Tag Archives: Security

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Over at the day job I recently had the need to write a quick keycloak login integration for my team.

I needed this to interface with our central login server, and extract a token in order to be able to interface with our GraphQL data management APIs, so that our new research project output pages could be built out by the rest of my team.

Thought this might be of use to folks, if you need it! Supports login/logout using OAuth2 and OIDC, as well as token refresh to extract a token compatible with our GraphQL library.

Have fun!

» Visit the project on Gitlab...

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I have previously talked about speeding up your site by using Squid as a reverse proxy to cache served pages. This is a great thing to do, but presents a problem now that all sites are moving over to HTTPS, since for various technical reasons reverse proxies can’t really handle HTTPS.

These days the standard way of doing this seems to be using Varnish as a cache, and Squid seems to be a little “old hat”, however I have several client estates which were set up before Varnish came on the scene, so I needed a solution I could get up and running very quickly.

Terminating HTTPS

Thankfully, the solution is very similar whatever reverse proxy you’re using. The solution is simple, you need to install something that terminates and handles the HTTPS session before sending it to your proxy. The simplest way to do this is to install NGINX and configure it to handle HTTPS sessions.

1) Disable Apache’s handling of HTTPS (if you’ve got an existing, un-cached, HTTPS server).

2) Install the basic nginx apt-get install nginx-light

3) Configure nginx to forward to your proxy (which you have previously configured to listen on port 80)

server {
        listen 443 ssl;
        server_name www.example.com;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;

        location / {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:80;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port 443;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
        }
}

After restarting nginx, you should be able to see https requests coming in on your squid proxy logs.

Gotchas

The biggest gotcha that you’re going to hit is that if you’re checking whether a request is HTTPS in your app (e.g. for automatically forwarding from insecure to secure), you’re not going to be able to use the standard protocol checks. The reason being is that HTTPS is being terminated by nginx, so by the time the session hits your app, it will not be seen as secure!

To perform such a test, you’re instead going to have to check for the X-Forwarded-Proto header instead ($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] in PHP).

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Tor (which stands for The Onion Router), is a powerful anonymity service originally developed by the US Navy, which helps protect citizens around the world from abuse and monitoring. A VPN also offers the same service, if you’re not familiar with the tool, you can read about the VPN meaning here.

Most people use Tor via the Tor Browser, which simplifies setup, and I encourage you to use that where you can. This article discusses going one step further, and routing all traffic through Tor via the use of a HTTP proxy.

In the UK, the passage of the disastrous #IPBill places everyone under suspicionless surveillance, and I have client confidentiality to consider. So, as a matter of due diligence, I wanted to ensure that when my ISP’s surveillance database was inevitably hacked, the information the Russian Mafia got was of limited use.

This was easy enough to set up.

Install and configure Tor

The first step is to install Tor; not the browser, but the software the browser talks to in order to make it’s connection. On Debian based systems, apt-get install tor.

Tor comes with a SOCKS proxy, so enable support by editing /etc/tor/torrc and uncomment the line:

SocksPort 9050

If this is a network server, you may want to enable an external proxy on your network as well (for example, I have an always on Raspberry Pi running a tor proxy for all the various iOS devices on my home network).

Chain a simple HTTP Proxy

Once that’s done, you’ll have a SOCKS proxy up and running that’ll route anything it gets through Tor. Many things (e.g. the aforementioned iOS devices) won’t talk SOCKS. To solve this, I use a light weight HTTP proxy called polipo to create a HTTP proxy wrapper for Tor’s SOCKS proxy.

Install polipo: apt-get install polipo

Then configure the proxy to chain to Tor’s SOCKS proxy, modify /etc/polipo/config:

...

allowedClients = 127.0.0.1, 192.168.1.0/24 # Expose your network (modify accordingly)

socksParentProxy = "localhost:9050"
socksProxyType = socks5

proxyAddress = "0.0.0.0"    # IPv4 only

...

On my Raspberry Pi, I also disable the caching by adding diskCacheRoot = "" to the config, as this prevents polipo from filling up the SD card and breaking the proxy.

Restart both tor and polipo, and now you should have both a tor SOCKS and HTTP proxy.

Change your browser settings

Finally, you need to configure your browser (or your entire system) to use this proxy. This is different depending on what you’re using, but on Ubuntu you can set global proxy settings in your system settings, which will route all traffic over your new proxy (default port 8123).

iOS devices have a per-network proxy configuration found in your wireless network configuration (click on the little “i” icon).

Verify everything is working by visiting check.torproject.org.