I have a donation form which users fill out and I would like to then send the user to the charities own website with their information already filled in. Is this possible?
thanks
This is a big part of what my company does....but we have to rely on the client as well. It could be a great exercise for both you and them.
Here's the basic idea. We take a web form entry from a site. We have a script that processes the information and decides where to route the info (we do this for quite a few different clients) Then the system goes through logic for each individual site (functions in a class) that tells it how to pass the information over. In some cases, it's simply an email to a person. In other cases, we CURL a string over that the recipient site has been setup to accept. One site allows us to directly post to a "hidden" page on their site....this doesn't seem the most secure option to me, though. The key is to negotiate with the partner how they'd like to receive the information. If you're helping them get donors, I suspect they'll be willing to do anything they can to help.
Be aware, there could be some security issues with trying to forward donation information across sites....you'll want to remain as secure as humanly possible....and personally, I don't think I'd ever transmit something like a credit card number except to a processor via SSL.
I was a non-profit webmaster for quite a few years, and still have several non-profit sites I consult with. There's systems out there just for this purpose (one that comes to mind is network for good) Also, I've seen groups build non-profits specifically to accept donations on behalf of other non-profits. Point being, there's many different ways to approach this task, not all of them even code related.
Related
I am working with a research group that needs to collect Facebook post data for a group of participants over the course of a few months. The goal is let the participants authorize us to collect this information via facebook, and when they post to Facebook, send that information to a secured server.
After reading the Facebook documentation, I'm mostly just confused about how to provide a mechanism for the user to agree to the terms of collecting his/her data. I'm planning on using webhooks to collect the data, which is independent of the client platform, but do I really need to build separate apps for web, iOS and Android just for the approval process?
I'm planning on using webhooks to collect the data, which is independent of the client platform, but do I really need to build separate apps for web, iOS and Android just for the approval process?
You most likely won't get this approved in review anyway.
Permissions must, for the most part, be used to provide a direct benefit to the in-app user experience; collecting data for analytical measures only is explicitly mentioned as a not allowed use case. Whether the users would agree is not relevant here.
For example, user_posts permission, has "non-visible use of this data such as sentiment analysis or guarding against spam bots" marked with a red "X" for nope.
So the only way of getting your app to request the necessary permission(s) from users, would be to add them as testers to the app via app dashboard/API. Anyone with a role in the app which can be asked for any permission, reviewed or not. Those users would however have to have their accounts verified (mobile/text, credit card) and sign up as a "developer" on the FB platform, before your app could send them requests to become testers.
You'd be flying under the radar with that, so to speak. Facebook offers this "loophole" mainly for the purpose of letting developers test and develop their apps properly, before review. It is also explicitly mentioned in the app development FAQ as a way around the need for review, for specific use cases such as wanting to get your blog posts published to your own FB page automatically. It would not cover what you are trying to do so, but it will likely "work" as long as none of your test users specifically raises a complaint with Facebook ...
Not sure if there is any published limit on the number of test users that can be added to an app, people have asked about that in the past, but AFAIK none is documented or otherwise published by Facebook. If there is one, and it is not completely stopping this approach dead in it's tracks (say, a few hundred per app rather than, five), you could use multiple app ids, if you don't need to relate data between user accounts too much - because the app-scoped user ids will be different per app id, so that could making connections between friends that are in different "app-id test groups" etc. difficult. Or you might have to refer to other, less reliable measures of uniquely identifying them, such as email or profile name.
Just recently I was wondering, how Google manages it with analytics to track the user but avoid any fraud (as kinda everyone could insert that JS into an HTML page).
Can anyone tell me, if they just resolve the Domain on each incoming request and validate if it corresponds to the correct account and comes from a allowed server (by looking up the IP)? If that's not the case, can anyone provide me some Idea on how Google could do this?
Google does not, by and large, avoid fraud at all. They offer an option to automatically filter for known bots and spiders, and apparently they intervened in some fashion against referral spam (which used to be a huge problem but has by now almost completely disappeared at least from the accounts I have access to).
Other than that, as you say, anyone can stick the javascript code into his HTML and send data to your account, or use the measurement protocol and not even bother with JS. Checking server IPs would hardly help (relevant here is the IP of the client and there are too many possible IPs for meaningful filtering).
