CaspianXIWhat's a company secret you can share now that you no longer work there?
rtxnOur business-critical internal software suite was written in Pascal as a temporary solution and has been unmaintained for almost 20 years. It transmits cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests. They use a single decade-old Excel file to store vital statistics. A key part of the workflow involves an Excel file with a macro that processes an HTML document from the clipboard.
I offered them a better solution, which was rejected because the downtime and the minimal training would be more costly than working around the current issues.
cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests
I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?
nudelbiotopAnyone who has access to any network infrastructure can trace the cleartext communication and extract the credentials.
What do you mean by any involved network infrastructure? The URI is encrypted by TLS, you would only see the host address/domain unless you had access to it after decryption on the server.
They said clear text, I would assume it’s not https.
The comment you were replying to is asking about a situation where there is TLS. Also using clear text values in the URI itself does not mean there wouldn’t be TLS.
When someone just says cleartext, I assume they mean transmission too.
OP replied confirming HTTP: lemmy.world/comment/1033128
netvorI would still not sleep well; other things might log URI’s to different unprotected places. Depending on how the software works, this might be client, but also middleware or proxy…
Nope, it’s bare-ass HTTP. The server software also connected to an LDAP server.
supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS
I can practically guarantee you it was not
I’m not 100% on this but I think GET requests are logged by default.
POST requests, normally used for passwords, don’t get logged by default.
BUT the Uri would get logged would get logged on both, so if the URI contained @username:Password then it’s likely all there in the logs
SzethFriendOfNimiGet and post requests are logged
The difference is that the logged get requests will also include any query params
GET /some/uri?user=Alpha&pass=bravo
While a post request will have those same params sent as part of a form body request. Those aren’t logged and so it would look like this
POST /some/uri
Browser history
Even if the destination doesn’t log GET components, there could be corporate proxies that MITM that might log the URL. Corporate proxies usually present an internally trusted certificate to the client.