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Add thoughts about security considerations

Signed-off-by: Knut Ahlers <knut@ahlers.me>
This commit is contained in:
Knut Ahlers 2017-06-14 22:37:26 +02:00
parent 7e91879502
commit c9ac589c53
Signed by: luzifer
GPG key ID: DC2729FDD34BE99E

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@ -22,3 +22,11 @@ Two different methods are supported to store the secrets in Vault:
- You must configure the Github oAuth2 credentials
- You must configure the Vault parameters
- You should configure a `session-secret` having at least 64 byte length (If you don't set this it's chosen randomly which will invalidate your session cookies on every restart of the application)
## Security vs. Convenience
One of the key questions I found myself asking while developing this was whether to transmit the secrets used to generate the one-time passwords to the browser and to do the code generation in the browser or to keep the secrets in the backend application and only to deliver the codes themselves.
On the one hand the first solution would work when being offline because it can be cached in the browser. But seriously: I've never seen a OTP query when not being online so this wasn't a valid reason. On the other hand transmitting the secrets into the browser IMHO would be a major security flaw as - given the case you loose control over your browser having all those secrets stored in the local storage - an attacker would have the chance to generate unlimited one-time passwords for your accounts.
In the end I went with the solution to transmit only names and the currently valid code. This means being offline you are not able to generate a new code but also this means you can revoke access to the Vault keys and immediately stop the attackers ability to generate codes on your behalf.