Encrypt id in url controller/action/id

Rails
1

i am developing a community which has user profiles … those are now
accessible through an url like e.g.

/user/profile/10

the 10 is the id of the user within the database. now i dont really like
the plain ID within the url because it is very simple to iterate through
the users …

does someone has a nice solution for encrypting and decrypting the id?
some simple encryption would be fine

2

Michal G. said the following on 06/01/08 04:17 PM:

i am developing a community which has user profiles … those are now
accessible through an url like e.g.

/user/profile/10

the 10 is the id of the user within the database. now i dont really like
the plain ID within the url because it is very simple to iterate through
the users …

Yes, this is an intrinsic security flaw that appears in much of Rails:

http://example.com/web/84/topic/12379

A simple loop can find out all the projects, all the topics.

This kind of scanning is a common ‘pre-attack’ scan used by malicious
hackers.

–
It’s a well-known fact that the ISO/OSI seven-layer protocol stack
actually
has two additional layers:
Layer 8: finance
Layer 9: politics
However, there are network gurus who know how to route around them. . .
.
- Les Bell, RHCE, CISSP

3

Anton A. wrote:

Michal G. said the following on 06/01/08 04:17 PM:

i am developing a community which has user profiles … those are now
accessible through an url like e.g.

/user/profile/10

the 10 is the id of the user within the database. now i dont really like
the plain ID within the url because it is very simple to iterate through
the users …

Yes, this is an intrinsic security flaw that appears in much of Rails:

http://example.com/web/84/topic/12379

A simple loop can find out all the projects, all the topics.

This kind of scanning is a common ‘pre-attack’ scan used by malicious
hackers.

and do u have a solution?

4

Michal G. said the following on 06/01/08 05:12 PM:

Yes, this is an intrinsic security flaw that appears in much of Rails:

http://example.com/web/84/topic/12379

A simple loop can find out all the projects, all the topics.

This kind of scanning is a common ‘pre-attack’ scan used by malicious
hackers.

and do u have a solution?

There are many.
Google for security, but you’re on the right idea when you talk about
‘encrypt’ the ID. Of course the internal ‘find_by_id’ and the external
form in the URL can be different.

How strong do you want it to be? How meaningful do you want it to be?

If users sign up as “Firstname, Lastname” you could make that the ID -
CamelWord it to FirstnameLastname and get

    /user/profile/FirstnameLastname

This is ‘meaningful’. Its not obscure, but at least its immune to easy
"Brute Force"attacks of the form

[1 … 100000000].each { |i| attack.send(“/usr/profile/” + i.to_s) }

To be really paranoid, you could take

   sha1hash(firstname.to_s + lastname.to_s)

Yes, it would be possible to generate a big list of names, but think
about this:

firstname.length and lastname.length can vary from 2 to 20 (or whatever)
characters. A generator for all that would take a long time to run.
An attack like this would show up in your log files and IDS quite
clearly.

Log files monitoring? IDS? They too are part of security. You can’t
just rely on programming. Security is about overlapping checks and
controls. But even so, all you’re doing is uppng the ante, and there
may be other areas of attack. Residual risk - Wikipedia

“The Air Force is reacting to the EPA ban on CFC’s by replacing them in
the cooling systems of the ICBMs. If they are ever fired, it will be an
environmentally friendly nuclear holocaust, not threatening the Ozone
layer.” – Access to Energy, July 1993

5

thanks for the answers guys … but i am looking for the best solution to
encrypt and decrypt the id of my user …

anton i thought about your solution with first and lastname but i could
have duplicate names and then its not that straightforward anymore …

i just want to crypt the id so it does not look obvious that you can
just grab all of them with bruteforce

6

On 06 Jan 2008, at 23:08, Anton J Aylward wrote:

Yes, this is an intrinsic security flaw that appears in much of Rails:

http://example.com/web/84/topic/12379

A simple loop can find out all the projects, all the topics.

This kind of scanning is a common ‘pre-attack’ scan used by malicious
hackers.

