On the doc Specifying WebSocket authentication details, it did not mention how are passwords being sent from client's authenticate() JS func to server's onWSAuthenticate. Are they being sent through a secure channel? or in plain text?
Side question: what tool / browser / browser's plugin can one use to sniff through websocket's traffic?
Thank you.
username/password sent through authenticate() function is in clear-text. You can actually see that in cfwebsocket.js (its minified so search for authenticate). On server if the call is for authentication, it would invoke onWSAuthenticate() in application.cfc passing whatever username or password given to the function. So the logic of encryption/decryption/validation lies with the developer.
Any TCP monitor can be used for sniffing websocket's traffic like wireshark , TCPMon etc
Mostly just answering to further my own understanding of how this works. From the websocket.org site:
The tunnel is established by issuing an HTTP CONNECT statement to the proxy server, which requests for the proxy server to open a TCP/IP connection to a specific host and port. Once the tunnel is set up, communication can flow unimpeded through the proxy. Since HTTP/S works in a similar fashion, secure WebSockets over SSL can leverage the same HTTP CONNECT technique.
So, if this is what you're asking, it appears that just like with http/https, it's up to the developer to implement SSL encryption, which makes sense.
Sagar Ganatra also has a blog entry on the basics of Websocket Authentication with CF.
Related
can the proxy server intercept my https request and set cookies before actually sending the request?
I'm going a GET on an url from chrome browser. In the development tools, under "Network", I noticed that the first request, the one that I made, has cookies set. but I did not set any cookies.
any thoughts?
No it can't. To proxy HTTPS requests your browser issues HTTP CONNECT command (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Methods/CONNECT). Proxy then creates a tunnel between the browser and a target server.
A conventional proxy can neither view nor manipulate a TLS-encrypted data stream, so a CONNECT request simply asks the proxy to open a pipe between the client and server. The proxy here is just a facilitator - it blindly forwards data in both directions without knowing anything about the contents. The negotiation of the TLS connection happens over this pipe, and the subsequent flow of requests and responses are completely opaque to the proxy.
It cannot modify or see what is being transferred as it is protected by TLS encryption.
The only way to modify HTTPS conenctions on the fly is if you install some external CA certificates on your computer. This is known as MITM Attack.
Recently i started to write a proxy(web debugging) software.
and handled the GET request well.
sometimes i get CONNECT messages from the client, so i connect to the target server and reply the client by "200 Connection Established".
is that it all??
because after it i don't get any messages
from the server or the client.
so i got confused.
I want to know all the steps of https CONNECT message request and responses until an https site(like https://google.com) gets loaded.
Thank you.
The CONNECT request is used to set up a connection tunnel. This is used mainly to allow access to https sites through an http proxy.
The web proxy is expected to set up a proxy connection to the indicated host, and then proxy the traffic between the two connections, until one or the other terminates.
After establishing the connection, you expect to see either the client or the server start sending something to the other. Your proxy code should be prepared, at any time, to receive more data from either the client or the server, to be forwarded to the other party. If not, your proxy is not doing something correctly. It is not your proxy's job to handle https negotiation. Once the connection is established, your proxy must transparently proxy all the data, and it is the client's and the server's task to talk https with each other.
I'm attempting to write a simple HTTP/HTTPS proxy using Boost ASIO. HTTP is working fine, but I'm having some issues with HTTPS. For the record this is a local proxy. Anyway so here is an example of how a transaction works with my setup.
Browser asks for Google.com
I lie to the browser and tell it to go to 127.0.0.1:443
Browser socket connects to my local server on 443I attempt to read the headers so I can do a real host lookup and open a second upstream socket so I can simply forward out the requests.
This is where things fail immediately. When I try to print out the headers of the incoming socket, it appears that they are already encrypted by the browser making the request. I thought at first that perhaps the jumbled console output was just that the headers were compressed, but after some thorough testing this is not the case.
So I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction, perhaps to some reading material where I can better understand what is happening here. Why are the headers immediately encrypted before the connection to the "server" (my proxy) even completes and has a chance to communicate with the client? Is it a temp key? Do I need to ignore the initial headers and send some command back telling the client what temporary key to use or not to compress/encrypt at all? Thanks so much in advance for any help, I've been stuck on this for a while.
HTTPS passes all HTTP traffic, headers and all, over a secure SSL connection. This is by design to prevent exactly what you're trying to do which is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack. In order to succeed, you'll have to come up with a way to defeat SSL security.
One way to do this is to provide an SSL certificate that the browser will accept. There are a couple common reasons the browser complains about a certificate: (1) the certificate is not signed by an authority that the browser trusts and (2) the certificate common name (CN) does not match the URL host.
As long as you control the browser environment then (1) is easily fixed by creating your own certificate authority (CA) and installing its certificate as trusted in your operating system and/or browser. Then in your proxy you supply a certificate signed by your CA. You're basically telling the browser that it's okay to trust certificates that your proxy provides.
(2) will be more difficult because you have to supply the certificate with the correct CN before you can read the HTTP headers to determine the host the browser was trying to reach. Furthermore, unless you already know the hosts that might be requested you will have to generate (and sign) a matching certificate dynamically. Perhaps you could use a pool of IP addresses for your proxy and coordinate with your spoofing DNS service so that you know which certificate should be presented on which connection.
Generally HTTPS proxies are not a good idea. I would discourage it because you'll really be working against the grain of browser security.
I liked this book as a SSL/TLS reference. You can use a tool like OpenSSL to create and sign your own certificates.
I will be having a software which will give me information about the moving vehicles on the server side and I need to pass this information to the client computer on demand.
There will be a website which will act like a server and another website will act like a client. The client
website will ask for a data from the server website.
From here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2849683/462608
As the protocol may not be HTTP, you may provide WebServices over mail or other protocols, and you do not need a web server for that.
I request an explanation on the above quote. In my case will I be needing a webserver?
There is a bunch of webservice protocols, some of them may use and some may not use http as transport layer. When http is used - you need a webserver on server-side of your service and a webbrowser as a client. If the transport is other than http, you need server of other type, and other client, for example, mail server and mail client in case of running service over smtp.
I've just started studying Winsocks and I've a simple question for you: how can I determine if the connection to a server must take place over a HTTP or HTTPS connection?
Let's say I want to connect to randomsite.random, how can I know what kind of connection I need? I know that for HTTP I must connect to port 80, while for HTTPS is needed 443, but how can I determine WHEN is needed a HTTPS connection?
Thank you for the attention!
The same way a web browser decides: Based on the URL you are trying to load. In a web browser, the URL begins with http or https, which is used to determine whether an SSL connection should be used. This is also used to determine the port if no port number is specified in the URL.
Many sites offer both a secure and a non-secure version. Some offer only a secure version, but still run a non-secure server which issues a redirect to the URL of the secure version. If you implement following of redirects, you don't need to worry about which version to use: it will happen automatically.
This is usually a function of the site you are connecting to.
If the site requires a HTTPS connection, then if you connect over HTTP you will get a redirect response code with a HTTPS URL.
Firstly, it's not always port 80 and port 443. Secondly, you won't establish successful communication if you use the wrong communication protocol. As said in another answer, if you try to connect via HTTP to an HTTPS server, it will give you a redirect response code with an HTTPS URL.
Most of the time, you have this information before-hand!