On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Petr Bena <benapetr(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I am basically interested only in oauth that can be
used by remote
applications / processes running on user's PC, which isn't available
yet
This is the second most requested feature that we don't support yet.
We've been looking at options for it. All solutions would basically require
we make a second class of OAuth Consumers. This has precedence: OAuth 2
makes the distinction between "confidential" and "public" consumers,
and
Twitter's xAuth has to be specifically enabled on your OAuth Consumer.
We're debating making a similar distinction for our OAuth Consumers, but we
don't want to get into the situation where we need to give lots of caviots
to our users that, "Yes, this OAuth thing is secure, as long as Consumers
of this type are doing these things, but these other ones also need to do
these other things...".
On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 7:18 PM, Chris Steipp <csteipp(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 1:57 AM, Merlijn van Deen
<valhallasw(a)arctus.nl
wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> On 22 October 2013 05:45, Chris Steipp <csteipp(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > OAuth does not support this, since the results of an api call
> > using OAuth signatures aren't signed (only the request from the OAuth
> > consumer is signed), so it's possible that an attacker could forge a
> > response back to the application, and the application would think a
> > different user was logged in. This is less likely if you're using
https
> for
> > your api calls, but it's surprisingly hard to get https right [1],
even
> if
> > you trust all your CA's.
> >
> (...)
>
> >
> > This is a common issue is being addressed by the OpenID Connect
extension
> > to OAuth2, which allows the application
to request information about
the
> > person doing the authorization, and the
result is signed by the
server to
> > prevent tampering.
>
> (...)
>
> I'm a bit confused by this -- I was under the impression https would be
> enough to confirm I'm actually talking to the WMF's servers. The main
> argument in [1] against just using https seems to be it's easy to ignore
> invalid certificates. Is there another reason why it's dangerous to
assume
you're talking to mw.o if the certificates check out?
That's correct. The issue is more that we (the security community) keep
finding code out there that doesn't correctly handle the verification (
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_ccs12.pdf was one of the popular
surveys of the subject). It's often the underlying libraries at fault
(errors parsing the certificates, or the revocation lists, that fail
open),
or common programming mistakes (like how
mediawiki
set CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST to true, instead of 2, for a very long time).
But if you accept that your current libraries are probably flawed, and so
you keep your libraries up to date, and you're careful about how you're
doing the verification at the application layer, you *should* be fine.
>
> Basically, I'm not quite sure whether using OIDC will help alleviate
this
> problem - you get a response back, but you
still have to check the
> signature! And with the ease of not checking the signature, you're
> basically back to the same problem with not checking the ssl
certificate.
Correct. Hopefully, applications that really need to know the identity
of a
user (like UTRS) will go through the bother of
checking the signature (in
both OpenID Connect, and the intermediate solution I'm proposing, this is
an HMAC signature using a pre-established secret, so it should be easy
enough that the effort is worth the security).
>
> Nonetheless, I think it's useful to add an authentication mechanism that
> follows a standard - which is clearly not the case with the current
> 'api.php?meta=userinfo' calls.
>
> Merlijn
>
> [1]
>
>
http://blog.astrumfutura.com/2010/10/do-cryptographic-signatures-beat-ssltl…
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l