmp/wsdl*.
Maybe external SOAP service trying to check your IP, and your server has ICMP allowed, when your local network - not.
Anyway, this question might be answered more clearly by administrator of external SOAP service :)
Is there a difference between the php.inis that are being used?
On a standard ubuntu server installation:
diff /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
//edit:
Another difference might be in the include paths. Had this trouble myself on a local test server, it didn't actually use the soap class that was included (it didn't include anything, because the search paths weren't valid), but it included the built-in soap_client class.
I'm working on a project that requires me to download files from FTP using Perl. I just found out that I've got the option to use FTP-SSL. It seems that this is just SSL encrypted FTP (similar to HTTP vs. HTTPS) and I should just have to send the "AUTH TLS" or "AUTH SSL" commands to the FTP server.
The question: is there a way to do this with the standard Net::FTP? I've checked the docs and the only thing I've found about it is use the "features" function to find out if the server supports it.
I found the Net::FTPSSL module on CPAN, but the author says sometimes the server does not receive the data that was sent. That doesn't sound like something I want to put into production.
Short answer: no.
From looking at the source of Net::FTP I'd say it's not possible to use SSL with it. I'd rather test if Net::FTPSSL works with the FTP server you're going to use your program with. If your program needs to be able to work with any FTP server, you might want to try and fix the module for those servers it doesn't work with and contribute your code to the original module.
I'm documenting the procedure for a full redeploy on my development server. Small staff, using Basic authentication (over SSL, of course) with an htpasswd file backend.
Is it safe to transfer the .htpasswd file as-is?
The Operating Systems will potentially differ, but the software on top (ie. Apache) will be the same.
It's safe to transfer the htpasswd file no matter what architectures you are on. It is a text file. The only case in which you might need to do some conversions is to deal with line endings if you were moving between Unix and Windows, but between Linux/Unix boxes, no problems.
Short answer: Yes you can.
That's all you need to know.
If you're using apache, then the .htpasswd file should be the same. Just make sure you aren't overriding the password file to use in your new server config. And make sure you set proper permissions on the file so that you don't get any additional unauthorized entries.
If you use the same apache version you shouldn't have any problems just copying the .htpasswd files: They just contain the hashes that people's passwords are being compared with and the hashing is always the same (or it wouldn't work on any machine ;))