On Saturday, November 17, 2007 10:14 PM Jon Jensen wrote:
I understand what you mean by "offsite link", but nevertheless I don't believe there should be any situation where our admin URL would appear as referrer, offsite link or not.It's surprisingly hard to keep a URL secret these days. You can leak a "private" URL to the world by many methods: 1. Follow an offsite link, and the referrer ends up in the next site's logs, often visible to the world in traffic reports or to Google via Google Analytics, etc.
True, though I'd like to think that no reputable plugins should or would. Needless to say I ensure that Google Toolbar is not installed on any of our PCs :-). Even so, whilst I appreciate Google Toolbar "leaks" information to Google I would still be a little surprised if this went so far as "secret", orphaned URLs finding there way into Google's search engine by this means. I am sure there are conspiracy theories out there that suggest this is exactly what happens, and maybe they are true, but I'd like to think it's not quite that bad :-)2. Browser plugins may leak history information to other sites.
3. Spyware may leak URLs to Bad Guys or to some search engine-indexed page.
Very true. Hopefully I don't have any of that :-o :-)
True. But again, whilst I accept the "secret" url could be leaked this way, I would still like to think that it wouldn't make its way as far as someone elses web log as the referring url, or as part of a Google analytics trail on someone elses website, or more importantly into Google's search engine database.4. If you email the URL to a co-worker or whoever, their email provider may snoop on their data (perhaps automatically, as Google does in Gmail for targeted advertising), or #1, #2, or #3 above may apply on the recipient's computer.
I agree, absolutely. And I suppose what I am saying is that if used with care an obscure URL is far more worthy than worthless. I can't help but feel that one is almost inviting script kiddies and malicious folk to have a pop at a dictionary crack if your admin page sits at an obvious URL. And it's the denial of service implications of that which concern me more than the unlikely chance they will succeed in gaining entry.Obscurity isn't security, but it's not worthless, either.
Conversely, it just doesn't seem to make sense to me to use a standard location for an admin page when a non-standard location could be used just as well. To change its location just seems a sensible thing to do to me, which is why I think it is a shame the UI_ADMIN (or whatever it was called) has disappeared.
If it wouldn't be that difficult to replace any hardcoded references to /admin then, as you can see :-), I think it would be worthwhile reintroducing the UI_ADMIN variable. Do you not agree? :-)
Anyway, thanks for your reply and the heads up on potential sources for url leaks.
_______________________________________________ interchange-users mailing list suppressed http://www.icdevgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/interchange-users
Mail converted by mhonarc 2.6.15
This archive provided courtesy of JSW4.NET, Internet Hosting Services for Small Business.