  1. If you don’t want it to be seen, it should have been in a password
    protected part of your site. Never trust user input, whether it’s in
    forms or in urls.
  2. If you want to avoid record scraping for data within the pages,
    use different techniques like clientside decrypting of encrypted
    elements or use rmagick to render the data as an image instead of a
    string.
  3. If you want to avoid record scraping of entire pages over your
    complete database or brute force attacks, use log file analyzers that
    reconfigure your firewall to ban those ips when certain conditions
    are met. fail2ban is such a solution.
  4. If you want to avoid hotlinking to files, use Apache/other
    webserver techniques to avoid it.
  5. If you need to make temporary file downloads with a hash in the
    url, use a simple named route instead of shoving it in a RESTful route.

Believe me, this kind of scraping is the thing you need to worry
about the least.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

7

Peter De Berdt said the following on 06/01/08 06:08 PM:

This kind of scanning is a common ‘pre-attack’ scan used by malicious

hackers.

  1. If you don’t want it to be seen, it should have been in a password
    protected part of your site. Never trust user input, whether it’s in
    forms or in urls.

Absolutely.

The
Post.find( … params[:post] …)
is high risk.
Always sanitise and filter your inputs.
The example given in AWDWR about cross-site-scripting is just the
beginning.

  1. If you want to avoid record scraping for data within the pages, use
    different techniques like clientside decrypting of encrypted elements or
    use rmagick to render the data as an image instead of a string.

Just as a generation of spammers did to try and get around SpamAssassin.
(Only it didn’t work.)

  1. If you want to avoid record scraping of entire pages over your
    complete database or brute force attacks, use log file analyzers that
    reconfigure your firewall to ban those ips when certain conditions are
    met. fail2ban is such a solution.

Log file analysis and IDS/IPS are an essential part of a security
strategy.

  1. If you want to avoid hotlinking to files, use Apache/other webserver
    techniques to avoid it.

Again, well documented.

  1. If you need to make temporary file downloads with a hash in the url,
    use a simple named route instead of shoving it in a RESTful route.

LOL!
And yes, lots of sites use temporary URL strings with limited lifetimes.
Its no different from fixed lifetime values in the cookies.

Believe me, this kind of scraping is the thing you need to worry about
the least.

… until you get bitten.

The cost of retrofitting security after an incident is always going to
be greater than the cost of addressing the risks when designing the
system. You don’t always have to load up the complete suite of security
tools from the start, but do think about it.

Sometimes small architectural changes that don’t really affect the code
development can make a big positive or negative impact on security.

Sometimes it IS coding style.
For example, I list the real actions in controllers with ‘public …’
and use ‘hide_action’.
But then I’m a bit paranoid. (Actually I’m paid to be paranoid.)

There is a great deal of information on secure programming style and
considerations. Some is language specific and some is perfectly
general. Some that seems specific because of the examples is actually
quite general. (injection attacks, XSS, print format string hijacking
…)

http://www.securecoding.org/companion/links.php

Consider also that the term ‘security’ means more than keeping hackers
and attacks out. You may have a requirement for availability and for
protecting PII or maintaining integrity of records. To say nothing of
‘resilience and robustness’, for example ensuring availability to
legitimate users in the faces of DoS attack.

See also
http://rubythis.blogspot.com/2006/11/rails-security-checklist.html
http://nob.cs.ucdavis.edu/bishop/papers/2006-cisse-2/clinic.pdf

Rubyists can always learn from Perl - one way or another :slight_smile:

–
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas H. Huxley

8

Michal G. said the following on 06/01/08 07:27 PM:

thanks for the answers guys … but i am looking for the best solution to
encrypt and decrypt the id of my user …

anton i thought about your solution with first and lastname but i could
have duplicate names and then its not that straightforward anymore …

I use this on my Wiki. Dealing with ‘duplicates’ is straight forward if
you think about it. There are many possible solutions.

What I do is prompt for first and last name and then use javascript to
join them and check to see if that already exists. If it does I add a
digit and try again. The result is offered as a suggestion, the user
can change it and “submit”, but that might still be a duplicate, so he
gees told and we go round again.

