RES: RES: [java] RE: http->https url rewrite bug TC 5.0.28?

2004-11-16 Thread Paulo Alvim
Thanks a lot, Steven...

As you guess, in our case we don't have important security requirements
(just personalized contents) most of time and the hardware isn't that
good...but we don't fell confortable to accept http login.

One more point in order to implement you suggestion:

".. and automatically logs the user in to the non-secure site without
prompting."

Could you email a snippet for that? The cookie stuff and "interceptor" will
not be a problem - but I couldn't find out how to get the credential from
the https sesssion to auto-authenticate the user the next time.

Thanks in advance...

Paulo

-Mensagem original-
De: Steven J.Owens [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Enviada em: segunda-feira, 15 de novembro de 2004 23:39
Para: Tomcat Users List
Assunto: Re: RES: [java] RE: http->https url rewrite bug TC 5.0.28?


On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 05:13:21PM -0300, Paulo Alvim wrote:
> I have a similar problem: I'd like to use https only with the
> login.jsp page and come back to http after that. Could you explain
> why it isn't possible?

 It's not possible because it's not _proper_ from a security
perspective, so they built tomcat to not enable it.

 I can sorta understand why people want to do it, myself, but you
should understand that it's not secure, and be very much aware of the
risks you're taking.  Still, I can understand some of the motivation
behind the request, and I think there's a solution.  The key is to
realize you're trying to solve the wrong problem.  See my explanation
at the end for what the right problem is, and how to solve it.

 To illustrate this properly, imagine that your account has two
usernames and two passwords that you can use to access it, the
permanent username/password and a temporary username/password.

 When you login, you first have to send the permanent username and
first password over the net.

 At that point, the server then sets your temporary username and
second password to some random value, temporarily, and then sends
those back to you.

 The temporary username/password will last until your user session
times out, or until you explicitly log out.

 Your browser then sends a copy of that temporary username and
temporary password along with _every_ _single_ _request_ to the
server.

 Just because you make sure the first communication, where you
sent the permanent username/password, is secure, doesn't keep somebody
from sniffing the temporary username and password and using those to
do all sorts of damage to your account during that window of
opportunity.

 To bring this back to reality, the JSESSIONID cookie is the
temporary username/password.  This explains why it is not secure to
use the same session for both HTTP and HTTPS connections.

 Thinking about it, I can certainly see why people would want some
happy medium between the two.  SSL consumes resources* and often
you're not worried about securing the entire series of user
interactions, just a critical subset.  For example, you don't need to
SSL-protect the user browsing your catalog, but you do need to
SSL-protect the payment authorization.

 (* Last I heard, the SSL server takes up about 40% extra
resources, though that info is years old and may be way out of date.)

 However, the important point is _not_ that you want to share the
session data across secure and unsecure apps, but that you want to
avoid making the user log in twice.  Here's how I'd approach this.
You need two distinct sets of security credentials, "serious" and
"trivial".  The serious credential is necessary for the SSL-protected
portion, the trivial credential is necessary for the non-SSL portion.

 Then, when the user logs in via SSL, it also creates a trivial
security credential, and sets that on a _different_ cookie than
JSESSIONID.  It's been ages since I've worked with cookies, but you
can mark a cookie as "Secure", meaning it only gets sent back to the
secure server, or not.  The tomcat SSL-created JSESSIONID is set
secure, for example.  Here's what one looks like:

Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=202E506FAD4A9ADB5F062DB3A3310E89; Path=/xyzzy; Secure

 This is further documented at:

 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt

 However, you can also set a second cookie, _without_ the secure
option, from the SSL response.  The browser will then include that
cookie value in further requests to the non-secure site at the same
domain.  You would have to customize the non-secure site's security so
that it checks for this cookie and automatically logs the user in to
the non-secure site without prompting.

 One thing you'll have to watch out for is the timeout of the SSL
session, since it might get left alone for many hours.  You have two
choices there:

1) either include an SSL-protected icon on every page, which will keep

Re: RES: [java] RE: http->https url rewrite bug TC 5.0.28?

2004-11-15 Thread Steven J. Owens
On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 05:13:21PM -0300, Paulo Alvim wrote:
> I have a similar problem: I'd like to use https only with the
> login.jsp page and come back to http after that. Could you explain
> why it isn't possible?

 It's not possible because it's not _proper_ from a security
perspective, so they built tomcat to not enable it.

 I can sorta understand why people want to do it, myself, but you
should understand that it's not secure, and be very much aware of the
risks you're taking.  Still, I can understand some of the motivation
behind the request, and I think there's a solution.  The key is to
realize you're trying to solve the wrong problem.  See my explanation
at the end for what the right problem is, and how to solve it.

 To illustrate this properly, imagine that your account has two
usernames and two passwords that you can use to access it, the
permanent username/password and a temporary username/password.

 When you login, you first have to send the permanent username and
first password over the net.

 At that point, the server then sets your temporary username and
second password to some random value, temporarily, and then sends
those back to you.  

 The temporary username/password will last until your user session
times out, or until you explicitly log out.

 Your browser then sends a copy of that temporary username and
temporary password along with _every_ _single_ _request_ to the
server.

 Just because you make sure the first communication, where you
sent the permanent username/password, is secure, doesn't keep somebody
from sniffing the temporary username and password and using those to
do all sorts of damage to your account during that window of
opportunity.

 To bring this back to reality, the JSESSIONID cookie is the
temporary username/password.  This explains why it is not secure to
use the same session for both HTTP and HTTPS connections.

 Thinking about it, I can certainly see why people would want some
happy medium between the two.  SSL consumes resources* and often
you're not worried about securing the entire series of user
interactions, just a critical subset.  For example, you don't need to
SSL-protect the user browsing your catalog, but you do need to
SSL-protect the payment authorization.

