I have a very specific question. I'm in the middle of an assignment for school and my team is stuck at a part where we need to recover a password from the Event Logs that was purposely placed in there. He said there should be logs that have the password included in them that were man-made but we have no idea where to look. We've looked through the 4688, 4723, 4724 event logs, as well as the rest of them even though they don't apply much to this situation, to see if maybe there is custom information that's placed that includes a password but we can't find anything. There are logs where we can see that users were made and changes were made to their accounts/passwords and then one user was disabled and deleted but is there a way to actually get more information from an event log using PowerShell? We've been using MyEventViewer for the event logs but are really lost at this point. Our teacher said that he was able to get the password by using PowerShell. Does anyone have any idea as to how we could go about getting the password for a user like that going through PowerShell? It's the Domain Admin accounts password that we're looking for and it's also the same password for a KeePass database file that we need to unlock and then perform a live response after. Even if anyone knew how you can input your password into an event log, that would also really help so we can backtrack to see about exporting it. Any information would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
I am trying to find the best practices for forgot password functionality via sending a link to reset password i.e. sending an email with a one time token to the registered user. The token will be stored in the database and when the user clicks the link, we check the token and allow the user to set a new password.
Best practices while designing forgot password function -
The token must be unpredictable, that's accomplished best with a
"really" random code which is not based upon a timestamp or values
like the user-id.
Like a password, the token should be hashed, before storing it in
the database. This makes them useless for an attacker, even if the
database is stolen.
The reset-link should preferably be short to avoid problems with
email clients, and contain only safe characters 0-9 A-Z a-z
(base62 encoded)
The token should have an expiration time within single-digit hours.
The token should be marked as used,after the user has
successfully set a new password.
When a user changes their password or requests another password
reset, expire all tokens already associated with their account.
These are some of the points I found. What can be other security issues that should be considered ?
Sources:
Secure password-reset function
Ycombinator News
A couple other practices I've seen:
Check user is on the same machine/browser/IP as the one where the reset password request was triggered (unless it was initiated by admin/system).
Rate-limit number of reset tokens that can be generated for an account.
It should also be noted that the best practice is usually to use an established library rather than inventing your own mechanism, as too many things can be overlooked.
I have the same question and found the OWASP Forgot Password Cheat Sheet.
Also few things that I would like to add:
Usually if user entered non existing email sites anyway shows message "pwd restoration link was sent". This is due to prevent hackers from determining that user with the email exists in system. But IMHO it's better to say user that email is not exists because usually it may not remember email used during registration.
It is better to add some additional personal question to user like a birthday date. If hacker stole user's email it makes harder to receive reset link. But since reset link may be sent to user by site admin the question with birthday must be on change password page which is opened by link.
Hackers may automatically send a lot of letters to some user. Some sites uses a CAPTCHA near email field to prevent this.
After successful changing of password all active sessions should be closed and user must be logged out. Thus even if hacker is logged in he will logged out.
It is a good idea to hash a restoration ticket like a password. Here should be used the same hashing algorithms like with password: Argon2, SCrypt, BCrypt.
After user restoration password it is good to mark it a possible fraud and for some time (like a week) do not allow to make some critical actions, like withdrawal money from account.
Also some sites are sending a letter to user that it's password was changed. They do this when user was logged normally changed it manually but maybe it is good to send the same latter when pwd was reseted.
I want to be able to get the list of users and their details from an IRC channel without joining it and thus increasing its user count.
So instead of issuing JOIN #chan and then NAMES #chan to get the list of users, I can run the latter command. Is this possible?
You can issue NAMES for a channel where you are not in, but NAMES does not display users that are invisible (usermode +i).
Most servers set the usermode +i on connect, and some don't even allow changing it.
So if you don't have everyone set their usermode -i, you can't see them when not in the channel.
The RFC is not very specific about usermode +i. Some say that you can see users with +i on a NAMES reply if you share a common channel, and others say that you can not.
While the RFC implies that you should be able to issue /NAMES #chan from outside #chan (or even just issue /NAMES to get everybody), in practice many servers I've seen will ignore the former if you are not in a channel and just reject the latter.
The only reliable way is to issue /JOIN and /NAMES, and then deduct one from the user list to account for your bot.
You can see the number of users with /list #channel
I hope this is allowed but I have a number of questions regarding Facebook Connect, I'm quite unsure on how I should approach implementing it.
