How to: Automatic User Login in CakePHP

Category : CakePHP, Open source, Software development, Tips

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

Category : AJAX, IPWEditor, New Release, Open source, release, SAAS, Software development, web


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

Category : CakePHP, Open source, PHP, Security, Software development

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

Forget About Software Configuration, Settings and Options – Choose the Right Defaults

Category : Best practices, Opinion, Software development

Common pitfall “I am not sure what to do…. let’s make it configurable”

You hear this all the time in software companies – Some business analysts, developer or product manager trying to solve a dilemma in software development by pushing the decision to the end user side. “Let’s make it configurable” seems like a get-out-of-jail free card if you can’t make you mind about colors, screen layout and many other hard choices we have to make many time when designing our software.

People think they want free choice, while in fact they want the right choice.

It is a common mistake to think that making some aspect of your application configurable is necessarily a good thing. Software users rarely go into configuration and edit the software options to fit their needs. Users expect the software to work “by default” / “out of the box” / “no hustle”. Continue Reading

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

Category : CakePHP, Open source, PHP, release, Security, Software development

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.

Google to present at the Wellington Architect forum

Category : Software development


Our speaker will be James Tarquin, Enterprise Architect with Google.
He’ll be speaking about the “Key challenges with cloud services”, specifically security, change management and reliability.

Get copies of the flyer here both a thumbnail and a high-res copy are available here.

When: 2nd-Feb-2010 (Networking from 12 noon, formal session from 12:30 till 1:30pm)
Venue: Optimation Boardroom, 1 Grey Street, Wellington (New Zealand)

I’ll be happy to see you there.

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

Category : CakePHP, Open source, PHP, release, Security, Software development


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.

Category : Microsoft, Open source, Software development

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)

10

Category : Open source, Security, Software development

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

Open source presentation at the Wellington Architect forum

Category : Architecture, Microsoft, Open source, Software development

Just finished my presentation on Open source and Architecture in the Wellington Software Architect Forum.

We have covered these topics:
1) Definition, Licensing & players
2) Open source based architecture examples
3) Best practices
4) ROI, TCO and other TLA
5) Open source tools for architecture
6) Want to be an open source developer?
7) Future FOSS trends

You can download the presentation here.