Security

Authentication

The default policy

By default, c2cgeoportal applications use an auth ticket authentication policy (AuthTktAuthenticationPolicy). With this policy, the user name is obtained from the “auth ticket” cookie set in the request. The policy is created, and added to the application’s configuration, in the application’s main __init__.py file.

Note

With the default configuration, for security reasons, the authentication will only work if the project is served on https.

Using another policy

When using AuthTktAuthenticationPolicy, an “auth ticket” cookie should be set in the request for the user to be identified. In some applications, using a custom identification mechanism may be needed instead, for instance to use SSO. Our knowledge base has an example of how this can be achieved.

User validation

For logging in, c2cgeoportal validates the user credentials (username/password) by reading the user information from the user database table. If a c2cgeoportal application should work with another user information source, like LDAP, a custom client validation mechanism can be set up. Our knowledge base has an example of how this can be achieved.

HTTPS

If your application is accessed in HTTPS, you have to make sure that all URLs generated by the application (CSS and JavaScript files, images, MapServer requests, etc.) use the HTTPS scheme as well. Otherwise the browser will prompt “unsecure content” warnings.

There are two ways to manage this:

  • application behind a proxy
  • application and SSL certificate on the same server

Application behind a proxy

If the application is placed behind some proxy that removes the SSL encryption (plain HTTP is used between the proxy and the server), then some specific configuration is required both on the c2cgeoportal application and on the proxy:

  • The proxy should add a specific header to the requests. For example X-Https on (X-Https is the header name, and on is the header value).

In Mako templates, if you need to know what scheme is used, you may test the value of request.scheme. For example:

var WMTS_OPTIONS = {
% if request.scheme == 'https':
    url: 'https://my.wmts.server/'
% else:
    url: 'https://my.wmts.server/'
% endif
/* ... */
};

Application and SSL certificate on the same server

If the SSL certificate and the application are located on the same server, all requests will be redirected to https. So you should change the scheme to https for all url except for some cases that should always use http (typically, all requests to localhost): see url parameter in tilegeneration configuration.

If you apply ssl encryption on your application, you should take care of the tiles url to use https scheme to avoid mixing secure and insecure contents.

Finally, you should redirect all http requests to https. Depending on your environment, you may need to request this via your infrastructure support.

In case you load http external resources into your application, you should use the resourceproxy service as described below.

Loading non https external resources

If you want to load non https external resources in your https application, you should use the resourceproxy service and add the list of hosts you want to access in your project vars.yaml configuration file:

resourceproxy:
    # list of urls from which it is safe to load content
    targets:
      #exampletargetname: https://www.camptocamp.com/?param1=%s&param2=%s
      rfinfo: https://www.rfinfo.vd.ch/rfinfo.php?no_commune=%s&no_immeuble=%s

Then you can access resources by building urls using the following schema: https://<host>/resourceproxy?target=<targetname>&values=(<valueparam1>,...).

For example:

https://geoportail.camptocamp.com/main/resourceproxy?target=rfinfo&values=(175,2633)

Local certificate checks

Certain c2cgeoportal features open a http session to your c2cgeoportal services, for example the checker or the lingua_extractor. If you are running your server in https and wish to disable certificate checks in these connections, you can achieve this by adding the following configuration element to your vars file:

vars:
    http_options:
        verify: False

See other options in parameters of requests.Request

Reset password

When a user has forgotten his/her password, a new one may be sent by email if some additional GeoMapFish configuration is provided.

To ensure such an e-mail can be generated, you should add the following configuration in the vars.yaml file:

# SMTP configuration could be already there if needed by other feature
smtp:
    host: smtp.example.com:465
    ssl: true
    user: <username>
    password: <password>
    starttls: false

reset_password:
    # Used to send a confirmation email
    email_from: info@camptocamp.com
    email_subject: New password generated for GeoMapFish
    email_body: |
        Hello {user},

        You have asked for a new password,
        the newly generated password is: {password}

        Sincerely yours
        The GeoMapFish team

If the SMTP host ends with a colon (:) followed by a number, and there is no port specified, that suffix will be stripped off and the number interpreted as the port number to use.

Replace the smtp.example.com value by a working SMTP server name.

Access to WMS GetCapability

Set hide_capabilities to true in your vars.yaml to disable the WMS GetCapability when accessing the Mapserver proxy (mapserverproxy).

Default: false

Access to the admin interface

To disable the admin interface, set enable_admin_interface to false in your vars.yaml file.

Default: true

Access to services by external servers

By default, only localhost can access c2cgeoportal’s services. To permit access to a specific service by an external server, you must set CORS headers (Access-Control-Allow-Origin) in your vars.yaml file.

Add or modify the structure as follows:

headers:
    <service_name>:
        access_control_allow_origin: ["<domain1>", "<domain2>", ...]
        access_control_max_age: 3600

A "*" can be included in access_control_allow_origin to allow everybody to access, but no credentials will be passed in this case.

Available services are:

Entry:

  • index
  • config
  • api

Services:

  • themes
  • login
  • mapserver
  • print
  • profile
  • raster
  • layers
  • login
  • error

Authorized referrers

To mitigate CSRF attacks, the server validates the referrer against a list of authorized referrers.

By default, only the requests coming from the server are allowed. You can change that list by adding an authorized_referers list in your vars.yaml file.

This solution is not the most secure (some people have browser extensions that reset the referrer), but that is the most consistent approach with regard to the different JS frameworks.