I am building a website using web2py. For security reasons I would like to hide the url after the domain to the visitors. For example, when a person clicks a link to "domain.com/abc", it will go to that page and the address bar shows "domain.com".
I have played with the routes_in and routes_out, but it only seems to map your typed url to a destination but not hiding the url.
How can I do that? Thanks!
Well I guess you're going to have a build the worlds most remarkable single page application :) Security through obscurity is never a good design pattern.
There is absolutely no security "reason" for hiding a URL if your system is designed in a such a way that the use of the URLs is meaningless unless the access control layer defines permissions for such use (usually through an authentication and role/object based permission architecture).
Keep in mind - anyone these days can use Chrome inspector to see whatever you are trying to hide in the address bar.
For example. Say you want to load domain.com/adduser
Sure you make an AJAX call to that URL, and the browser address bar would never change from domain.com/ - but a quick look in the source will uncover /adduser pretty quickly.
Sounds like you need to have a think about what these addresses really expose and start locking them down.
Related
I have a query as to whether what I want to achieve is doable, and if so, perhaps someone could give me some advice on how to achieve this.
So I have set up a health check on Route 53 for my server, and I have arranged so that if the health check fails, the user will be redirected to a static website I have set up at a backup site.
I also have a web scraper running regularly collecting data, and my question is, would their be a way to use the data I have collected, and depending on its value, either pass or fail the heath check, therefore determining what site the user would be diverted to.
I have discussed with AWS support and they have said that their policies and conditions are there by design, and long story short would not support what I am trying to achieve.
I'm a pretty novice programmer so I'm not sure if it's possible to work this, but this is my final hurdle so any advice or help would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks!
Make up a filename. Let's say healthy.txt.
Put that file on your web server, in the HTML root. It doesn't really matter what's in the file.
Verify that if you go to your site and try to download it using a web browser, it works.
Configure the Route 53 health check as HTTP and set the Path for the check to use /healthy.txt.
To make your server "unhealthy," just delete the file. The Route 53 health checker will get a 404 error -- unhealthy.
To make the server "healthy" again, just re-create the file.
I'm building a webpage featuring a very much a-like the facebook wall/newsfeed. Registered users (or through Facebook-connect, google auth) can submit urls. At the moment, I'm taking these URLs and use urllib2 to fetch the content of the URL and search for relevant information like og:properties, HTML title-tag and perheps some -tags for images.
Now, I understand that I'm putting my server at risk when I'm letting users feed my server with URLs to open.
My question is how high the risk is? What standard security checks can I make?
As for now, I am simply opening the url without any "active" protection because I don't know what to check for.
And what about storing fetched content into the database. Does django have built-in protection against SQL-injections?
Thank you!
One of the obvious risks here is that one could use your website as a vector for spreading malicious URLs.
E.g. Say I figure out a malformed html that allows for arbitrary code execution in webkit based browsers, say by exploiting a certain 0-day buffer overflow. Say your website goes popular, that'd be one of the spots I'd definitely try.
Now, you can't possibly match the contents of the URLs submitted to look for security flaws. You'd become an anti-virus/security company then. Both Chrome & Safari do take care of these to some extent.
For user's/content's sake and for the risk I explained, you could build in a flagging system that learns by user's actions. You could train a classifier whenever someone flags a URL, see examples here.
I'm sure there is a variety of such solutions, also in python.
For a quick overview of security, sql injections in Django's context, checkout this link.
I'm implementing a link scraping system like Facebook's link share feature, whereby a user enters a url which is passed to our server via ajax, and our server then does a get request (using the requests library) and parses the response html with Beautiful Soup to capture relevant information about the page.
In this type of system, obviously a person can enter any url that they want. I'm trying to imagine what type of security risks our server could be exposed to in this type of scenario? Could such a set up be exploited maliciously?
You probably want to make sure that your server doesn't execute any plugins or copy any videos/images.
Javascript is trickier, if you ignore it you will miss some links, if you execute it then you had better be sure you aren't being used to do something like send spam.
If you are asking on SO you probably aren't sure enough!
You should do a google on RFI/LFI (Remote / Local) File Inclusion Vulnerability and Iframe attacks. If you are safe from these two attacks , then you're good.
I have built quite a few small & large crawling systems. Actually not sure what kind of security risks you are talking about. I am not clear on your requirements.
But if all you are doing is fetch the html using BeautifulSoup & then extracting certain stuff about the page like title tag & meta tag info etc. & then store this data. I dont see any problems.
