Skip to main content

Pointers for Websocket Security

Websocket security:

1. In case of form based authentication, the authentication must happen before WebSocket handshake. The sessiontoken must be used when doing the first handshake.

2.  The WebSocket server can use any client authentication
mechanism available to a generic HTTP server, such as any cookie field value, basic
authentication, digest authentication, or certificate authentication. As long there is a
possibility to authenticate the user in a secure manner and the WebSocket server
verifies it, the authentication mechanism in question is suitable for use.

3. After authentication comes the authorization part. Authorization is mostly application dependent and mostly controlled at the application logic leve. Same principle of least privilege are applied in this context too. Need to check if a unprivileged user is able to access/ see data/ function of other users. 
qa
4. Cross-origin headers must be checked, if they allow all the sites to communicate with server, any client can create handshake with the server. So Allow-Access-Origin header must contain a domain name rather than a wildcard (*).

5. Encryption must be turned on (wss://). It's not turned on by default for WebSockets.

6. All the usual relevant OWASP Top 10 issues.

7. Resource exhaustion- Denial Of Service attacks. Tries to consume server resources to slow it down considerably or make it down. By default WebSockets are connection-oriented protocol which means the connection does not close automatically until one of the parties close it down.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using an AirPcap device in Windows with Wireshark

Capturing wireless traffic in a Windows environment is unfortunately not as easy as a setting change. As with most Windows-based software, drivers in Windows are often not open source and do not allow for configuration change into monitor mode. With this in mind, we must use a specialized piece of hardware known as an AirPcap device. Once you have obtained an AirPcap device you will be required to install the software on the accompanying CD to your analysis computer. The configurable options include: • Interface - Select the device you are using for your capture here. Some advanced analysis scenarios may require you to use more than one AirPcap device to sniff simultaneously on multiple channels. • Blink LED - Clicking this button will make the LED lights on the AirPcap device blink. This is primarily used to identify the specific adapter you are using if you are using multiple AirPcap devices. • Channel - In this field, you select the channel you want AirPcap to listen on. Extension C...
5 comments
Read more

Anti CSRF header

Recently I came across an application which was preventing crsf attacks using a unique non-traditional approach. In traditional approach the csrf is thwarted by embedding unique random tokens, called nonce, in each sensitive page. But this application, which was making ajax calls and used jQuery, was creating a header to identify the valid and invalid requests altogether. The idea is to generate a custom header, x-session-token in this case, with every request which is considered sensitive and includes any sort of transaction. For example: xhr.setRequestHeader('x-session-token', csrf_token)   At the server level, server checks for this header if found request is fulfilled, otherwise rejected. We need to use xhr calls for making use of this technique, not useful in regular POST and GET requests. Since, I was not aware of this kind of countermeasures, probably, since most of the applications I did were using standard requests. So, I searched a bit and found even Go...
4 comments
Read more

Some one watching where you visited!

Yes... Mozilla has been susceptible to browser-history stealing java script code. Today, Giorgio posted some cool information about the exploit. Mozilla is already working on this. This bug has been reported. Actually they have set up a web site to show the proof-of-concept. Visit www.statrpanic.com in FF,Safari or Netscape and it will tell you which websites have you been already ! But I am not sure it will work in IE or not because my IE is not responding to the website. Clearing history of visited website makes you safe to this attack. I mean this is one way..may be there are other ways to exploit this. But I have found this effective. Try it yourself in FF and then in IE and see the results.
Post a Comment
Read more