How to implement HTTPS in an insufficient manner

http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/04/5-ways-to-implement-https-in.html

by tomelders • 13 years ago

135 64 13 years ago

csmattryder2• 13 years ago

This is the same guy who exposed similar flaws with Tesco's (UK supermarket chain) systems [1].

Why on Earth these companies are given free advice, but think they (or their PR folks) know better is beyond me. Take the advice! You've now got a security flaw, documented, waiting for Joe Hacker to take your customer's data and shoot a hole through your business, and its reputation.

[1] http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/07/lessons-in-website-security-...

nwh3• 13 years ago

I emailed my ISP today to ask them why my password was being stored in plain text (and not even escaped) in a MySQL database. Their response was that everything was "working", so I didn't have to worry. Bear in mind, this is a company with my banking details.

I have absolutely no expectation that it is going to be fixed either.

devcpp• 13 years ago

How do you know they do?

That said, you should have seen my face when my ISP emailed me my very password for online access, in plain text. It was something like 123456. Unforgivable double offense.

claudius5• 13 years ago

Could someone explain to me why storing un(salted/hashed) passwords is such a big thing? Sure, it doesn’t hurt to salt and hash passwords[0], but since users aren’t supposed to reuse passwords anyways, what's the problem in storing 7UgHxJYjkgWDyCa9gsrH rather than db5670ac4a274055e3f785300bec563c48306bf3ab8cb32223a4cd311984a3b4?

[0] And possibly normalise their length/character set, something that comes for free with hashes.

eurleif• 13 years ago

What users do is not necessarily the same as what they should do.

EvilTerran2• 13 years ago

Users do reuse passwords, even if they shouldn't. Defence in depth.

webignition• 13 years ago

Firstly, an attacker with access to your backend database will have full access to user credentials if passwords are not salted and hashed. An attacker can then sign in as any user. The attacker may not be trying to steal all your have and may instead be looking to make life difficult for a single specific user.

Secondly, users will reuse passwords. An attacker with access to the plaintext password and the user's email address can use this to try to gain access to other services.

Thirdly, the attacker in the first example could be a disgruntled employee. You don't want a disgruntled employee causing trouble.

Lastly, I like to protect myself. A user of your services may claim you or your employees are signing in as them. It is convenient to be able to honestly state that this cannot happen.

shawabawa3• 13 years ago

Another point:

If someone has read-only access to the database (e.g. a junior developer) they can do absolutely nothing with a hashed password

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

> since users aren’t supposed to reuse passwords anyways

Never design for what people are supposed to do. Design for what people actually do.

rthomas6• 13 years ago

Probably the same reason civil engineers design every individual component several times stronger than they need to be. Redundant safety points mean multiple things have to simultaneously fail instead of just one thing.

WatchDog• 13 years ago

These companies likely have staff that already are acutely aware of the problems. It is sometimes very difficult to change anything from the inside, sometimes you need some negative PR to actually get the ball rolling.

dragcdxfbv• 13 years ago

Do i have to pay or create accounts on third party services to use HTTPS (in nginx)?

I never used https on my sites because there are some giant warnings ("dangerous") in browser when you go to a website that is self-signed. No warnings on plain http.

JennyZ• 13 years ago

You can get a free SSL certificate at https://www.startssl.com/ , so that should not be a reason to keep you from using it.

I do agree that the extreme mistrust of browsers towards self-signed certificates is an odd thing.

derefr2• 13 years ago

> I do agree that the extreme mistrust of browsers towards self-signed certificates is an odd thing.

No, not at all; it's the whole point of SSL. The guy MITMing an SSLed website can create a cert for that site himself, but he can't get it signed by a CA. So he has to sign it himself. Thus, from the browser's perspective, all self-signed certs are possible instances of "there used to be a CA-signed cert here, but now you're being MITMed."

Now, that's not to say something like self-signed certs wouldn't be nice--given some sort of distributed pin cache, we could have something closer to an SSH/PGP model where everyone's current self-signed cert "fingerprint" is on file, and alarm bells go off if you see a cert different from the one you're supposed to see. But without that, self-signing is literally no more secure than no SSL at all: anyone else can also self-sign to MITM you.

lmm• 13 years ago

It's free but they charge you to revoke a certificate, which is quite unfortunate as it discourages people from revoking if they e.g. leak their private key.

dmm• 13 years ago

Browsers mistrust self-signed certificates because that's what a MITM attack would look like.

tacticus• 13 years ago

http://www.startcom.org/ has free certs for non businesses. or it's about 10$ a year for a paid one

claudius5• 13 years ago

You could also think about getting CAcert(ified?) and promote the CAcert root certificates getting included in more browsers. This is not measurably more insecure since SSL is mostly snakeoil anyways as long as you rely on external entities[0] to verify the identity of websites.

