Ticket #395 (new Feature Request)
Auth Server should allow generation of relative URLs
Reported by: | igough57@… | Owned by: | |
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Priority: | normal | Milestone: | Not yet assigned to a Milestone |
Component: | Auth server, Authentication, permissions and access control | Version: | |
Keywords: | Cc: |
Description
The following describes a security issue with wifidog.
Auth server configuration allows SSL to be used for a particular virtual host by setting the Allow SSL on this Server setting. This flag toggles whether the prefix to all absolute URL links within returned pages are prefixed by http or https. This allows you to have an insecure or secure session.
There is one problem with this approach. If the wifidog administrator chooses to set up the virtual host to *not* use SSL, but an SSL certificate exists, then the user cannot do her own risk assessment and determine that for this particular login session that she wants to use a secure session, or even just a secure login transaction. This is of importance when doing logins over unsecured wireless networks, where any joker running WireShark? can collect your unencrypted credentials. It is of crucial importance to wifidog admins logging in as the privledge level allows any blackhat to bring down the entire system once he captures the admin credentials.
For example. If I go to an unsecured wifidog auth portal as https://auth.some-portal.ca, then the returned pages contain a login links for http://auth.some-portal.ca/login/ instead of login. The absolute URL prevents me from continuing with a secure session and makes it very difficult for me to login securely without hand crafting a web page or address.
The problem really comes down to the fact that the returned web pages contain absolute URLs as links. If you were to code all links as relative, a lot of these problems goes away. The only issue then becomes how does a user simply login using SSL or not. This is sometimes solved on other systems that want to give users the choice by having a Button or Link to "Login" AND "Securely Log in", one which has a relative URL and the other which has an absolute URL to https://the-login-url.
Any Questions to igough57@…