bryant-nupdal / secure-submarine

Secure Submarine

This version uses React, Redux, Express, Passport, and PostgreSQL (a full list of dependencies can be found in package.json). This version uses React to control the login requests and redirection in coordination with client-side routing.

Use the Download ZIP Option (Don't Fork & Don't Clone)

Step 1 - Download ZIP of Project:

• click on the Code button
  • select the Download ZIP option from the menu
• file download should appear at the bottom of your web browser
  • click on the downloaded file icon
• a finder window should open with the assignment folder unzipped in the Downloads directory
• move the folder to where you are keeping your projects

Step 2 - Initialize as a Repo:

• open the project in VSCode
• open up the terminal in VSCode for the project
  • in terminal: run git init
  • in terminal: run git add .
  • in terminal: run git commit -m "initial commit"

Step 3 - Attach GitHub Repo:

• goto GitHub in the browser (make sure you are logged in)
• click on the + icon in the top right of the window
  • select New repository from the menu
• name your repo secure-submarine
• make sure your repo has Public selected
• click the Create repository button at the bottom
• copy the terminal commands listed in the …or push an existing repository from the command line section
• goto your project terminal in VSCode and paste the commands you just copied from GitHub and press return

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Assignment Instructions

Base Mode

On the Secure Submarine, there are many secrets, but our enemies are out to steal our secrets! We just realized that our Secure Submarine web portal (the portal for all of the hottest gossip on the secure submarine) is compromised! Anyone, logged in or not, can visit http://localhost:5000/api/secrets to see all of the secrets for the entire crew!

No Secrets for the Unauthenticated (Authentication)

Task: Only users who are authenticated should see any secrets.

The user router is protected from unauthenticated requests thanks to the rejectUnauthenticated middleware:

router.get('/', rejectUnauthenticated, (req, res) => {
  res.send(req.user);
});

Do this for the secrets route to achieve these results:

• An unauthenticated user visiting http://localhost:5000/api/secrets should get a 403 or forbidden error instead of seeing the secrets.
• A user like Admiral Greer with password tuna should still be able to visit http://localhost:3000/#/secrets to see all of the secrets.

No Secrets Above Clearance Level (Authorization)

Task: When authenticated, a user should only see secrets with a secrecy_level that is equal or less than the user's clearance_level.

A user like Captain Borodin with password shark is be to visit http://localhost:3000/#/secrets to see all of the secrets! That's no good! There's a secret in there that calls him weird!

You should see the clearance level in the console log inside of secrets GET request in secrets.router.js. Now fix the query in secrets.router.js so that it uses the clearance level to determine which secrets to return.

• A user like Captain Borodin with password shark should no longer be able to see any secrets above his clearance_level which is 10.
• A user like Admiral Greer with password tuna should still be able to visit http://localhost:3000/#/secrets to see all of the secrets.

Stretch Goals

Hashing

If you're interested in securely storing passwords, you should salt and hash them. Here is a quick video that explains it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZtInClXe1Q

Right now, we are storing the passwords in plain text, so if the enemy got a hold of our database, they would know everybody's password! Instead of storing plain passwords, we should scramble them up. That is called hashing.

Uncomment this line to start hashing passwords for each user.

return bcrypt.hashSync(password, '$2b$10$p5Wkte33hlOBOcUtJie6H.');

Because the database doesn't store the actual password, we can't just check to see if they are equal like we were doing before. Uncomment this line to allow us to check candidatePasswords (what the user entered), against the storedPassword (the hash in the database).

return bcrypt.compareSync(candidatePassword, storedPassword);

New users will now have their passwords hashed!

Run these queries to add your users back to the database with hashed passwords:

DROP TABLE "user";

CREATE TABLE "user" (
    "id" SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    "username" VARCHAR (80) UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    "password" VARCHAR (1000) NOT NULL,
    "clearance_level" INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
);

INSERT INTO "user" ("username", "password", "clearance_level")
VALUES ('Admiral Greer', '$2b$10$p5Wkte33hlOBOcUtJie6H.PnCvk8v.KjZspVoAFtT7g5v5xK.EXVG', 18),
('Captain Borodin', '$2b$10$p5Wkte33hlOBOcUtJie6H.ZIgFjzr4zY8FItxC8gZyqIWD5gYmL0m', 10),
('Lieutenant Nguyen', '$2b$10$p5Wkte33hlOBOcUtJie6H.vaUd5ikB1LWCbVZAA87BR63NiDorn1C', 4),
('Lieutenant Ryan', '$2b$10$p5Wkte33hlOBOcUtJie6H.PnCvk8v.KjZspVoAFtT7g5v5xK.EXVG', 4);

Salting

Now that we are no longer storing plain text passwords. The enemy is unable to see the crew's passwords. However, Lieutenant Ryan has been careless, and the enemy knows that his password is tuna. Because of this, they can see the lowest security information. Then they notice that Admiral Greer's hashed password perfectly matches Lieutenant Ryan's hashed password! They now know that Admiral Greer's password is tuna as well! We should fix our code so that even if two people have the same password, it has a different hash in the database. Enter salting! Salting is the process of generating a random string for each user. Notice that every password starts with $2b$10$p5Wkte33hlOBOcUtJie6H.. That is the salt! These should be random and generated uniquely for each user.

Uncomment these two lines to start creating a unique salt for each user.

const salt = bcrypt.genSaltSync(SALT_WORK_FACTOR); // This generates a random salt

return bcrypt.hashSync(password, salt);

New users will now have their passwords salted and hashed!

Run these queries to add your users back to the database with hashed passwords:

DROP TABLE "user";

CREATE TABLE "user" (
    "id" SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    "username" VARCHAR (80) UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    "password" VARCHAR (1000) NOT NULL,
    "clearance_level" INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
);

INSERT INTO "user" ("username", "password", "clearance_level")
VALUES ('Admiral Greer', '$2b$10$uxPm0qeJAz70oqhEg8dX6uXlYc2PWUtPuZhTa65OiDv2LCHA41OLq', 18),
('Captain Borodin', '$2b$10$iUCrWSMvLpYuKQLsmmTiNe3gfU6jAdyElCbCLtboVH6DlXJdsuPxG', 10),
('Lieutenant Nguyen', '$2b$10$/3yhbbjXPPf3L4Z1gXDA5OJzJkf6b.2CuvIA8OzP6c8jPEQlbo5re', 4),
('Lieutenant Ryan', '$2b$10$hr1Tlo6K.yxAq3FC4iIHsuYQwYpjQC8SyDnYykMu/LNB9TXMkxMt2', 4);

Admiral Greer and Lieutenant Ryan still have the same passwords as before, but it's not easy to see that because of salting and hashing.

Create an Environment Variable

SERVER_SESSION_SECRET is supposed to be a secret, but right now we are pushing it to GitHub! Let's create an environment variable so that we don't do this.

• Uncomment // return process.env.SERVER_SESSION_SECRET; in session-middleware.js
• Run npm install dotenv to get the node module that can create environment variables
• Add the line require('dotenv').config(); to the top of server.js to use the module
• add .env to your .gitignore file
• Create a .env file at the root of the project and paste this line into the file:

  SERVER_SESSION_SECRET=superDuperSecret
  

  While you're in your new .env file, take the time to replace superDuperSecret with some long random string like 25POUbVtx6RKVNWszd9ERB9Bb6 to keep your application secure. Here's a site that can help you: https://passwordsgenerator.net/.