John Allsopp wrote:
Hi everyone
There may be blinding bits of total ignorance in this so don't ignore
the obvious.
This is a security question, but a sentence of background: I'm writing
software for a mapping/location website and I want to be able to provide
something others can plug into their website that would display their map.
So I'm providing a URL like
http://www.mydomain.com?h=300&w=250&username=name&password=password
The idea is they can define their own height and width and it plugs in
as an iframe.
That takes the username and password and throws it over web services to
get back the data from which we can create the map.
My question (and it might be the wrong question) is how can I not give
away the password to all and sundry yet still provide a self-contained URL?
MD5() (or SHA()) hash the information and supply that along with the
settings. Then you know it was generated by your site. So you can do the
following:
<?php
$height = 300;
$width = 250;
$username = 'username';
$key = md5( "SECRET_SALT-$heigh-$width-$username" );
$url =
"http://www.mydomain.com?h=$height&w=$width&username=$username&key=$key";;
?>
Then when you get this URL via the iframe, you re-compute the expected
key and then compare it against the given key. Since only you know the
SECRET_SALT value then nobody should be able to forge the key.
Cheers,
Rob.
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http://www.interjinn.com
Application and Templating Framework for PHP
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