Category Archives: Open source

Open source

Useful JQuery Plugin to Display Errors, Messages, and Alerts: Gritter

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Real estate on your web page could be as important as real estate in real life. You got very little space on your client screen and need to use every inch (or pixels). Errors and messages take up valuable space that could be better used for more important things.

That is why Gritter is a great JQuery plugin – it saves real estate on your page by showing alerts, messages and errors in a floating bubble way, that is both informative and (because you can configure Gritter to fade away after a few seconds) non intrusive:

This image was taken from one of our new site’s design, we decided to use Gritter instead of putting the errors and notification inline.

Check out Gritter’s demo site and project site and, for CakePHP developers, here is an article about integrating Gritter with CakePHP.

It is open source, looks great, easy to integrate, and is very useful!

CakeOTP 1.1 – User Registration with One Time Password for CakePHP Released

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CakeOTP is a reference implementation of User Registration with a secure, table-less and expirable implementation of One Time Password for the popular CakePHP development framework.

New in CakeOTP release 1.1

1) Automatic login process, after the account activation- The user is automatically logged into the site and is redirected to an internal page, immediately after activating his/her account.
2) User email validation.

Download this release here.

Checkout the Online Demo, project page and getting started page.

How to: Automatic User Login in CakePHP

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Sometimes you need to enable silent (implicit) login for your users. A good example of this would be this – after a registration process, you would want to automatically login the user, rather then having him retype the user name and password.

In CakePHP there is a simple method in the Auth components that lets you login on the user’s behave.

Here is how it is done:


// assuming $password is the clear text password
$this->data["User"]["password"] = $this->Auth->password($password);
$this->data["User"]["username"] = $username;

// do the login
$login = $this->Auth->login($this->data);

// $login is true is login went well.
// now we can redirect the user to any page:
if($login){
$this->redirect(array('controller' => "anycontroller",
'action' => "any_secure_action", null));
}

This will be implemented in the next CakeOTP release.

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.2.1 Released with TinyMCE bug fix and more

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IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

Up until now IPWEditor did not support TinyMCE advance settings, due to a minor bug found and resolved by the community.
This release incorporates this bug fix and adds additional documentation around the ‘cancel’ functionality.

DEMO (TinyMCE)



Click me! I am editable and WYSIWYG!!! (TinyMCE)

Code behind:


<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.editable.ipweditor-1.2.1.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>

<div id=”editable” class=”myipwe1″> Click me! I am editable and WYSIWYG!!! </div>

<script type=”text/javascript”>//set all the tinyMCE configuration here and pass it to the editable
$().ready(function() {
var ed = new tinymce.Editor(‘myipwe1’, {
theme : “advanced”

}); $(‘.myipwe1’).editable(
{
type: ‘wysiwyg’,
editor: ed,
onSubmit:function submitData(content){
alert(content.current)
},
submit:’save’,
cancel:’cancel’
});
});

</script>

download and docs

Formal documentation and download can be found here.

Security issue in CakePHP code documentation

5 Replies

I have been using CakePHP for a long time now and enjoy every second. It provides a productive, easy to use and well document platform for PHP application. The key advantages for me are – transparent OR mapping, a strong Model View Controller framework, and tons of extra utilities that make your life better.

I have came across a possible security issue in one of cakePHP code examples. This section of code is responsible to authorize or un-authorize clients access to a certain action (MVC flow)

action == 'delete') {
            if ($this->Auth->user('role') == 'admin') {
                return true;
            } else {
                return false;
            }
        }

        return true;
    }
?>

The major security rule this code is breaking is – never ever have ‘return true’ as a default for an authorization method.
Continue reading →

CakeOTP 1.0 – Secure, Expirable, Table-less One Time Password for CakePHP Released

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CakeOTP is a secure, table-less and expirable implementation of One Time Password for the popular CakePHP development framework.

A one-time password (OTP) is a password that is only valid for a single login session or transaction. It is commonly used in the internet for registration and password reminder process in which OTPs are provides to the user in a form of a link that the user uses to access in order to create/reset his password.

The problem is that most one-time password implementation involve maintaining additional database tables and batch process that handle the persistence and expire date of the one time password. This adds complexity and reduces performance.

CakeOTP is a simple and clean implementation of one time password. It reduces complexity by removing the redundant SQL calls and DB batch maintenance while still keeping the one time password secure and expirable.

Download this release here.

Checkout the Online Demo, project page and getting started page.

Feel free to post comments and questions.

Automatic online advertisement finally developed a twisted sense of humor.

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In an interesting blog post about New Zealand education system moving from Microsoft to open source. I have noticed that the advertisement picked for the blog post, indicates that automatic-advertisement finally developed a sense of humor:

I hope I get the same kind of advertisement and then we can have a recursive blog post.

CakeOTP 0.1 beta release – One Time Password Reference Implementation for CakePHP

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I have started to implement the algorithm for tableless, secure One time password.

Here is a link to the Demo, and here is a link to the beta release.

The only thing you need to do other then the regular cakePHP setup is to create a user table (used by the CakePHP Auth component):

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `users` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `username` char(50) default NULL,
  `password` char(40) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=23 ;

Continue reading →

Morphfolia – A New Open Source CMS is Born.

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My friends, Adrian Kearns, finally released his excellent CMS, Morphfolia, as an open source project.

Morphfolia is two things:

  • A Content Management System (CMS)
  • A web application framework (for the typical Microsoft ASP.NET stack)

Morphfolia provides a suite of tools and capabilities that make website development and management flexible and easy.

This is achieved by a mature architecture and good design principles; the pages, content, page-layout and look & feel are all separated. Continue reading →

Tableless and Secure One-Time Password (OTP)

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A one-time password (OTP) is a password that is only valid for a single login session or transaction. It is commonly used in the internet for registration and password reminder process in which OTPs are provides to the user in a form of a link that the user uses to access in order to create/reset his password.

Common requirements of One Time passwords are:

  1. Statistically unique – using the same password for all requests is probably not the right security choice.
  2. Hard to guess – using sequential number is again, probably not the right security choice.
  3. Can be authenticated by the server – the server needs to distinguish between real OTP and bogus OTP.
  4. Good for one time – after the process is done the OTP should no longer be valid.
  5. Time limited – the OTP usually expires after a configurable amount of time.
  6. Secure – hackers should have a hard time changing the expiry date, username context and so forth.

Most OTP implementations use a Database table to persist the OTP and to manage their expiry date, a DB table might look like this:

id User Id OTP Expire date
1 Amir Asfsd3434bgddh 1/1/2010
2 Someone Ddfsd3345ssfsss 7/1/2010

While this is a valid solution, it is not the most efficient and elegant one, the truth is that you do not need an additional table enable and manage OTPs.

The answer is simple – the seed for this OTP is already persisted in the Database in the form of the old password (or more exactly the old password hash)

Here is how it is done:
Continue reading →