Of course if you notice wrong data that follows a discernible pattern you can create filters yourself, which is at least gives you some control over what data is removed.
If I placed a javascript game on my website and part of the game asked for user addresses (in order to refer to local landmarks for example) is it possible that some third party might be able to hijack my game to send the user addresses their way?
I understand that javascript is not very secure, but I'm also thinking that no one will be able to hijack my javascript code without hacking my site, so it's secure in that respect.
Am I being naive?
Just asking because I have an idea for a game that I'm trying to think through.
If you consider your user's addresses to truly be a secret, then yes you probably have some work to do:
XSS attacks
You need to be very careful about how you display user input. For example, if I say my name is <script>alert('hello world')</script>, are you actually going to print that out in the website? If so, can then insert their own JavaScript into your application. Here's an example of an XSS attack, and Wikipedia has more information. If attackers can insert custom JS, they can intercept secret user input like addresses or passwords or cookies.
HTTPS
When your web server sends its message back to the user, the message doesn't go directly to the user's computer. It first goes through intermediate computers in a relay race. If attackers control one of the computers in the middle of the relay race, they can modify the server's message and insert their own JS. Once again, the attackers win. To circumvent this, you'll need HTTPS, which is a protocol that among other things encrypts the message. You'll also need something called a certificate; StartSSL sells them affordably.
Note that the attacker doesn't have to be some corporation or government sitting miles away to control an intermediate computer. It could be someone running Firebug on your school campus' unencrypted Wi-Fi network, for example.
But really
A better way to structure your web application is to never send the user address back to your server in the first place. One of the first rules of information security is that it's hard to get right; the more you can rely on other people's work the better. Instead, maybe keep a fixed list of landmarks in the JS code. Or use a public API provided by a service like Google Maps, which already runs over HTTPS.
Say, a link to a person is sent to a user via email. If the person is already logged into the webpage in his/her browser, clicking on the link takes him/her to the page. However, if he/she is not logged in, he/she should be asked to login in order to access the page. Is there a way to achieve the above functionality using jquery, javascript?
Yes. Build a back-end authentication system, using AJAX and whatever your server-side language is.
From there, develop a hypermedia-style of content-system, and a modular, "widget"-based application delivery model.
Within your hypermedia responses to login (plus passing whatever relevant path information was gained from the e-mail), either redirect the page to a new page (based on the linked response from the server), or download the widgets requested from the server (for whatever application you're displaying media in), and then stream in AJAX content (again, from a URL dictated by the server-response).
This is about as close as you're going to get to security, in terms of delivering things to the client, in real-time, with authentication.
If you were to load the reports/gallery/game/whatever, and put a div over it, and ask for users to log in, then smart users can just kill the div.
If you include the content, or include the application components (JS files), or even include the links to the JS files which will request and display the content, then clever people are again going to disassemble that, in 20 seconds, flat.
The only way I can see to do this is to have a common request-point, to touch the server, and conditionally load your application, based on "next-steps" URLs, passed to the client, based on successful authorization and/or successfully completing whatever the previous step was, plus doing authentication of some form on each request (REST-based tokens+nonces, or otherwise)...
This would keep the content (and any application-structure which might have vulnerabilities) from the client, until you can guarantee that the client has been properly authorized, and the entire application is running inside of multiple enclosed/sandboxed modules, with no direct access to one another, and only instance-based access to a shared-library.
Is it worth the work?
Who knows.
Are we talking about a NORAD nuclear-launch iPhone app, which must run in JavaScript?
Then no, engineering this whole thing for the next six months isn't overboard.
And again, all of this security falls over as soon as one person leaves themselves logged-in, and leaves their phone on the table (biometric authentication as well, then?).
Are we talking about a gallery or discount-offers that you want to prevent people to log into, so you know that only the invited people are using them?
Well, then an 18-month project to engineer, develop, debug and deploy a system like this is probably going to be overkill.
In this case, perhaps you can just do your best to prevent the average person from stealing your content or using your cut-prices, and accept that people who take the time to dig into and reverse-engineer everything are going to find a way to get what they want, 95 times out of 100.
In that case, perhaps just putting a login div overtop of the page IS what you're going to be looking for...