I am working on a live music type service and currently have user registration, etc. If I were to implement Facebook Connect alongside this, would I still be able to email the Facebook Connect users as if they were on my database?
Also, would it instead be possible to let users who have Facebook "link" their accounts once registered so I am able to give them the benefits of sharing via Facebook and inviting friends while still having an actual registered user on my system.
I have tried to read up answers to the above questions but what I've found is quite ambiguous.
Thanks, look forward to your views.
Facebook's documentation process is very poor, so don't feel bad about having a hard time getting started. Their wiki-style approach to documentation without any real official documents tends to leave the "process flow" tough to grasp, and requires piecing together parts of a bunch of randomly scattered docs.
Facebook has an obligation to protect privacy, so they never make a user's actual email address available to application developers, through Connect or normal applications. They do have a proxied email system in place that you can use, however, you must get explicit permission from a user in order to email them. There's a decent document on proxied email here. You can get permission by prompting for it; there's several methods for doing so linked in that document.
In regards to linking Facebook and local accounts, this would definitely be the way to go. Once a Connect user logs in, you want to store that fact for that user so you can provide the Facebook-specific functionality. I would simply create a normal user account in the database for every new Connect user that came by, with it's own local id, so that you don't have to do special handling of two different types of user accounts all over the site. That being said, the account would obviously have to be marked as a Facebook user's account (I use an externalId column in my users table), and any part of the site that relied on information you might otherwise have locally would have to handle the Facebook aspect properly (such as using proxied email instead of normal email).
For existing users, you could arrange an "account link" by having a process whereby they log into FB Connect after they've logged into the site already, and you could detect that and simply add their FB id to your users table. After that, they could log in through Connect in the future, or through your normal process. I've never done this, but it should be possible.
If you write the account handling code generically enough, your site will be able to function well no matter what kind of user you throw at it.
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I'm creating a web app that requires registration/authentication, and I'm considering using an email address as the sole user id. Here are what I see as the pros and cons (updated with responses):
PROS
One less field to fill out during registration (it would just be email address, password, and verify password). I'm a big fan of minimalistic registration.
An email address is easier to remember. (thanks Mitch, Jeremy)
You don't have to worry about your favorite username being taken already - you're the only one who uses your email address. (thanks TStamper)
CONS
User has more to type every time they log in.
What if a user wants multiple accounts? They'll need another email address. (Do I even want a user to be able to create multiple accounts?)
Easy for a potential attacker to guess (if they know the target's email address, they know the login id). (thanks Vasil)
Users may be tempted to use the same password they use for their email account, which is bad security. (thanks Thomas)
If you change email addresses frequently, it may be difficult to remember which address you used to sign up for a site after a long hiatus. (thanks Software Monkey)
A hacker could spam the registration form and use "email already taken" responses to generate a list of valid emails. (thanks David)
Not everyone has an email address. (thanks Nicholas)
If I went with email as id, I would provide a mechanism to allow it to be changed in the event a user changes address. In this case users would not be posting content to a public site, so a separate username won't be necessary to protect the email addresses (but it is something to consider for other sites).
Another option is to implement OpenID (which is a whole other debate).
This seems to work for Google, but their services are tightly integrated. What have I missed in my analysis? Do you have any recommendations? Does anyone have experiences to share?
FINAL EDIT
Thank you all for your responses. I have decided to use email as an id, but then allow the creation of a username for login purposes after registration. This allows a little flexibility while keeping registration as short as possible. It also prevents problems when a user changes email addresses (they can just log in with their username and update it). I will also be implementing methods to prevent brute-forcing of email addresses out of the registration and login systems (mainly a cool-down period after repeated attempts).
Personally, I prefer just using my email address as a username. It's one less thing to remember, and I never have to worry about my preferred name being already taken.
Just my 2 cents!
I think you missed a PRO:
Users are likely to remember their email address; and as email addresses are unique, they never have to worry about their preferred username being taken already.
As a user of websites, I can tell you that I hate memorizing unnecessary usernames. I don't use a unique handle or anything so I can never remember which variation of my name I used that wasn't already taken. I'd much rather type my email address.
Also, I like OpenID.
CONS
When the same password is used for the e-mail account, compromising the one automatically means compromising the other.
CON: Not everyone has an e-mail address. Consider if your database is ever accessed by an internal application. If you are running a store, people will call up and place an order by phone and refuse to provide an e-mail address. So while having an e-mail address as the default user ID is cool, be sure to allow alternates to get into the system. (Of course, this depends on the context.)