Unless you are not blindly doing some kind of eval either on the response of the url or on the stuff the user entered you are safe I feel.
I am building a website for a comedy group which uses Facebook as one of their marketing platforms; one of the requirements for the new site is to display all of their Facebook events on a calendar.
Currently, I am just trying to put together a Python script which can pull some data from my own Facebook account, like a list of all my friends. I presume once I can accomplish this I can move to pulling more complicated data out of my clients account (since they have given me access to their account).
I have looked at many of the posts here, and also went through the Facebook API documentation, including Facebook Connect, but am really beating my head against the wall. Everything I have read seems like overkill, as it involves setting up a good deal of infrastructure to allow my app to set up connections to any arbitrary user's account (who authorizes me). Shouldn't it be much simpler, given I only ever need to access 1 account?
I cannot find a way to retrieve data without having to display the Facebook login window. I have a script which will retrieve all my friends, but it includes a redirect where I have to physically log myself in to Facebook.
Would appreciate any advice or links, I just feel like I must be missing something simple.
Thank you!
Just posting up my notes on the successful advice, should others find this post;
Per Daniel and William's advice, I obtained the right permissions using the Connect options. From William, this link explains how the Facebook connection works
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
This section on setting up the actual authentication was most helpful to me.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api
Basically, it goes as follows:
Post a link to the following URL. A user will need to physically click on it (even if that user is just you, the site admin).
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/HANDLER
This will redirect to a Facebook login, which will return to http://www.example.com/HANDLER after the user authenticates. If you wish to do more than basic reads and news feed updates you will need to include this variable in the above link: scope=offline_access,user_photos. The scope variable just includes a comma separated list of values, which Facebook will explicitly tell the authenticating user about during the login process, and they will have to OK. Most helpful for me was the offline_access flag (user_photos lets you get at their photos too), so I can pull content without someone logging in regularly (so long as I store the access token obtained later)
Have a script located at http://www.example.com/HANDLER that will take a variable from the request (so facebook will redirect to http://www.example.com/HANDLER&code=YOUR_CODE after authentication). Your handler needs to pull out the code variable, and then send the following request:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?
client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&
redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/oauth_redirect&
client_secret=YOUR_SECRET_KEY&
code=YOUR_CODE
This request will return a string of the form access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN.
Just parse off the 'access_token=', and you will have a token that you can use to access the facebook graph API, in requests like
http://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN
This will return a JSON object containing all of your friends
Hope this saves someone else some not fun time straining through documentation. Thanks for the help!
It is true, that Facebook's API is targeted at developers who are creating apps that will be used by many users.
Thankfully, the new Graph API is much simpler to use than its predecessor, and shouldn't be terribly difficult for you to work with without using or creating a lot of underlying infrastructure.
You will need to implement authorization, but this is not difficult, and as long as you prompt the user for the offline_access permission, it'll only need to be done once.
The documentation on Desktop Authentication would probably be most relevant to you at this point, though you might want to move to the javascript-based authentication once you've got a web app up and running.
Once the authentication is done, all you're doing is making GET requests to various urls and working with the resulting JSON.
Here's the documentation about Events, and you can get a list of friends from the friends connection of a User.
I'm not expert on Facebook/Facebook Connect, however I've seen it used/used applications with it and it seems there's really only the 'official' way to do it. I'm afraid it looks like your best bet would probably be something along the lines of this.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Connect/Authentication_and_Authorization
Regardless of how you actually 'use' it, you'll still need to authorize the application to connect to the account and this means having a Facebook App as well.
The answer to Facebook application authentication is hard to find but is actually found within the "Analytics" page of the Graph API.
Specify the following: https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_cred&client_id=yourappid&client_secret=yourappsecret , you will then be given an access_token that you may use on all other calls.
The Facebook provided APIs do NOT currently provide this level of functionality.
I need to create a cherrypy main page that has a login area. I want the login area to be secure, but not the rest of the page. How can I do this in CherryPy?
Ideally, any suggestions will be compatible with http://web.archive.org/web/20170210040849/http://tools.cherrypy.org:80/wiki/AuthenticationAndAccessRestrictions
Assuming you only want parts of the actual page to be secure, you should create an iframe pointing to a HTTPS source. However, this shows a "secure and non-secure items on page" warning to the user.
This is commonly considered a bad idea. The primary reason is that it confuses most people due to the website identity markers appearing in just about every current browsers url area.