HTTP Cookies: Any way to make sure it wasn't copied? - cookies

Is there any way that a website can read a cookie in a way that the cookie is locked to that particular computer and that it wasn't somehow copied to another computer?

Assuming you don't trust the end point — no.
If you don't trust the user, then you can't be sure.
If you don't trust the computer (e.g. it might have malware installed), then you can't be sure.
If you don't trust the connection (i.e. it isn't secured with SSL), then you can't be sure.
You be sure by linking the cookie to an IP address, since:
Multiple computers can share an IP (e.g. via NAT)
One computer can cycle through multiple IPs (e.g. some large ISPs use a bank of proxy servers)
You could include a bunch of data gathered from the browser (e.g. the user agent string) as a hashed value in the cookie, but that would break if something changed the data you were checking against or the cookie was copied to another machine with identical data (while user agent strings can vary a lot, two computers can be configured identically, and there are plenty of circumstances where they are likely to be (e.g. in a company with a standard desktop install that includes standard versions of browsers and plugins).

The only thing you can do is to try to put as much data as possible in the cookie (browser user-agent,os, screen resolution,...). you have to scramble/encrypt the data.
if you read the cookie again sometime you can check if the values still match. but of course this is no 100% safe solution since all these data can be faked by a malicious user (if he knows what exactly he needs to change)

Related

C++ - Detecting multiple connections to server

In a Linux/C++ TCP server I need to prevent a malicious client from opening multiple sockets, otherwise they could just open thousands of connections until the server crashes.
What is the standard way for checking if the same computer already has a connection on the server? If I do it based off of IP address wouldn't that mean two people in the same house couldn't connect to the server at the same time even if they are on different computers?
Any info helps!
Thanks in advance.
TCP in itself doesn't really provide anything other than the IP address for identifying clients. A couple of (non-exclusive) options:
1) Limit the number of connections from any IP address to a reasonable number, like 10 or 20 (depending on what your system actually does.) This way, it will prevent malicious DoS attacks, but still allow for reasonable usability.
2) Limit the maximum number of connections to something reasonable.
3) You could delegate this to a higher-layer solution. As a part of your protocol, have the client send a unique identifier that is generated only once (per installation, etc). This could be easily spoofed, however.
I believe 1 and 2 is how many servers handle it. Put them in config files, so they can be tuned depending on the scenario.
There is only IP address to base "is this the same sender", unless you have some sort of subscription/login system (but then someone can try to log in a gazillion times at once, since there must be some sort of handshake for logging in).
If two clients are using the same router (that uses NAT or some similar scheme), your server will see the same IP address, so allowing only one connection per IP address wouldn't work very well for "multiple users from the same home". This also applies if they are for example using a university network or a company network.
So depending on what you are supplying and how many clients you can expect from the same place, you may need to go a fair bit higher than 10. Of course, if you log when this happens, and you see a fair number of "looks like valid real users failing to get in", you can adjust the number.
It may also make sense to have some sort of "rolling average", so you accept X new connections per Y seconds from each IP address, rather than having a fixed maximum number. This is meaningful if connections last quite some time... For short duration connections, it's pretty pointless...

Why Cookie is the only way to know the number of users

I was reading howstuffworks and this is what is written there :
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cookie3.htm
" It turns out that because of proxy servers, caching, concentrators and so on, the only way for a site to accurately count visitors is to set a cookie with a unique ID for each visitor."
Couldn't derive from it why only cookie is the way ?
Thirty users might come from the same IP address (think an ISP block or inside a corporate network).
Thirty different users might retrieve content from various caches rather than making unique requests that make it all the way to the app server (local cache, ISP cache ,etc.)
Without tracking individual sessions, traffic may be mis-estimated or mis-interpreted.

Is IP address authentication safe for web service / site?

We're building a web service which users will subscribe to, and we were thinking of authenticating users based on their IP address.
I understand that this creates some hassle, eg, if a client's IP changes, but I wanted to know from a security point of view if this was safe? I'm not sure how hard it is to spoof IP addresses, but my thinking is that even if that happened we wouldn't end up sending data back to the attacker.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!
I'd say this would be very risky. Hackers use a number of IP spoofing tools to avoid detection, and there are legitimate anonymity uses. Check out IP onions via the Tor network (used extensively by wikileaks folks, for example) http://www.torproject.org
That said, if your data isn't sensitive AT ALL, like you want to guess their location to show the local weather, you can certainly use IP blocks to roughly locate people. If that kind of thing is all you're after, check out: http://www.hostip.info/dl/index.html
Think about proxies and VPN's.
And what if an user would like to use your site from an other PC?
You might want to use browser fingerprints (together with IP) it's safer, but then they must always use the same browser...
Conclusion: not a good idea.

