Hi, I am Rohan Jain, a 4th (final) year B.Tech undergraduate Student from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. I have been using django since over a year and generally look into the code base to find about various implementations. I have made attempts to make some minor contributions and if selected this would be my first major one.
More about Me: <http://www.rohanjain.in/about/> IRC, Github: crodjer I am interested in contributing some security enhancements to django as my Summer of Code project. Below is the 1st draft of my proposal regarding this. A pretty version of this is available at: https://gist.github.com/2203174 #Abstract Django is a reasonably secure framework. It provides an API and development patterns which transparently take care of the common web security issues. But still there are security features which need attention. I propose to work on integration of existing work on centralized token system and improved CSRF checking without any compromises. If time permits I will also attempt on integration of django-secure. #Description ##Centralized tokenization There are multiple places in django which use some or other kinds of tokens: - contirb.auth (random password, password reset) - formtools - session (backends) - cache - csrf - etags Token generation is pretty common around the framework. So, instead of each application having its own token system, and hence needs to be maintained separately. There should be centralized token system, which provides an abstract API for everyone to loose. In fact, I have seen that some apps use `User.objects.make_random_password` from contrib.auth, which they can be sure of being maintained in the future for random generation. To me this looks kind of weird. In last djangocon, a lot of work regarding this was done over [Yarko's Fork][yarko-fork]. I had a discussion with Yarko Tymciurak regarding this. The work is nearly ready for a merge, only some tasks left. In the initial period my SoC I can work over these to insure that the already done significant work gets in django and is updated for 1.5. - Porting more stuff to the new system (README.sec in [yarko's fork][yarko-fork]) - Testing - See if the current coverage of the tests is enough, write them if not. - Compatibility issues - API Documentation I will study the changes done at djangocon and then attempt the tasks mentioned above. ##CSRF Improvements Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS): W3C has a working draft regarding [CORS][w3c-cors-draft], which opens up the possibility for allowing client-side request cross-origin requests. This directly triggers in mind the capability to develop API which can be exposed directly to the web browser. This would let us get rid of proxies and other hacks used to achieve this. Currently all the major browsers support this: Chrome (all versions), Firefox (> 3.0), IE (> 7.0), Safari (> 3.2), Opera (> 12.0). Introduced it here as some further parts of the post refer to this. ###Origin checking With CORS around need for using CSRF token can be dropped, at least in some browsers. [Ticket #16859][orig-check-ticket], is an attempt for that. But this was rejected because of neglecting the case for presence of `CSRF_COOKE_DOMAIN` (Refer to the closing comment on the ticket for details). So to handle this we need to simulate checking of CSRF cookie domain as web browsers do it. Maybe: ```python reqest.META.get('HTTP_ORIGIN').endswith(settings.CSRF_COOKIE_DOMAIN) ``` As the closing comment points it out, we can't do this with secure requests. They need to be essentially checked against the referrer or origin, at least for now. We can not be sure that some untrusted or insecure subdomain has not already set the cookie or cookie domain. d To deal with this, we have to consider https separately as it is being done now. So it will be something like: ```python def process_view(self, request, ....): # Same initial setup if request.method not in ('GET', 'HEAD', 'OPTIONS', 'TRACE'): host = request.get_host() origin = reqest.META.get('HTTP_ORIGIN', "") cookie_domain = settings.CSRF_COOKIE_DOMAIN if request.is_secure(): good_referer = 'https://%s/' % host referer = origin or request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER') # Do the same origin checks here # We are insecure, so care less # A better way for this check can be used if needed elif origin.endswith(cookie_domain): # Safe, accept request # Some unsupported browser # Do the conventional checks here ``` If the above were to be implemented, the setting `CSRF_COOKIE_DOMAIN` should be deprecated for something like `CSRF_ALLOWED_DOMAIN` which makes more sense. I would also suggest making CSRF cookie as http only. There doesn't seem a reason currently why the cookies would be needed to be accessed in browser. ###Less restrictive secure requests The current CSRF system is pretty much secure as it is. But CSRF protection poses too much restriction to https. It says no to all the request, without honouring any tokens. It kind of has to, thanks to the way browsers allow cookie access. A cookie accessible through subdomains mean that any subdomain secure or insecure can set the CSRF token, which could be really serious for the site security. To get around this, currently one has to completely exempt views from CSRF and may or may not handle CSRF attacks. This can be dangerous. Also if a person has a set of sites, which talk to each other through clients and decides to run it over https, it would need some