Adding a security concerned feature

[Shoury Sharma]

Hello everyone!

I was going though idea of admin page but sometimes it can be a security concern regarding access of admin stuff by URL/admin.

I would therefore like to give a suggestions regarding the URL/admin to be some key which only the owners would have access to so the user can never have anyway to check admin by penetrating into it in any malicious way.

Generous regards,

Shoury Sharma

[Arvind Nedumaran]

The one I follow is to set an environment variable to see if it’s a public facing instance or a private one (disconnected from the internet) and use that as a condition, which when true will add some urls.

It’s the same pattern you’ll follow when using something like Django debug toolbar - where you check if debug is true and if it is, you add some more urls to the root urlconf conf.

Hope that helps.

P.s. This is the mailing list for contributions to Django itself. Questions about how to use django are better suited in the Django Users mailing list or the forums.

Onward,
Arvind

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[Adam Johnson]

Hi Shoury

I agree that this is an easy thing to change to prevent discovery of the admin. I've done it on several projects, and I saw Will Vincent mentioned it in his recent article on security: https://learndjango.com/tutorials/django-best-practices-security

Implementation-wise, perhaps we could add another system check that checks if /admin is routed to the admin, and recommends it be changed if so.

That said, such a check would not apply in every situation. I've seen Django projects that are *only* the admin, or that only exist on an internal trusted network, and there the '/admin' URL may be of use for discovery.

We also have other possible, stronger defenses here, such as adding rate-limiting to the login page: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/21289 .

Thanks,

Adam

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Adam

[Carles Pina i Estany]

Hi Adam, Shoury,

About '/admin' URL to not be routed to admin: I can't remember if this
is documented in Django documentation (I can't find it right now). But
a lot of documentation on the internet says to change, in urls.py, from
path('admin/') to path('admin-something'). In my opinion the admin path
should be stored with the secrets of the application (like S3 keys,
SECRET_KEY, etc.) to make sure that it doesn't get into
GitHub/somewhere.

Another idea would be to create the ADMIN_URL='admin/' variable by
default in settings.py with a comment next to it: similar to SECRET_KEY
and also add a deployment check. So all (or more) changes to go to
production happen in settings.py instead of different places. Users
would be more aware of this from the beginning as well while editing
settings.py.

Either way: I'd be happy to write a django check to make sure that
'admin/' is not routed to admin.

rate-limiting: recently I've started using django-axes. I don't know if
any inspiration could be taken from there (
https://github.com/jazzband/django-axes ).

Cheers,

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[Carles Pina i Estany]

Hi,

On Nov/16/2020, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:

> Either way: I'd be happy to write a django check to make sure that
> 'admin/' is not routed to admin.

Regarding this check: this morning I've done a very preliminary/for fun
draft to play with.

https://github.com/cpina/django/commit/199c2fb26dc6b323195b8136bda596d1cc9857f1

I'm not sure what is the best way to check if /admin is routed to
django.contrib.admin. At the moment it's doing:

resolve(admin_url)._func_path == 'django.contrib.admin.sites.index'

Yes, I know! :-)

I could also do something along the lines of:
resolve(admin_url).func.admin_site == admin.site

This causes problems on the unit test side (need to import admin.site).
Still I don't really like it.

Does anyone have any better suggestions or comments? (or code pointer).
Otherwise later on I'll have another look.

Thank you very much,

[Tim Graham]

I'm not convinced that a system check promoting security by obscurity adds much value. The original poster wrote "sometimes it can be a security concern." Maybe that's the case (how so?) but for most sites I would say it's not.

[Carles Pina i Estany]

Hi,

I wasn't convinced about changing the 'admin' path until recently. My reasons to change the path of 'admin' are:

-A bit less likely to be affected by bugs like
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/releases/3.0.1/#cve-2019-19844-potential-account-hijack-via-password-reset-form
: at least the site wouldn't appear in automatic scans for
vulnerabilities (if checking Django versions based on the admin
template, etc.) . The bug/exploit might have been known before the fix
was implemented (and everyone updated) so I prefer to not be exposed (or
less exposed)

-At the moment in Django there is no rate-limiting login attempts "out
of the box" so I prefer to avoid the opportunity if possible

-Partially out of my control: an 'admin' user might have used the same
password in another place and the password got leaked

Other people might have other reasons.

