Die XP: Another benefit of Let's Encrypt

The Let's Encrypt project is a great initiative to move towards a more secure web, removing the costs to apply a secure certificate to a site and providing an automated client to take care of renewals.

This means of course huge changes across the whole the web industry:

Other CA will be forced to drop the price of their equivalent certificates to a bare minimum or make them free also, just to try to keep on some people looking at them.

Hosting providers will have to allow everyone to use a one click install of a free SSL certificate or at least manually update their certificates unless they want their clients to move to a friendlier hosting that allows setting up SSL without paying huge fees.

Website owners now will be able to avoid one of the problems (money) to install a SSL and this will be specially important for small websites. Big companies have enough resources that the cost of a certificate is nothing to them, but for a small website it's clear that every Euro counts, so most of the people didn't think at all about paying just to say that their site now can be used with https.

Hopefully this will mean the end of self-signed certificates or expired certificates, so end users will be able to understand better the difference between a secure site and a non-secure one and so after a while people will reject "old" sites that aren't using SSL, forcing those sites to install one, pushing their hosting companies to allow install of free SSL.

The government spies will have a harder time trying to track what everyone does, and no, this won't be an improvement for terrorists because they are already able to use secure communications but in Paris it has been clear that they used normal non-secure methods.

But there's one more benefit: Most of those small sites that now are installing SSL en masse are using shared hosting, so they don't have a unique IP and that means that they rely on SNI to enable https and it turns out that no version of IE under windows XP (as well as old Android 2.x phones) don't support it, so those that still keep using the old IE8 will now face a new problem because they will have constant security warnings whenever they try to visit all these new https sites.
And this is a good thing!!!

That people keep on using that old IE. I mean, it's old, old, old. Full of bugs, full of problems, a pain for all of us that try to create modern websites if you have to keep supporting it, and now those users will feel a little of that pain (although I guess that they are already suffering from all of us that have left IE8 behind and no longer test it).

Time to ditch IE 8 and move to a modern browser.
 

Location aware password policy

This morning I waked up and I was thinking about the password on my phone. I've always found it annoying having to retype it every now and them, specially if I'm at a place like my home where no one else can grab it.

So I thought that the device should be smarter, and I think that currently it should be possible to bring a little intelligence to these "smartphones". When I'm at a place that I have to configured to be trusted, then once I unlock the phone it should remain unlocked as long as it remains there or I don't explicitly lock it.

One easy way to achieve this would be to enhance the wifi manager, whenever I connect to a protected wifi with a password one new option is available: "this is a trusted site", by checking it the phone (or any similar mobile device) will remain unlocked and it's also possible to specify if the unlock should last some minutes (5 or 10, like when you are doing something with 2 devices, leave one apart and when you pick it up again it's locked so you waste time unlocking it), one hour or remain unlocked as long as you're connected.

That simple change could help lots of times, if we can use the devices at home without the need to retype the password (or whatever lock mechanism you've chosen), then we would be slightly happier and we could use slightly harder passwords for the moments when we're out of home.

Additional refinements could defined as an option to specify a coverage zone: instead of home, you're at work in your office, so you want the device to remain unlocked while you're there, but if you move out of the office then it should go back to the normal behavior.

I think that many people might not be using currently any password just to avoid the hassle of having to unlock his device every now and then, but if a system like the proposed in this post would be available then I would bet that they would be much happier to know that they have a secure device when they're walking down the streets while keeping the simplicity of an always available device at home without the need to retype the password at every moment.

 

Security attack from IP 92.243.90.103

I've noticed recently that the IP 92.243.90.103 is testing several servers, requesting for files related to FCKeditor and then checking for the availability of the connectors to perform operations on the server (usually I think that it's more common requests related to tinymce filemanager, but it doesn't really matter too much).

I don't think that the requests are related to an unknown problem with the server connectors in FCKeditor as it seems to search both the asp and aspx versions (maybe it acts depending on the server software), but there are a few points that everybody should remember in order to avoid problems.

As every other time that I've written about this issues, let me remember you that I'm not a security expert and these are just some basic guidelines, the basis is that you should try to create an onion around the security of your server, different layers so that an attacker has to go through all of them, and hopefully he should be stopped at the very first steps.

Keep only the needed files

Whenever you use a third party software (or even your own software), don't upload to the server everything that comes in the shipped distribution. You won't need at the server source files, samples, documentation, or integration files for other server languages.

By removing those extra files you are avoiding a larger vulnerable surface and you can focus on the important files.

Security by obscurity can be useful

Yes, security by obscurity isn't really secure, but this kind of automated attacks that just search any number of domains for some files at specific locations like "/FCKeditor/editor/filemanager/connectors/aspx/connector.aspx?Command=GetFoldersAndFiles&Type=File&CurrentFolder=/" can be avoided if you place this 3rd party components in a non-standard location, so something as easy as putting the FCKeditor in another subfolder can avoid that an automated attack finds your files.

It's also important that the files that the users upload to your server with scripts like the FCKeditor server upload, don't end up in a folder that gives any hint about how they have been placed there, if your files are under /scripts/CKFinder/userfiles I'll know that you are using CKFinder somewhere in your server and more important, you are stating the path for CKFinder so you are weakening a little the security that you got in the first place by using /scripts/CKFinder instead of just /CKFinder

Expose the upload script only to users that can upload files

If a user doesn't have permissions to upload anything, then he shouldn't be able to see any hint about what are you using to manage the files in your server.

Secure the upload folder

The folder where the users are able to upload files shouldn't have permissions to execute any script, so even if they are able to upload a script, it won't do anything. Using the IIS control panel or .htaccess files in Apache it's easy to perform this task.

Keep your code updated

This can be a pain, but you once you start using a script at your server, you should check from that moment any new release about that project, paying special attention to warnings about security problems in new releases. I think that every project has some kind of RSS feed, so it shouldn't really be that hard to at least notice the new versions.

Enable file management wisely

In FCKeditor and CKFinder the server connectors include a config file where you can adjust some parameters (location of uploaded files, allowed or disallowed extensions, types of files, etc...) but the most important one is the ability to state if the script is enabled or disabled.

By default the server connectors are disabled in FCKeditor and CKFinder as that's the safe default, but people the complain that when they try to use them they get a message stating that the connector is disabled. Of course, that kind of people are showing that they didn't bother to read the minimum about how to configure these scripts, so they might end up using other ones that are enabled by default and they won't ever notice that now everyone can manage the files of their servers.

The correct step is to use the login credentials of your CMS to enable the file management only for the correct users, you don't really want an anonymous user being able to upload a file to your server.

Finally: be careful

As you can see, I'm not revealing anything extraordinary, these are just some basic rules that can provide some basic protection, but there are more that you should be aware of and that's part of the task of managing a web server.

When you pick a file manager for your server, don't think only about a few buck that you can save by using a free manager instead of a paid one, check how the security is implemented in each one, if an attacker is able to get control of your server you can lose many times that money trying to getting it back to normality.