Luckily I have a pretty unique name, but at some sites I’m “anton1” or
even “anton7”

But the important thing is defending against Brute Force and predictable
sequence attacks. As I said, the basic id# approach of AWDWR is a CFM.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- Edward Abbey

9

Perhaps you could add salt to this, such as their user id? Encrypt their
first name, last name AND id to ensure a different result from everyone
else?

On Jan 7, 2008 12:18 PM, Anton J Aylward [email protected] wrote:

sequence attacks. As I said, the basic id# approach of AWDWR is a CFM.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- Edward Abbey

–
Ryan B.

Feel free to add me to MSN and/or GTalk as this email.

10

cant i just take the id and encrypt it using a key (chosen by me) and
then decrypt it before i use it within the application … this is what i
would like to achive …
i dont want to hash the values because then i cannot really use it
within my queries…

11

Perhaps change the URL to something like 10-michal-gabrukiewicz, or even
just michal-gabrukiewicz. When a user changes their first and last
names,
save this as another field in the table as that (michal-gabukiewicz) and
then do a find by that field.

On Jan 7, 2008 1:16 PM, Michal G. <
[email protected]> wrote:

–
Ryan B.

Feel free to add me to MSN and/or GTalk as this email.

12

Simple encryption is harder than Just One More Field ™

13

Ryan B. wrote:

Perhaps change the URL to something like 10-michal-gabrukiewicz, or even
just michal-gabrukiewicz. When a user changes their first and last
names,
save this as another field in the table as that (michal-gabukiewicz) and
then do a find by that field.

that sounds good but then i need to maintain another db field … is
there no way for simple encryption? it would be okay for me to have
profile urls like this

/user/4fh39dj3jd

On Jan 7, 2008 1:16 PM, Michal G. <
[email protected]> wrote:

–
Ryan B.
http://www.frozenplague.net
Feel free to add me to MSN and/or GTalk as this email.

14

Michael G. wrote:

It would seem to me that if you think you need to obfuscate the id value
in
the url there’s likely a but instead of getting into that I’ll offer a
possible solution.

require ‘uuidtools’
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
def before_create()
self.id = OpenSSL::Digest.SHA1.hexdigest(UUID.timestamp_create())
end
end

yeah but then i loose my id … i dont want it to be extremely secure …
a simple xor encryption should be fine i think … does someone has it in
the pocket?

15

Is not firstname-lastname secure enough?

On Jan 7, 2008 1:44 PM, Michal G. <
[email protected]> wrote:

self.id = OpenSSL::Digest.SHA1.hexdigest(UUID.timestamp_create())

–
Ryan B.

Feel free to add me to MSN and/or GTalk as this email.

16

It would seem to me that if you think you need to obfuscate the id value
in
the url there’s likely a but instead of getting into that I’ll offer a
possible solution.

require ‘uuidtools’
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
def before_create()
self.id = OpenSSL::Digest.SHA1.hexdigest(UUID.timestamp_create())
end
end

This should be a drop in replacement and make it impossible to predict
id
values…

On Jan 6, 2008 8:46 PM, Michal G. <
[email protected]> wrote:

–
Michael G.
http://blog.michaelgreenly.com

17

Ryan B. wrote:

Is not firstname-lastname secure enough?

yep it is and i would really prefer this … but my problem is that i
have duplicates

18

then id-firstname-lastname

On Jan 7, 2008 2:14 PM, Michal G. <
[email protected]> wrote:

–
Ryan B.

Feel free to add me to MSN and/or GTalk as this email.

19

Ryan B. wrote:

then id-firstname-lastname

damn you are right … this was mentioned already before but i didnt
recognized that this combination is okay … when i saw the id i
immediately thought this is wrong… but it works like this! thanks…

20

Quoting Michal G. [email protected]:

i am developing a community which has user profiles … those are now
accessible through an url like e.g.

/user/profile/10

the 10 is the id of the user within the database. now i dont really like
the plain ID within the url because it is very simple to iterate through
the users …

How about restricting user profile so only a user and the admin can view
a
profile?

Jeffrey