I am trying to save the username and password of user at c# console application. Hence there will be just one username and password that must be saved (It is like pin code). I don't want to use a Database for this. Using .txt will be irrational because anyone can see and find txt file and enter program.
I tried to use Properties.Resources but because of Resources are read-only, there is no way of changing password at runtime if user wants to change its password.
Properties.Resources.Admin_Mail = Reading;
It gives error because of the reason I mentioned above.
What should I use, I cannot find any suitable way for this problem on the internet.
I am not sure where you are at in your development journey.
You'll need system.io to read and write to the text file. I would give in a different extension then .txt.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io?view=net-6.0
Consider using a SecureString type in C#
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.security.securestring?view=net-6.0
Encrypt the data stored in the file.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/security/encrypting-data
Decrypt the users entry to ensure it matches the file.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/security/decrypting-data
There is a StackOverFlow link talking at the actually input.
Password masking console application
Sorry for just linking to references instead of a straightforward code answer, but I not sure of your intent and level of security you wish to provide.
Related
i work as a pen-tester for a security company.
as a part of our PT, if we are successful we sometimes upload a reverse shell ASPX file, i cannot share that here for obvious reason but we would like to password protect the file.
our programmers tried doing that but they don't know how, only via the web.config file (which even if we gain access to, won't modify)
the reason we need to do this is because when we upload the file, its a risk because if an actual malicious user finds the shell.aspx file he has control of the system, we want to mitigate that risk.
so is there any way to password protect a specific ASPX file?
ty.
(Posted as an answer pending enough rep to comment)
I assume your shell.aspx, when run, presents the user with a form containing an input serving as a command prompt, and that you'd like this functionality to be available for demonstration purposes but not for drive-by attackers who stumble on the page's URL.
What I would do is modify the page so that it also prompts for a (strong) password. Presumably the page server-side code-behind logic is within the same file - you will have to hardcode the password's once-way cryptographic hash and only execute the user command if the password's hash matches the hardcoded value.
we have created an application like adobe reader to read a special encrypted document file format which does recognize only by our application.
what we want to do is to let user buy the application using his/her account from a website & after that we'll let him/her download that document using this program and start reading it.
here is our concerns:
1) document files should not be read in another user computer which means if user1 gives the raw downloaded file to user2 which has our application in his/her own computer the second user must not be able to read that file
2) after users download their files, they can just read those file offline (not constantly be online to be able to read)
3) this security must not break down easily because these document data are vital & the user information & application must not be hacked and cracked !
4) maybe later we want to have our android/IOS version so the solution must be cross platform
5) solution like providing login mechanism for each document won't work because users are able to give the copy of their own files together with their username & password to other users.
6) file encrypting mechanism must not break down by crackers so that they just decrypt the document & post the free version all around the internet
Do you have any programming method, security mechanism or suggestion ?
You could use public-key (or asymmetric) cryptography. You encrypt the document with the public key of the user. Then only people with access to the private key (ideally: only the user) can decrypt it.
However if the user has access to his own key (and he should), nothing can keep the user from decrypting the document and sharing it with others (or sharing his private key with others).
In the end: if a user, or the program needs access to the unencrypted product and the user has no interest in keeping the document secure, confidentiality can and - if the product is interesting enough - will be broken.
This is the problem with .NET it's easily reversed, because of the executables having a lot of meta data stored and that it does not compile to native (asm), but to IL. Your best bet would be to use an obfuscator and something like .NET Seal (However if I am correct it requires the users to be on the net) http://forum.elitevs.net/
Again you want to go cross platform and for C# to do that you'll have to use something like Mono:
http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page
Although that would require the end user to also have mono.
Now to answer your "points".
1) Make each file and application share some sort of encryption that is unique to each file and application, making sure that the file only matches for the application one user have ex.
User X downloads the application.
User Y downloads the application.
Both downloads are unique with some sort of encryption algorithm or encryption key.
User X downloads Document A.
Document A will be sharing the same algorithm / key as User X's application which makes it unique to him only.
User X gives Document A to User Y.
As User Y's application does not share the same algorithm / key as User X then the Document is not readable.
2) I will referre to what I said first in my answer.
3) I will referre to what I said first in my answer.
4) I will referre to what I said first in my answer. However I want to point out that it's not entirely a bad idea, but it's something that should be taken into consideration if C# really is the language of choice for this.
5) I will reffere to answer #1 here.
6) I will reffere to answer #1 here.
If you are going to allow the user to download the file, then there is going to be no way to 100% secure it. The reason is, there must be a way to decrypt it so that the user can read it. This decryption process must occur on the user's machine, since the program to read it will have to decrypt it and open it on their machine.
Once the program to decrypt it is running on the user's machine, he can reverse engineer it and hack it (assuming he's clever enough).
That being said, there are many way to make it difficult to crack your decryption. Now if you take away the ability to read offline, you have more control. A hacker cannot run a disassembler or decompiler on your remote server.
Hope this info helps
I have a web form which takes in user information. The value of various text boxes is used to build a html file. I write this html to a file( with specific name) and then prompt user to Save this file.This html is used for creating outlook email signatures. Currently I have this html within the application.This has been deployed to the server. I had to set write permission on this file for all users for it to work.