Ideally, browsers would store the certificate presented on the first visit to a website and compare the certificate presented on following visits to that stored certificate to warn the user on mismatches – so far, I have not yet found a usable implementation thereof, and especially not one more widespread than CAcert.

[0] Among them such trustworthy companies as DigiTrust, TÜRKTRUST or CNNIC.

markhemmings• 13 years ago

I'm the guy who originally contacted Troy Hunt about this, as he mentions in the blog post.

What annoys me is I'm a very young developer, and I've only really just become interested in security (12 months ago I didn't even know what hashing was!!!), yet there's developers out there with years and years of experience making huge sites for the likes of Tesco and TopCashBack for vast sums of money and they don't think about incorporating even the simplest foundations of internet security a novice like me would implement without even thinking! How is this possible?! If I'm doing it in tiny little php sites with 1 unique visitor ever, why are these 'experts' not in there huge corporate sites with hundreds of thousands of users a month?!

kijin4• 13 years ago

Because huge corporations often prioritize other things over technical expertise, and experts often prefer to work in settings other than huge corporations.

troyhunt2• 13 years ago

Years and years of experience? Often not, and that's speaking from years and years of experience!

Vast sums of money? Yes, at least the outsourcing vendors who churn this sort of thing out.

Unfortunately you're the exception Mark so good on you for that. Well I mean unfortunate for the greater web using population, but very fortunate for you!

ZoFreX• 13 years ago

To expand further on those points with a personal anecdote... I worked on a "big website" for a very big government department. I was still in university at the time, had about a year's experience with the platform, and was earning close to callcenter wages.

The government only contracts to companies on a particular whitelist, which we weren't. They paid a company something in the region of £300,000 for the website.

That company then outsourced 100% of the work to the tiny (single digits employee count) company I was at.

They paid us £40,000.

My share of that works out at about £2,000.

The fact something cost half a million dollars in no way implies any kind of quality, or that the people working on the software will know what they're doing. (Really: another horror story involved a website that only needed to work in IE6... and had been built and tested purely in Firefox)

iaw• 13 years ago

I'm scared to death of making a more-subtle security mistake that can be exploited. I find it surprising that people can be so negligent.

acdha• 13 years ago

Businesses care about loss, not security as an intrinsic merit. They will invest it only to the extent to which problems are actively costing them sales, raising expenses like insurance or are required to comply with some sort of regulation (government, credit card processor, etc.).

Something positive like a site redesign perceived as increasing customer appeal or negative like an expensive legacy server upgrade often trumps security unless it clearly poses a future risk – this is also why many large companies tend to follow the trailing edge as the main concern is usually avoiding a lawsuit alleging that they were significantly worse than everyone else in their industry.

nageeb• 13 years ago

"Years and years experience"

This is not always the case. Lots of marketing/PR companies started off in the pre-Internet days, and simply added websites to their list of services and rely solely on the experience of their devs to handle the rest. I was a contractor for such a company and to cut costs (read: to save on paying me), they hired a junior developer with no formal education, who specialized in copy-paste programming to do many of their large sites. He's since left, but the damage he's done still lives on in the countless sites he built for their clients, which are full of horribly insecure code (especially #1 on the HTTPS no-no list).

The good news is that, following his departure, I got plenty of work doing clean-up jobs on all the sites he built. :)

jackalope• 13 years ago

I could cite multiple reasons, but the main one I see is that the people who pay for and specify the requirements of a project are often nontechnical and don't delegate any decision making authority to technical personnel, no matter how much talent is in the pool. Repeated attempts to bring up issues are met with blank stares, as if a foreign language is being used (and to nontechnical people, it is). I've gotten calls at 5 PM on a Friday that "Our new site (hosted on a third party server) is going live on Monday! We need a domain and an SSL certificate." In a corporate or institutional environment, bureaucratic obstacles can make such a request impossible. Throw in a VIP who won't budge, and you're about to ruin the weekend for multiple employees who will remain gun-shy about disclosing any problems in the future.

tquai• 13 years ago

How is this possible?!

In any sufficiently large organization, the people who make the decisions and the people who enact those decisions are separated by distance, background, experience, or other reasons. This is why you see so much dysfunction in large organizations, and it extends to politics and other things that affect you as well. Look for it and you'll start seeing it everywhere.

lucb1e4• 13 years ago

Https article served over http. Lovely.

