Security considerations

Transmission security

Use https for the web interface as well as for the update client (if possible).

Otherwise, your username / password (FQDN / update secret) will be transmitted in clear text (unencrypted).

The web interface will warn you if you use it via http. If WE_HAVE_TLS is set to True, it will suggest you better use the https site and link there.

Additionally, the service administrator can implement a redirect from the http to the https site within the webserver configuration for the WWW_HOST. The redirect should not be implemented for WWW_IPV4_HOST and WWW_IPV6_HOST as it is unknown whether all update clients can deal with a redirect (and support TLS).

For the router / update client configuration examples we show when creating a update secret, we use update URLs with https: (and we also tell why it might not work).

On the hosts overview page, we show whether we received the last update via TLS.

Please note that if you like security, you also need to use https (with certificate verification) if you use the web-based method to query your IP address. If you use http, a powerful attacker could MITM your request and tell you a wrong IP, which your updater then would happily write into DNS.

Login with remote vs. local Account

If you use a already existing remote account to log in into our service, you don’t need to create a local profile (with username, E-Mail and password).

That way, we need to store less information about you - especially no password hash (and you also don’t need to create a new password just for our service). So, this is a little more safe if you just consider our service.

BUT: If you use some external service to log in, you of course need to trust them for this purpose as they are telling “yes, this is really you”.

Also, if you cancel the account on that external service and you don’t have a local profile (login, E-Mail, password) with us, you will be unable to log in afterwards or recover access to your hosts/domains.

So maybe the best way is to first create a local profile (username, E-Mail, password), then log in and associate your other remote accounts with that local profile.

Passwords / Secrets / Keys

Interactive login password

We recommend that you use a rather strong and not guessable password for this. Do not re-use passwords, use a password system or a password manager.

The interactive login password for the web site is stored using Django’s default hasher mechanism, which is currently pbkdf2 (a very strong and intentionally slow password hash). Brute-Force attacks against such hashes are very slow, much slower than against simple hashes like (s)sha1/sha256 etc.

It is NOT stored in clear text by nsupdate.info.

If you lose the password, you’ll have to do a password reset via e-mail.

Automated update secret

The automated update secret for routers or other update clients is a random and automatically generated secret. We store it using the sha1 hasher of Django (which in fact is salted-sha1, a not very strong, but fast-to-compute hash).

Considering that a lot of routers or update clients store this secret in clear text in their configuration and often transmit it using unencrypted http (and not https), this secret is not too safe anyway. We also wanted to save some cpu cycles here and rather not use pbkdf2 for this regularly and automatically used secret.

It is not stored in clear text by nsupdate.info.

If you lose the secret, you’ll have to generate a new one and change it in your update client also.

We use a random and automatically generated update secret to avoid that users enter a bad password here (like reusing a password they use somewhere else, choosing a too simple password) and to avoid disclosure of such user-chosen passwords in case the hashes ever get stolen and brute forced.

Nameserver Update Secret (backend, RFC 2136)

We currently store this secret (which is basically a base64 encoded shared secret, one per dynamic zone) “as is” into the database (“Domain” records there).

This is somehow critical, but also hard to do better - encryption would only help very little here as we would need to decrypt the update secret before using it, so we would need the unlocked decryption key on the same machine.

Make sure no unauthorized person gets that secret or he/she will be able to update ANY record in the respective zone / nameserver directly (without going over nsupdate.info software / service).

We support creating a random update secret, so you don’t need an extra tool for this.

Other Services Update Secret (dyndns2 client)

We need to store this secret “as is” into the database for the same reasons as outlined above.

But: we tell you in the services overview whether we’ll use TLS to transmit the update, so at least if TLS is enabled, it won’t go unencrypted over the wire.

CSRF protection

We use Django’s CSRF protection middleware.

Clickjacking protection

We use Django’s clickjacking protection middleware.

XSS protection

Django’s templating engine html-escapes inputs by default.

Cookies

The software (“as is”) uses these cookies:

  • “csrftoken” (host-only, for CSRF protection)
  • “sessionid” (host-only, to keep the session when you have logged-in to the web interface)

If you have set WE_HAVE_TLS to True (because you run the software on a https site), you should also set *_COOKIE_SECURE to True to avoid the cookies getting transmitted via http.

We use a session cookie by default (gets cleared when you close the browser). If you check the “Keep me logged in” checkbox on the login screen, then we’ll set a permanent cookie with a lifetime as configured by the site admin (SESSION_COOKIE_AGE, default: 14 days).

Be careful with domain cookies

The software (“as is”) does not use any domain cookies.

In case you modify the software, please be extremely cautious with domain cookies and in case of doubt, do rather not use them.

If you use domain cookies (like for “.yourservice.net”, the leading dot makes it a domain cookie), all hosts in that domain would be able to read and write these cookies. Your site (at e.g. www.yourservice.net), but also users’ sites (like attacker.yourservice.net).

Obviously, this might lead to security issues with stealing, modifying and faking domain cookies.

Django’s SECRET_KEY

Django’s SECRET_KEY needs to be a long, random and secret string (it is usually set up by the administrator of the site).

The builtin default settings will try to read SECRET_KEY from an environment variable of same name. If there is no such environment variable, the SECRET_KEY will be undefined.

You can also define the SECRET_KEY in your local_settings.py.

If you do not define a SECRET_KEY by one of these methods, the application will refuse to start and give you an error, that a SECRET_KEY is required.