Finding and optimal way of distributing dictionary changes over the network

The problem: You have a big dictionary on the server and you are distributing it to lots of clients.
The dictionary is updated only on the server side but you want to allow the clients to update the dictionary by minimizing the data being transfered.
Also you can assume that you have a huge number of clients requesting updates, probably daily or so.
If a key is removed from the server you expect it to be removed from the client on sync.
How would you solve this problem?
Additional request: the solution should be easy to implement on different platforms including desktop (Windows,Linux,OS X) and mobile ones (iOS, Android,...). If this request the usage of third-party library their license has to be very liberal, like BSD.
If this is at a file level, you use rsync (or the awesome bsdiff or xdelta or such).
If this is at an application level, then one approach is to write journal updates to the dictionary (key-value-store) in the server - you write a log of all updates, adds and removes in the order they occur. Your clients then periodically hit the server and say the position in the log they last received, and the server sends them all log items newer than that. The server may also skip journal items that are superseded (e.g. an add that was later removed). If the server keeps track of the clients, it can keep track of the minimum client journal position, and so get rid of journal items it doesn't need any more.
If the dictionary is large and yet requests are low, the clients can just hit the server for each lookup and always get the newest key. This often scales better than you imagine.
Ideally you can find a solution that supports your requirements rather than build your own.
I suggest that you take a look at CouchDB. It has the following features that make it relevant for your problem imo:
It's a key-value store = dictionary, so should easily fit your data model.
Supports replication from machine to machine (or multiple machines) in an occasionally connected environment. That should fit your use case of clients connecting to a server once in a while to pull all updates.
Works well in a distributed environment, so you should be able to handle the huge number of clients, e.g. by maintaining several servers.
Good scaling - works on servers and any kind of client (including mobile). Also, runs on multiple OSs.
It has a rather efficient data protocol for the replication process.
It's free.

Tracking and logging anonymous users

If you let anonymous users vote for any post on a site just one time and you log that vote by the user's IP, what's the likelihood that you'd be banning other users from voting and that the original user would be able to vote again after a certain amount of time because their IP address has changed? I'm guessing almost certainly.
Client side cookies can be deleted and server side cookies again have no way to reliably map said cookie to the anonymous user.
Does this mean there is no reliable way of tracking anonymous users indefinitely?
Using only IP addresses for user authentication/identification is extremely unreliable. There might be many hundreds or even thousands of users behind one IP (e.g a corporate network) and for most of those on home connections their IPs are likely to be dynamic and regularly changing.
You have to use Cookies for more reliable tracking. You can specify just about any time-to-live for a cookie, so that when an anonymous user returns, you can identify him.
Of course cookies can be deleted by users, so they could delete their cookies and vote again. However, is this likely to be a big problem? If someone really wants to game your poll, they could write a script. However, you could add a few basic security features: only allow some maximum votes per IP per day, and allow only so many votes per IP per second.
If you let anonymous users vote for
any post on a site just one time and
you log that vote by the user's IP,
what's the likelihood that you'd be
banning other users from voting
Unless that page is extremely popular, it's very unlikely that someone else being assigned the same IP address by the ISP would also visit it.
Edit: Users using the same IP address due to NAT are a much bigger problem and probably a deal-breaker for using the IP address. I'd be less worried about corporate networks than about private home networks: very common, and having two people in the same household wanting to visit and vote on the same site is rather more likely than two random strangers.
and that the original user would be able to vote again after a certain amount of time
because their IP address has changed? I'm guessing almost certainly.
It's not just a question of time; most ISPs assign IP addresses upon connect, so all someone has to do to get a new one is to reinitialize their DSL connection (or whatever they use).
Does this mean there is no reliable way of tracking anonymous users indefinitely?
Correct.
Yes, there is no certainty in tracking IP addresses or using cookies.