Learned this one the hard way.
I tend to not prefer pro/con lists, and instead try to think of benefits and challenges.
Challenge:
Some users will be tempted to use their email address from their ISP. Linking to an email alone, may be difficult for the users who forget to update their email in all the web sites they have signed up for before they change ISPs.
Instead:
You should consider allowing a user to provide multiple addresses, as well user-selected id and then let the user decide what they want they wish to do. Perhaps also consider allowing the user to provide an OpenID account.
CON: If I change my email address, suddenly all my account names are invalid. My name doesn't change, but my email often does. I have occasionally revisited a site after a number of years, and been stuck... what was my email address two years ago???
One setup you may want to consider: Have both a username and an email. The email is used to login and is always kept private, the username is used to identify the user in any public interaction, such as posting a comment. It winds up being slightly more secure as both halves of the user login credentials are kept private, whereas if you use a username for both login and public identification, half of the login is already known.
I definitely agree with you about having minimal registration for most cases, but depending on what you're doing you may want to balance that against added security for your users. Four fields isn't outrageous for registration, (username, email, password, confirm password), and if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you could cut it down to three by dropping the confirm password field, or two by emailing them a password that they can change later.
PRO
People hate having to create a unique name that fits their id and that has not already been taken to register for a site..So this is why the user id as EMAIL ADDRESS is so embraced.
ex:TStamper1930, who actually wants to remember 1930 at the end of my name that I really wanted
CON: If a hacker can try registering random email addresses en masse, he or she will be able to figure out which of those addresses are valid based on which registrations fail. This is a tactic that can be used to put together lists of known valid email addresses, which are a hot commodity on the spam black market.
Although now that I think about it, that's a problem that affects any website which asks for an email address as part of the registration process, regardless of whether or not there's a separate username. But it's still something to think about.
Stick to email addresses they are used everywhere, actually most of the major websites use them, they are unique so they save the user from struggling to find a name that's not used by others, also users won't forget their email addresses (in most cases at least :)), which is unlike usernames that they will keep on forgetting if they don't visit your site very often.
You shouldn't be worried about them being too long as all the major browsers (IE, FF .. etc) offer autocomplete to forms which is enabled by default, so you type the first letters in your email and you get a drop down list (ie. autocomplete list) where you just click to enter the whole email, personally I almost never type the email address in full, I always type the first letters then select the email from the autocomplete drop down list. Besides, if you allow users to be remembered (using a Remember Me checkbox and persistent cookies), it will be another reason to not worry about it.
I don't know about your app but usually users having multiple accounts is not desirable in most apps.
One con might be that if it's an email address the login can be guessed by people and brute force attacks attempted. Which is not really a big issue, since on most sites today the logins are publicly displayed.
The biggest pro is that logins are easier to remember this way.
A good setup is to require username and email. Allowing the user to login with either email address or username is very user friendly. An added benefit is the user can change their email address. It would also allow multiple accounts for one email.
To solve your con item of the email being too long to type in every time. I have implemented the StringScan Ruby library.
require 'strscan'
def signup!(user, &block)
self.email = user[:email] unless user[:email].blank?
str = StringScanner.new(self.email)
str.scan_until(/#/)
str.pre_match
self.login = str.pre_match
etc..
Then just change login method to allow either email or login to match password.
This works just like google or mobileme. A user can choose to just type in their email username (ie. username instead of username#gmail.com.)
I'm fighting with removing this right now. Here's a newer CON from the current era.
An email address is considered Personal Identifiable Information (PII) by many governments. Hence extra care needs to be taken any time you display it on a page, or even return it from an end-point.
Consider that many sites allow interactions between different users. This often means the site will provide a list of users to choose from (e.g. a drop-down list, or search results). This ca actually enable the leaking of PII by the site.
Usernames, on the other hand, can be completely anonymous. Given the prevalence today of password managers, users really don't need to actually remember their username and password.
If you don't care about forcing your users to login to your application with Facebook or some other social network (most people don't seem to care), then you can just use their social network email as their 'user id' when referencing other tables/documents (MySQL, Mongo, etc).
I've noticed the bonus to using social media logins is that all the security has been taken care of by said social network, including not allowing 2 users to have the same email or username in their database thus saving you the hassle of having to code for all of that. This is just my personal preference.