If you're dealing with, say a company back-end, or with company fiscals or end-user, private-data, or anything of the sort, then aside from meeting legal requirements for collection/display/storage, how much extra work you put into the security of the system depends on how much your company's willing to pay to do it.
If it makes you feel better, there are companies out there that pay $60,000-$150,000 a year, to use JS tracking/testing programs from Adobe. Those programs sit right there, on the webpage, most of the time, for anybody to see, as long as you know where to look.
So this isn't exactly an unknown problem.
Yes it is. By authenticating (login) you can store a "loggedIn" cookie which you have to delete by session end (logout or closing the browser). You can use that cookie to check if somebody is logged in or not. If not logged in, than you can display the login page and send the login request with ajax. Btw it is not a good practice to use hybrid applications like that. It is better to use SPA-s with REST service, or implement this on server side.
I've been looking for better ways to secure my site. Many forums and Q/A sites say jquery variables and HTML attributes may be changed by the end user. How do they do this? If they can alter data and elements on a site, can they insert scripts as well?
For instance I have 2 jquery scripts for a home page. The fist is a "member only" script and the second is a "visitor only" script. Can the end user log into my site, copy the "member only" script, log off, and inject the script so it'll run as a visitor?
Yes, it is safe to assume that nothing on the client side is safe. Using tools like Firebug for Firefox or Developer Tools for Chrome, end users are able to manipulate (add, alter, delete):
Your HTML
Your CSS
Your JS
Your HTTP headers (data packets sent to your server)
Cookies
To answer your question directly: if you are solely relying on JavaScript (and most likely cookies) to track user session state and deliver different content to members and guests, then I can say with absolute certainty that other people will circumvent your security, and it would be trivial to do so.
Designing secure applications is not easy, a constant battle, and takes years to fully master. Hacking applications is very easy, fun for the whole family, and can be learned on YouTube in 20 minutes.
Having said all that, hopefully the content you are containing in the JS is not "mission-critical" or "sensitive-data". If it is, I would seriously weigh the costs of hiring a third party developer who is well versed in security to come in and help you out. Because, like I said earlier, creating a truly secure site is not something easily done.
Short Answer: Yes.
Anything on the users computer can be viewed and changed by the user, and any user can write their own scripts to execute on the page.
For example, you will up vote this post automatically if you paste this in your address bar and hit enter from this page:
javascript: $('#answer-7061924 a.vote-up-off').click();
It's not really hacking because you are the end user running the script yourself, only doing actions the end user can normally do. If you allow the end user on your site to perform actions that affect your server in a way they shouldn't be able to, then you have a problem. For example, if I had a way to make that Javascript execute automatically instead of you having to run it yourself from your address bar. Everyone who came to this page would automatically upvote this answer which would be (obviously) undesired behavior.
Firebug and Greasemonkey can be used to replace any javascript: the nature of the Browser as a client is such that the user can basically have it do anything they want. Your specific scenario is definitely possible.
well, if your scripts are public and not protected by a server side than the Hacker can run it in a browser like mozilla.
you should always keep your protected content in a server side scripting and allow access by the session (or some other server side method)
Yes a user can edit scripts however all scripts are compiled on the user's machine meaning that anything they alter will only affect their machine and not any of your other visitors.
However, if you have paid content which you feed using a "members-only" script then it's safest if you use technology on the server to distribute your members-only content rather than rely on the client scripts to secure your content.
Most security problems occur when the client is allowed to interact with the server and modify data on the server.
Here's a good bit on information you can read about XSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
To put it very simply:
The web page is just an interface for clients to use your server. It can be altered in all possible ways and anyone can send any kind of data to your server.
For first, you have to check that the user sending that data to your server has privileges to do so. Usually done by checking against server session.
Then you have to check at your server end that you are only taking the data you want, and nothing more or less and that the data is valid by validating it on your server.
For example if there is a mandatory field in some form that user has to fill out, you have to check that the data is actually sent to server because user may just delete the field from the form and send it without.
Other example is that if you are trying to dynamically add data from the form to database, user may just add new field, like "admin", and set it to 1 and send the form. If you then have admin field in database, the user is set as an admin.
The one of the most important things is to remember avoid SQL injection.
There are many tools to use. They are made for web developers to test if their site is safe. Hackbar is one for example.