Edit: Besides that problem #1 is offtopic since it has nothing to do with https and that 3/4 other points are captain obvious, #4 is actually a good one. It's so obscure that many will forget to enable it ("all pages are secured anyway"), but whenever a user visits any http page, an attacker can inject a small frame loading the http version of my website, and even if I redirect, the cookie was already sent and read by the attacker. Only an HSTS header or enabling the secure-cookie option protect against this.

troyhunt2• 13 years ago

If there was something worth protecting on a personal blog site, it might be a different story.

1 is very on-topic - there's no way that data should be sent in the clear.

HSTS is good, but unfortunately only partially supported. Agree on the secure cookie, but of course you need to drop the dependency on accessing it over HTTP before you do that.

lucb1e4• 13 years ago

> If there was something worth protecting on a personal blog site, it might be a different story.

It's not about security here, it's about privacy.

https://willnorris.com/2012/12/all-https-all-the-time

> This blog isn’t terribly controversial. But if only the "controversial" stuff is private, then privacy is itself suspicious. Thus, privacy should be on by default.

nwh3• 13 years ago

If every blog on the internet had a static IP to serve HTTPS over, we'd have even less IP addresses available than we do now.

newman314• 13 years ago

IPv6 or SNI

fulafel• 13 years ago

this went from good motivation for ipv6 switchover to obsolete excuse: http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI

reeses• 13 years ago

I almost didn't read past the introduction, where he claimed a secure form in an unsecured page meant that the contents of the submitted form would be transmitted in the clear.

kijin4• 13 years ago

The author lists 5 problems, but all of them have to do with the fact that the website in question is not 100% HTTPS. So it's really just one problem that has many different implications.

When you maintain both an HTTP site and an HTTPS site, it's nearly impossible to toss state back and forth between them without exposing yourself to at least one of these problems. Even if you do everything perfectly, people will complain that they get logged out when they visit HTTP URLs. The only solution is to treat HTTP, from now on, as if the only response it could produce were:

    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Location: https://www.example.com/remainder/of/url

That's it. If you handle personal information, never send "200 OK" responses over plain HTTP, ever.

Need more server resources? Maybe. And this is probably why 99% of websites that have the problem the author mentions resist making changes. But the "HTTPS uses more server resources!" complaint is so 20th-century it's not even funny anymore. If you're not going to invest in 10% more server resources (or 5%, or 25%, or whatever) to protect your users' personal information, I seriously doubt that you deserve anyone's business in the first place.

lucb1e4• 13 years ago

> all of them have to do with the fact that the website in question is not 100% HTTPS

Problem number 4 is actually also relevant for HTTPS-only websites. That is, if the website doesn't use HSTS, and most don't.

Also a 301 only works for one page. Consider this: You go to example.com (typed in address bar), it redirects you to https://example.com via a 301, then you load your favorite news website, I inject an iframe in the news website that loads http://example.com/pwnd, and the browser happily sends the cookie (if it wasn't set to secure-only).

The HSTS header is what you need to do, not only a 301.

kijin4• 13 years ago

> Problem number 4 is actually also relevant for HTTPS-only websites.

You're right, but I was thinking along the lines of: The reason why they don't set secure cookies is probably because they want to share state between their HTTP site and their HTTPS site.

> Also a 301 only works for one page.

You can make it work on every page. Even the query string will remain intact. POST requests are more complicated, but they are usually triggered by forms and JS on your own pages, so you have more control over that.

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
    Rewrite (.*) https://www.example.com/$1 [L]

Of course, this doesn't solve the insecure cookie problem. But again, I'm assuming that not being HTTPS-only is the root of all evils.

brey• 13 years ago

> Need more server resources? Maybe.

AWS does this for (almost) free - load balancing includes optional SSL termination. really simple to set up, all HTTPS traffic just forwards to port 80 on your instance.

nodata• 13 years ago

No, please don't do this:

If a visitor goes to http://domain/some/url they should not redirect to https://domain/some/url - it makes it harder to catch pages that use the wrong protocol.

Better to redirect http://domain/some/url to https://domain

Edit: if you're logging referrers from your own domain with non https:// urls AND using secure cookies, ignore my comment!

trust-me3• 13 years ago

Nooo, don't erase the address that took me 5 minutes to type. What you say doesn't make any sense. You should obviously configure the https redirect as a site wide setting and not per page.

EvilTerran2• 13 years ago

That would make for terrible UX, and I'd expect most users to just shrug it off as your website being weird, so it wouldn't even help you "catch pages that use the wrong protocol".

Why not just do the redirect that you know is right, but log it (with referer, so you know what needs fixed)?

ancarda• 13 years ago

SSL should really be all or nothing. The same way browsers don't like loading insecure content from a secure origin, they should also squirm at the idea of submitting a form to a secure area (from non-secure) -- including if the parent is non-secure. An iframe isn't good enough.

How to implement HTTPS in an insufficient manner

Related Stories