Re: securing a custom app

On 05/23/2010 05:22 PM, David Mehler wrote:

Hello everyone, Thanks. I'm looking in to the ssl, I would like to use it, and it does seem much less work than the alternative. Thanks. Dave. On 5/23/10, Adam Richardson<simpleshot@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 12:40 AM, David Mehler<dave.mehler@gmail.com>wrote:

Hello, I've got a custom app that interacts with a database. I want to use something stronger than .htaccess to protect it and ssl is not available as this is a shared host. There will be several user's accessing this app and updating the database through it. What i was thinking was giving each a unique username, password, and ID string, which would be somehow used to compute a hash and if that would match access could be granted. That's just a guess on my part, i'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks. Dave. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

If you really, really can't get to SSL, you could develop the client-side code to use a java applet as a proxy, and the applet could handle the encryption (I've only done that once and it wasn't worth the work in the long-run, I should have just switched hosts OR clients.) You could also pull off the same effect with a FLEX application, too. And, if you really, really wanted to, you could even develop an ajax application that encrypted the traffic before sending and decrypted any incoming traffic using a hash of a nonce provided by the server and the password of the user (the server-side PHP would perform the complimentary actions.) However, this would be quite a bit of work, and I'm hoping that you can talk someone into a hosting upgrade :) For reference, here's a javascript implementation of AES I've used in the past (there's a port of the corresponding PHP to use linked on the same page): http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/aes.html But, again, I hope you can just switch to a host with SSL. Adam -- Nephtali: PHP web framework that functions beautifully http://nephtaliproject.com

Ah obviously, because it is not done by PHP but managed by the server ! ;) -- Nilesh Govindarajan (निलेश गोविंदराजन) Twitter: nileshgr Facebook: nilesh.gr Website: www.itech7.com