Are there any security risks? What happens if multiple users access this applications and write to the file at the same time.
When you say the file has "a specific name", do you mean that it is always the same name? If so, then yes, there will be problems if multiple users use this functionality at the same time. They'll be overwriting the one file and downloading each other's data. You would need to generate a unique filename each time the process runs to avoid this.
But do you actually need to save the file?
Or is your goal purely to produce some HTML for the user to download, and the way you are doing this is by writing it to a file, and then prompting them to download that file?
If you don't need to save the file, but rather just need to generate HTML and prompt the user to save, just serve it up as a normal page, and set response headers such that their browser will download it. Something along these lines:
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=my_file.html");
From what I understand, the user fills the web form and submits. Immediately, an html file pops up for download from the server. I think this is very neat implementation of this scenario. You just need to make sure that resources are released properly in order to prevent locking of files.
When multiple users access this application, it should not break since separate files are created with a specific name (as you have mentioned). I don't know what logic has been used to create unique names. At some peculiar situation (this is purely dependent on your name calculation logic) if the calculated specific file name somehow becomes similar to an existing file, you should have code in place to replace or create a different version of the same file name. Locking could occur if you are writing captured data from web form into the same file again and again without disposing your stream/File objects . Make sure you dispose your objects after use in the code.
It would be great if you give access to the application pool of the web application to a user who has write access to that file/folder instead of giving everyone the write access. In this way, your application gets full rights to perform write operations rather than users having rights. If users have write access on the file/folder, it is very easy for anyone to peek in and do something unexpected.
Hope this helps.
I want to get the fullname from a file on Silverlight OpenFileDialog, when I try that, Silverlight throws me an error.
I saw there is an attribute on FullName saying it is [SECURITY CRITICAL], but I need to display the full path, is it really no way I can do that?
OpenFileDialog won't provide the full name simply because it doesn't want you to alter those files. With Silverlight, you only have access to the isolated storage and the file could be located outside this storage.
But you could just open the file and copy it to the isolated storage, and modify it there.Just discovered that bassfriend found this link too and posted it above. My mistake. Then again, the link is in the top-20 of Google. :-)
Another reason why you won't get the full filename is because that filename could contain sensitive information. For example, a file in the "My Documents" folder could expose the user login name.
Basically, it's a security restriction. You're not supposed to bypass it, even if it would be possible. If you would find a way around this, MS would probably release a security update to close that leak again...
Well, yes, Silverlight will not allow you to retrieve the full path information. Your topic seems to be closely related to this question. Maybe the answers there will shed more light on your question.
Try to use the File property as documented here:
Example,
MSDN
The Silverlight OpenFileDialog behaves differently to the standard forms OFD for security reasons. If you retrieve the SelectedFile, it actually returns a FileDialogFileInfo object which contains the Name of the file, rather than a path to the file. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense - you don't want somebody writing a piece of malicious code that can get a handle into your filesystem.
What's the smartest way to prevent a textfile (e.g. xml) from being edited by a user?
I need to make sure that the file in which I store the usernames and there privileges for the desktop application can't be simply edited.
Maybe I can generate a certificate of the file and the desktop applications checks this?
I'm using C# in a WinForms app.
You could use File system permissions to prevent editing.
You could use encryption to make editing difficult
You could get a hash value for the file to detect editing.
I think encrypting the file, then decrypting it will be easiest. Though users might still be able to read the contents of the file if they're smart enough. e.g. reading the plain-text from memory
The simplest way is probably to use a database with username and password authentication.
The smartest is to encrypt it so that the data is not available to them.
However, if a user truly wants access to a file on their machine, they will get it. You can make it so that they cannot read anything useful or make useful edits, but if they want to, they will be able to edit the file.
Since your aim is to store users' privileges directly in an XML file, you need a level of security beyond just preventing users from editing the file. Even if you could (hypothetically) impose some restriction at the operating system level against editing the file, any administrative user could just edit the file on a different computer and then overwrite your protected version.
Thus, you have to assume that users can edit the file. The only recourse you have is to be able to identify when they have, and ignore their edits.
The approach you suggest of creating a certificate sounds exactly right. You could either compute a hash for the entire file, or could do so on a user-by-user basis (whichever makes most sense in your context), in either case using a private or secret key to ensure that someone editing the file cannot simply recompute the hash.
IMHO you can not guarantee no one can edit it, but you can encrypt the file to secure the information.
you can not guarantee as any one can boot the machine using disk start up for example and edit the text file simply.
Personally I don't think XML is the appropriate format for storing secure information in this case. The whole point of XML, compared to binary formats, is that it is human readable/editable. Use some kind of encrypted binary format with a known hash/crc that tells you if it's been interfered with if you want total security.
You can use cryptography, but use the DPAPI built into Windows as you will also have to store the encryption key safely, which again is another hassle.
The benefit of using DPAPI is that it uses a key unique to the user or computer, and is never disclosed, even to the programmer! But if you move the file onto another user's profile or computer, it will be unreadable.
If you MUST keep that data in a XML textfile you could consider digitally signing it by your application every time it is modified and checking the digital signature when you read the file.
More details on how to sign XML file and how to verify signature.
But I think it's better to just keep that kind of data in different formats - database, encrypted file, application properties...