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I was just thinking of possible ways to go about temporary login systems. I was thinking having a bunch of your standard images with a jumbled up word and users type in the word. I would have a MySQL table where all the photos have a unique id, link and answer-key. that way the webpage just has to choose a random number the GET photo where id = random number. then compare what the user types in to the answer key of the photo.
I'm not currently trying to create this system, it seems very simple and I was just trying to think if it is a secure system that would work.
so my question really is, would there security risks with this, is it robust enough to keep out bots, would my site be destroyed 10 seconds after implementing it.
What you're describing sounds exactly like a CAPTCHA system. These are used widely to prevent bots from issuing automated requests against an interface. The problem is that it's hard to make images that a bot can't just interpret anyway.
Outsmarted: Captcha security not much of a gotcha is an article about some Stanford researchers who developed an image-recognition tool (which is not publicly available) to test captcha implementations:
Decaptcha was able to decode 66 percent of the Captchas used by Visa's Authorize.net payment site, 70 percent of Blizzard Entertainment's Captchas -- the company's games include World of Warcraft and Diablo -- and 25 percent of Wikipedia's. About one-fifth of Digg.com's Captchas and almost that many of CNN.com's were decodable.
The researchers recommended Google's reCAPTCHA as a much more effective system. You can add a reCAPTCHA widget to your own website. This would be safer and easier than trying to develop your own and find it to be too weak.
Short answer: No, it's not secure. If someone really wants to hack your system he can build his own database of image-word.
The key is to invest in security less than it will cost you if your system will be compromise, so I won't invest in a security system too much (it sounds like you don't really have a sensitive information to hide).
BUT, you have an easy & free solution. You can use reCaptcha, not only it's much more secured, you'll help digitize some useful information.
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I am new to IOS development.
I am going to make a Bilingual Dictionary App for IOS. I have two options in front of me for choosing database. SQLlite and MySQL.
If I choose SQLLite then I believe I will have to pack the database with the app. Every user who will use this app the database will be downloaded to his device.
is it a good approach ?
or I should use MySQL ? that stays on the server and app will connect back and forth to get data from it.
Please guide which database should I use for Bilingual Dictionary Mobile app ?
Or If there is anything else I am missing ?
Thanks in advance !!
There are advantages and disadvantages to each, depending on the functionality and user experience you prefer. Unless you plan to update the content frequently, you wouldn't expect it to change constantly, so there isn't an essential need to provide dynamic content. However, hosting the content online can save a lot of space, which for some mobile users may be limited.
However, to me the most important factor to consider is that as a bilingual dictionary, you may have a substantial market of people who are travelling. People who are travelling often don't have data service, and thus must rely on wifi if they want to access this dictionary. As someone who travels with my cellphone, having a dictionary which does not require a data connection is a major functional advantage, and as a designer I would want to provide this functionality, even if just as an option. This may change if you expect that the greater part of your market is not going to use it while travelling.
Agree with Mitch Goshorn's answer. I don't know if you're worrying about the "security" of your database or you just want to save space on device. But I suggest the local one (SQLite). In case that you don't want user to steel your database by hijacking the application folder, you may want to think about encryption. Sorry if this is not considered to be an answer cause I don't have enough reputation to comment.
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This is not something I want to do myself, but it's a question/problem I can't get out of my head.
If you distribute open source-program/classes/libraries, how can you make sure the user has purchased a license? Would it not be very easy for programmers to just remove the license-part of the product and distribute it or use a pirate-version?
Take Invision Power Board for instance. It is written in PHP (i.e completely open and editable) and you have to buy a license to be able to use it. How can they make this limit? Do they authenticate the forum towards their servers? If they do, would it not be easy to simply remove this function?
Another example that I have even more problem understanding is HighCharts, a JS library to draw graphs. They offer a free version with their name on each graph. If you purchase the product, the label is gone. How do they do this?
I know this question is a bit wide and open, but I am just asking for a way to prevent people from simply editing out the license/blockade? What is the essence in this?
There are no license purchases for true "open source" libraries or programs, because the essence of open source is that the code is free and you can build/deploy it yourself at will.
What you're talking about is commercial software that might use a codebase that is easily visible/editable. It's not marketed as "open source," but the source code is easily accessible and potentially easily modified.
There are various mechanisms for obfuscating or hiding the content of the code that some products would choose to use, which make modifying the code more difficult. For example, there are various ways of pre-compiling PHP code rather than distributing the raw files (see this question for examples).