 (* Last I heard, the SSL server takes up about 40% extra
resources, though that info is years old and may be way out of date.)

 However, the important point is _not_ that you want to share the
session data across secure and unsecure apps, but that you want to
avoid making the user log in twice.  Here's how I'd approach this.
You need two distinct sets of security credentials, "serious" and
"trivial".  The serious credential is necessary for the SSL-protected
portion, the trivial credential is necessary for the non-SSL portion.

 Then, when the user logs in via SSL, it also creates a trivial
security credential, and sets that on a _different_ cookie than
JSESSIONID.  It's been ages since I've worked with cookies, but you
can mark a cookie as "Secure", meaning it only gets sent back to the
secure server, or not.  The tomcat SSL-created JSESSIONID is set
secure, for example.  Here's what one looks like:

Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=202E506FAD4A9ADB5F062DB3A3310E89; Path=/xyzzy; Secure

 This is further documented at:

 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt

 However, you can also set a second cookie, _without_ the secure
option, from the SSL response.  The browser will then include that
cookie value in further requests to the non-secure site at the same
domain.  You would have to customize the non-secure site's security so
that it checks for this cookie and automatically logs the user in to
the non-secure site without prompting.

 One thing you'll have to watch out for is the timeout of the SSL
session, since it might get left alone for many hours.  You have two
choices there:

1) either include an SSL-protected icon on every page, which will keep
your SSL session from timing out.  This can have some slight
complications, since most browsers use some visual cue to indicated
SSL traffic.

2) or just set the SSL app's session timeout to a fairly long time.

-- 
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
 declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
 this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
 Take it all with a grain of salt." - http://darksleep.com/notablog


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RES: [java] RE: http->https url rewrite bug TC 5.0.28?

2004-11-15 Thread Paulo Alvim
Hi Yoav,

I have a similar problem: I'd like to use https only with the login.jsp page
and come back to http after that. Could you explain why it isn't possible?

-Mensagem original-
De: Shapira, Yoav [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Enviada em: segunda-feira, 15 de novembro de 2004 12:24
Para: Tomcat Users List
Assunto: [java] RE: http->https url rewrite bug TC 5.0.28?



Hi,
Not a bug.  You can't share a session that way, whether using cookies or
URL-rewriting.

Yoav Shapira http://www.yoavshapira.com


>-Original Message-
>From: John Sidney-Woollett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Sent: Monday, November 15, 2004 10:21 AM
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: http->https url rewrite bug TC 5.0.28?
>
>I'm not sure if this is a bug or a misunderstaning on my part - and
I've
>been searching the archives and googling for most of the day without
>success...
>
>I've got a problem where URL rewriting is failing to correctly encode
>the URL when switching from an insecure (non-ssl) connection to a
secure
>ssl connection FOR THE SAME DOMAIN and where the session already exists
>for the insecure connection and COOKIES ARE DISABLED in the browser. I
>can reproduce this behaviour with different browsers.
>
>An "action" servlet receives the non-ssl request and redirects to
>another secure "action" servlet. The call for the redirect should
encode
>the URL as follows in the first servlet's service(request, response)
>method:
>
>[snip]
>if (gotoCheckout)
>{
>   //goto the checkout
>   //this generates the URL
>   //https://www.mytestsite.com/CheckoutAction?action=start
>   String url = CheckoutAction.getCheckoutActionStartURL(request);
>
>   //make sure the JSESSIONID is appended for non-cookie browsers
>   url = response.encodeRedirectURL(url);
>
>   response.sendRedirect(url);
>   return;
>}
>[snip]
>
>Looking at the headers, you can see that the JSESSIONID is not appended
>to the redirect URL when the protocol switches from http to https:
>
>REQUEST
>===
>POST
>http://www.mytestsite.com/BasketAction;jsessionid=9E490ADF8FB268E3F6BC5
FA2F
>D61E8CF
>HTTP/1.1
>Host: www.mytestsite.com
>User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5a)
>Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1
>Accept:
>text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/pla
in;q
>=0.8,video/x-mng,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1
>Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
>Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
>Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
>Keep-Alive: 300
>Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
>Referer:
>http://www.mytestsite.com/basket;jsessionid=9E490ADF8FB268E3F6BC5FA2FD6
1E8C
>F
>Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
>Content-Length: 66
>ret=%2Fimage%2F6503740500223&action=upd&butaction=checkout&qty_0=1
>
>RESPONSE
>
>HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
>Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:38:23 GMT
>Server: Apache/1.3.29
>Location: https://www.mytestsite.com/CheckoutAction?action=start
>Content-Length: 0
>Content-Type: text/plain
>Connection: close
>
>
>Setup
>
>Apache 1.3.29 + mod_ssl + mod_jk + tomcat 5.0.28 (unix)
>
>Apache is configured with two virtual directives; one for port 80 and
>one for post 443 and the requests are forwarded by mod_jk to tomcat
>which has the following in its server.xml config:
>
>[snip]
>
>  
>   type="javax.sql.DataSource"/>
>  
>
>[snip]
>
>Tomcat possibly nevers "sees" that the request is secure because the
SSL
>part of the transaction is handled by mod_SSL, and I don't know if this
>has a bearing on the issue?
>
>My question, should the JSESSIONID be appended in the encoded redirect
-
>I think so?
>
>And if it should, am I doing something wrong. Or is there a bug?
>
>If there is a bug, should I manually append the ";jsessionid=xxx"
to
>the URL to workaround the problem.
>
>Can anyone shed any light on this?
>
>Many thanks
>
>John Sidney-Woollett
>
>-
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