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[nycphp-talk] sessions and application security

Chris Bielanski Cbielanski at inta.org
Tue Jan 27 15:47:07 EST 2004


Only solution I've ever seen devised for this is a moving-target encryption.
Public key handshake (within SSL) leads to an ever-changing series of
private keys devised by your own proprietary method. Every transaction
(every page) has a new key. The numerical application is left as an exercise
to the reader. ;)

No, it's not pretty. Yes, it makes Sterling and other beasts like it break
out in cold sweat.

Otherwise, yeah, get it off HTTP and on to your own protocol. That solves
the problem most handily.

~Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Zaunere [mailto:hans not junk at nyphp.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 3:38 PM
To: NYPHP Talk
Subject: RE: [nycphp-talk] sessions and application security


> One thought is to use both a token in the url and database sessions, 
> where the token in the url is a checksum of the database session, and 
> possibly vice versa. That way I can check both.  If I have a 
> checksum in both, then I can compare the checksum.  Hmm.

Good ideas, but even so, if someone can get that key on the browser,
he's in.  Again, it's the browser - but perhaps rotating session keys
can help - which could at least detect if a hijack was *attempted* and
then shutdown the session.

> Thoughts, suggestions, or even better what is the "best" way 
> to do this?

Don't use a web browser :)

H
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> Only solution I've ever seen devised for this is a=20
> moving-target encryption.
> Public key handshake (within SSL) leads to an ever-changing series of
> private keys devised by your own proprietary method. Every transaction
> (every page) has a new key. The numerical application is left=20
> as an exercise to the reader. ;)

I had kicked around some sequencing sessions, modeled after TCP's
SYN/ACK sequence numbers - but using the SSL keys... now
that's-a-good-idea.  I'm even thinking...  depending on your platform,
you could reach down the network stack and just grab the real TCP
SYN/ACK numbers.  But probably not doable in pure PHP :)

H




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