However, the biggest thing that you lose out on with most software of this sort is support. If you're a serious user of a complex piece of software, especially a business user, you would typically want to know that you have a commercial support plan in place for any critical software. The kind of user that would crack/pirate such software (that is, individuals or small companies) aren't likely to be as significant to the vendor.
On the internet there's a further obvious avenue: if a significant public site were using Invision Power Board, they would soon notice and could demand suitable license (or take legal action).
Ultimately, this kind of abuse is very difficult to prevent if someone is determined enough: you are very much at the whim of your users.
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I'm looking for a new CMS to host my new blog and I was deciding what the best route would be, either using MySQL or a file-based CMS.
I'll probably be writing on the blog every other day so I'm looking for speed.
Does anybody know which one would be better for speed / security?
Thanks!
I'd highly recommend one of the popular ones such as Joomla, Wordpress, or Drupal (why re-invent the wheel?). They're heavily supported by the community, so the standard concerns like security and such are usually found and fixed before you're even aware they existed. My personal favorite is Joomla because of the extensive collection of extensions that are available, with a great many of them focused on social media such as twitter and facebook to "spread the word" from what you're putting on your site.
For security, I see storing content in a database as being more secure, as database access requires one more level of authentication than simply storing content in a file.
If a user pokes around your system and finds your include folder, then all content could potentially be exposed by guessing the paths. Since the database is usually abstracted away from your front-end application, accessing its content by simply guessing url paths is much harder to do.
In addition, your application will probably only expose certain fields from your database to the front-end, (assuming your database access functions are properly written to prevent things like SQL injection etc).
Unless you expect seriously high volumes of traffic on your site, you probably won't notice much of a difference between reading from a file vs. reading from a database.
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In my 4 years of experience,I have developed a lot of web applications. Now, the concept of programmable web getting more and more popular, new APIs are being released almost everyday. I would like to develop a java API/library for a few of these endpoints.Ex stackapps,reddit,digg etc... What I would like to know from you people is ,
How is the API of the regular web
apps differ from the API of these
libraries. Or what is the difference
between these two from design
perspective
What are the best API development
practices.
What are all the factors that I need to consider before designing the API
.
Please comment, if the details are not sufficient.
Stability
If you offer an API to your web app, it is probably because you want other people to build applications using it. If it is not stable they will hate you for forcing them to follow through your frequent changes. If this takes too long, their site might remain non-functional for a long time while they are figuring out the new way of doing things in your API.
Compactness
You want the API to be complete but compact, as in not too much to remember.
Orthogonality
Design it so there is one and only one way to change each property or trigger an action. Actions in an orthogonal API should have minimal (if ever) side effects.
Also, it's not a good practice to remove a feature from a public API once released.
Security and Authentication
Since the API is web-exposed, you will have to authenticate each request and grant appropriate access. Security common sense applies here.
Fast Responses or Break into pieces
I believe in a web environment we should have fast responses and avoid requests that will take too long to complete. If it's unavoidable then it is better to send an ACK and break the task into several pieces and subsequent calls.
From my experience, all good API were not made to solve a generic problem, but to solve a problem for some that requires a certain abstraction. This abstraction is then evolving as the requirement and/or the underlying layer change.
So instead of finding the API that will do it all, I'd start by finding one or two good case problem were your API could help.
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I am developing an open source desktop twitter client. I would like to take advantage on the new xAuth authentication method, however my app is open source which means that if I put the keys directly into the source file, it may be a vulnerability (am I correct? The twitter support guy told me).
On the other hand, putting the key directly into a binary also doesn't make sense. I am writing my application in python, so if I just supply the pyc files, it is one more seconds to get the keys, thanks to the excellent reflection capatibilities of Python. If I create a small .so file with the keys, it is also trivial to obtain the key by looking at the raw binary (keys has fixed length and character set).
What is your opinion? Is it really a secutiry hole to expose the API keys?
Security hole? In broad terms, yes. Realistically though, these aren't nuclear launch codes we're talking about.
About the worst thing that could happen is that someone could take and use your app's keys to do something against Twitter's TOS that will end up getting the keys banned. No user data would be vulnerable since you're not distributing the user tokens (that would be much worse from a security standpoint). Since anyone can register an app in 2 seconds at no cost, the only reason to do that kind of impersonation would be specifically to besmirch the reputation of you or your app.
One thing you could do is leave them out of the source code but make it clear that user's compiling from source need to obtain their own keys and put them in the appropriate place, but leave them in the binary version that you distribute. Not 100% secure, but makes it that little bit harder that will deter a certain number of n'er-do-wells.