modifications. Django should behave under https similarly as it does under http without compromising any security. So, we need to make sure that the CSRF token is always set by a trusted site. Signing the data with the same key, probably `settings.SECRET_KEY`, across the sites looks apt for this, using `django.core.signing`. We can have `get_token` and `set_token` methods which abstract the signing process. This can be done in two ways: - Store CSRF data in sessions data in case `contrib.sessions` is installed. Then the data will automatically be signed with the secret key or will not be stored in the client as cookies at all. - In case of it being absent from installed apps, revert to custom signing ```python from django.core.signing import TimestampSigner signer = TimestampSigner("csrf-token") CSRF_COOKIE_MAX_AGE = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7 * 52 def get_unsigned_token(request): # BadSignature exception needs to be handled somewhere return signer.unsign(request.META.get("CSRF_COOKIE", None) max_age = CSRF_COOKIE_MAX_AGE) def set_signed_token(response, token): response.set_cookie(settings.CSRF_COOKIE_NAME, signer.sign(request.META["CSRF_COOKIE"]), max_age = CSRF_COOKIE_MAX_AGE, domain=settings.CSRF_COOKIE_DOMAIN, path=settings.CSRF_COOKIE_PATH, secure=settings.CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE ) def get_token(request): if 'django.contrib.sessions' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS: return request.session.csrf_token else: return get_unsigned_token(request) def set_token(response, token) if 'django.contrib.sessions' in settings.INSTALLED_APPS: request.session.csrf_token = token else: set_signed_token(response, token) # Comparing to the token in the request constant_time_compare(request_csrf_token, get_token(csrf_token)) ``` Now, doing this is not as simple as the above code block makes it look. There is a lot which can and probably will go wrong with this approach: - Even when the token is signed, other domains can completely replace the CSRF token cookie, it won't grant them access through CSRF check though. - This sort of couples CSRF with sessions, a contrib app. Currently nothing except some of the other contrib apps are tied up with sessions. It will break if sessions were to be removed in future or the API changed. Also, this means that if one website is using sessions CSRF, all of the other must be too. - If this were successfully implemented, is this exposing any critical security flaws otherwise? Will it cause compatibility issues? As Paul McMillan said "This is a hard problem", I'll delegate figuring this to future me. I will look into [The Tangled Web][tangled-web] and [Google's Browser Security Handbook][gobrowsersec] for ideas, again suggested by Paul on the IRC. ###Better CORS Support Since, already introducing Origin checking, we can go one step further and try to provide better support for CORS for browsers supporting it. A tuple/list setting, which specifies allowed domains will be provided. Using this the various access control allowance response headers will be set when the request origin is from amongst the allowed domains. For CSRF check, just see if http origin is present in allowed domains. ```python def set_cors_headers(response, origin): response['Access-Control-Allow-Origin']: origin def process_response(self, request, response): origin = reqest.META.get('HTTP_ORIGIN', "") if origin in settings.CSRF_ALLOWED_DOMAINS: set_cors_headers(response, origin) def process_request(self, request, response): # Use origin in settings.CSRF_ALLOWED_DOMAINS here instead of # origin.endswith ``` Probably, something similar to the above will be needed to incorporate the CORS support. ##Integrating django-secure A really useful app for catching security configuration related mistakes is [carljm's django-secure][djang-secure]. It is specially useful to find out issues that might have been introduced while quick changes to settings for development. This project is popular and useful enough that it can be shipped with django. I haven't been able give this enough time yet. I can think of two ways of integrating this: - Dropping it as a contrib app This seems pretty straight forward would require minimal amount of changes. - Distribute around the framework: Like CSRF, this can also be distributed framework wide and hence it won't be optional to have. Apps can still define custom checks in the same way when `django-secure` was installed as a pluggable application. The app might also need some changes whilst being integrated: - More security checks, if required - Adjust according to the changes introduced above. #Plan I think that the tasks centralized tokenization and CSRF enhancements will be enough to span through the SoC period. If after a thorough implementation and testing of these, I still have time, django-secure integration can be looked into. ##Timeline I have listed the tasks above in a chronological order. I'll add a more granular timeline in one of the next drafts. [yarko-fork]: https://github.com/yarko/django [w3c-cors-draft]: http://www.w3.org/TR/access-control/ [orig-check-ticket]: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16859 [tangled-web]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Tangled-Web-Securing-Applications/dp/1593273886/ [gobrowsersec]: http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Main [django-secure]: https://github.com/carljm/django-secure -- Thanks Rohan Jain -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
