On 24/04/2022 10:46, Narcis Garcia wrote:
__________
I'm using this dedicated address because personal addresses aren't
masked enough at this mail public archive. Public archive
administrator should fix this against automated addresses collectors.
El 24/4/22 a les 11:36, Ashley Sheridan ha escrit:
On 24/04/2022 06:40, Aziz Hussain wrote:
You can skip the DB part by sending the email address encoded and
you decode it when they click. You can use a custom key so it is
unique to that application.
On Apr 24, 2022, at 1:24 AM, Stefan A. <acid24@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't think it's a good idea to expose email addresses like that.
In between the user who clicks on the url and the server that hosts
your application the request can pass through many other servers.
You don't know what they log and what they do with those logs. So
probably best to avoid doing that.
I don't know the details of your application, so I can't say if a
MySQL database would be best for you or not, but no matter the
storage of your application you can avoid exposing email addresses
in your email confirmation URLs. One solution is to keep an
is_verified flag on your user entity. The user is created with that
flag set to 0 (in the registration step). You can then generate
your confirmation email url by generating a signature by hashing
the combination user id and email. You put both the user id and
the signature in the url (something like
https://your.application.com/userId=1&signature=a012b345c678d9010123456789
<https://your.application.com/userId=1&signature=a012b345c678d9010123456789>).
Then when this request hits your application, retrieve the user by
its id, generate the signature from id and email and compare with
the signature in the url. If they match, update the user
is_verified flag to 1 and save the user to storage.
On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 5:21 AM <gordonisnz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello. I'm wondering if you can assist with advice regarding
passwords/hiding emails.
basically,
a) a user enters their email address
b) I generate a code for login and generate an email.
c) the email contains the URL to log in
http://website.com/login?code=EMAILADDRESS-GENERATEDCODE
When the person clicks on it, I separate the email address - and
generate a new code - if it matches, they are logged in.
MAIN CONCERN - is if I have an email address in the actual URL,
it may
be easier for spammers to pick it up & start spamming the
user.. (I'm
not doing the spamming)..
Is that a real or imaginary concern? would the ISPs be spamming
folk &
scanning for URLs that pass through their servers for email
addresses?
Would a MySQL database be best - to store email addresses &
assign a
user number for each email? Then use the user number in the URL?
--
Gordon.
The best way to do this in my opinion is to generate and store a
token on the server, and use only this in the email link. This
ensures that:
* There's no way the email address is leaked or stored in between the
user and your servers
* The token can be limited to a specific time since it was generated,
or limited to a specific number of uses
* You can potentially match the users IP against both the initial
sign up attempt and the verification email. This can help towards
identifying possible malicious actions by people
* Email addresses can also contain many characters which would break
a normal URL if they were unescaped
+1
This (complex) token code can be directly a unique session ID, and no
account ID/address is needed. For this, you should maintain a sessions
table with internal data: Session ID, Account, Client IP, session
renewed (date&time) for expiration, and even session data if you
prefer to not load user with cookies.
I might not limit the token use to the specific IP as that could cause
issues for users who, for example, sign up on a desktop but receive the
email on their phone, which could result in different external facing IP
addresses if the two devices aren't on the same network. But it can be
used in conjunction with other things to detect malicious behaviour. For
example, if the same IP seems to be registered against a lot of signups
within a given time window, it could be sign of a bot.
Obviously, you might not need to go this far into analysing things, it
really does depend on what your site/app is doing, and whether it's
worth investing that sort of time into that level of security.
--
Ashley Sheridan
https://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
