4 ms·
> Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first? I thought it was a breath of fresh air. The unique ID is clearly very random and long enough to be ung
by gizmo 16y ago
> Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first?
I thought it was a breath of fresh air. The unique ID is clearly very random and long enough to be unguessable. Even if the user and document hashes are not picked in a cryptographically secure way it's still going to be much more secure than the average alpha web 2.0 app that's hacked together with some generic login&auth component.
I think you should be upset at products that do auth but do it insecurely, not those who make a conscious decision that a simple solution is good enough. Just look at the websites that don't hash passwords, that don't restrict login cookies to the domain of the app, that don't have SSL logins, and so on. There are a million points where it can go wrong, and even today it's pretty difficult to asses whether your application is secure.
Think about it for a second. The security system the authors have chosen is almost impossible to mess up. Given how the hash looks I'm almost entirely sure they used some kind of crypto library to generate it. (If their magic ids looked like the output of randrange(100000, 900000) it would've been obvious). There is no other point of failure. If the hashes are random and unguessable, you're done! For a free product, I'd say that's pretty good!
What you want is security, but what you ask for is a login page.
- robfitz 16y agoThanks for making me seem far smarter than I am. My mental process was basically: "Etherpad was easy to use, I'll do that." (come on google, I'm just like them!) You can also type in a more memorable URL (like etherpad, trend emerging) but that, of course, makes it much more guessable.
- edw519 16y agoWhat you want is security, but what you ask for is a login page. Sorry if I didn't make it clear enough, but all I want is: 1. the ability to add, change, or delete my any of my data at any time 2. the ability to share my data with exactly whom I want, no more, no less OP guarantees neither (and, refreshingly, admits it). In fact, "We'll try our best to preserve your data, but no guarantees" and "not very secure at all" were his words, not mine. I was responding to his disclaimer, not my interpretation of his site's security. [FWIW, I use ramamia by hner's jasonlbaptiste and markbao, which has a great and appropriate implementation of unique id. But then again, I'm less concerned about the security of my family reunion plan than of my business plan.]
- gizmo 16y agoI know you want to do (1) and (2), but my point is that you're not getting that from the other web 2.0 apps either. When you delete data perhaps only a is_deleted flag gets toggled in a database, and copies of your work may reside in backups for months or even years. When you want to share your data you want to be reasonably certain the app is secure, but there is no way for you to determine if this is the case. I'm saying that a very simple system with very obvious security implications may be preferable to a complex system. It's easy to get Open Auth wrong, it's easy to get logins wrong, and so on. Many apps will give you that login form and the share and delete buttons but chances are you would shudder at the thought of using the app if you knew what the backend looks like. About those remarks on the page. The first one, "We'll try our best to preserve your data", is the best you can hope for in any situation, and the second remark that the website isn't very secure at all is also truthful given that it doesn't even use SSL. So to reiterate, login forms on an app may make you feel more secure, but it won't bring you any closer to what you want.
- edw519 16y ago"We'll try our best to preserve your data", is the best you can hope for in any situation If that's the best my customers could hope for, then I'd be broke. I absolutely guarantee the integrity of my customers' data. To anyone who doesn't, I ask, "Why not?"
- aarongough 16y agoBecause giving an absolute guarantee of anything is impossible?