Cheers,

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[Carlton Gibson]

I think I'd come down as -1 for a system check here... 

They're not costless, there's a tendency to want to add a new system check for every possible configuration choice, but, beyond implementing and maintaining, the danger is it leads to too much noise. 

If you get a system check warning, you shouldn't be tempted to ignore it. In general I think reserving the built-in checks slightly means they don't get devalued. (Folks are free, and encouraged, to implement, and share, their own checks to enforce project-level standards.)

I think it's not sufficiently clear-cut that using `/admin/` is a bad idea to justify including a check. 

(On a personal note, I like to use `/admin/`, configure nginx to only serve the admin from the localhost, and then use an SSH tunnel to access it remotely, so I'd have to silence a system check here.) 

C.

[Shoury Sharma]

 I've got this idea with the usage of json files that require some keys which is authenticated for a single user which seems to excite me for fact that if this was similar for admin/, then it'd give django a overhead advantages for future use.

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[Carlton Gibson]

On this topic, a ticket proposing to prepend the project name to the `admin/` URL in the default project template was opened.

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/32209

Given that it's the exact discussion we're having here, I've paused that to see if there's a consensus for a change.

Thanks. C.

[r...@whidbey.com]

FWIW, I agree with Tim and Carlton.  There doesn't seem to me to be a compelling argument for recommending developers to change the default "/admin" url.  Any security concerns would hopefully be addressed by actual security safeguards rather than changing names to something non-standard.

[Arvind Nedumaran]

A security model doesn’t necessarily have to be any one thing that’s 100% secure. It can be a combination of things which include “actual” security features as well as plain ol’ obscurity.

If I have to register the admin urls on a project, I make sure to setup django-honeypot and move the admin site to something non-standard.

Any one thing may not be doing much on it’s own. But the combination, if messy enough to make someone give up, will give you a better overall security situation.

Just my 2¢.

Onward,
Arvind

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[Collin Anderson]

Hi All,

I think at minimum we should change the default admin url for new projects, as that's very easy to do, and it does provide a lot of value for new projects. This helps Django to be secure by default.

I use the default /admin/ url for my projects and bots are regurarly trying different password combinitations. In addition, security scanners are now starting to warn if you have an /admin/ url visible on your website.

It would be a ton of work for me to change it, but it would be trivial if this were a new project.

I think adding the project name as a prefix would help a lot and be very easy to do.

https://github.com/django/django/compare/master...collinanderson:patch-14

(and then the docs would need to be updated too.)

Thanks,

Collin

[Aaron C. de Bruyn]

That's security through obscurity that isn't too difficult to get past.  It certainly raises the bar a bit, but like you said, the root problem is someone finding a login box and hammering away trying to guess usernames and passwords.  I'm betting your 'standard' login box isn't difficult to find if your site has one.  Once you have cracked an account, see if it gets you into /admin.

I use django-axes.  If you keep guessing passwords, your IP gets banned.

Maybe a warning could be set that says "Your admin URL is at /admin, we recommend you change that"?

I think the combination of blocking IPs and having a different admin URL would raise the bar quite a bit.

-A

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[Collin Anderson]

> combination of blocking IPs and having a different admin URL would raise the bar quite a bit.

So having a different default admin URL would help, right?

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[Aaron C. de Bruyn]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 9:23 AM Collin Anderson <cmawe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> combination of blocking IPs and having a different admin URL would raise the bar quite a bit.

So having a different default admin URL would help, right?

Sure.  But so would disconnecting the network cable from your server. :)

It's all about practicality.

Using something similar to django-axes raises the bar quite a bit, but simply obscuring the URL doesn't do much.

I have plenty of apps exposed with the admin URL being '/admin/', but no one's been able to compromise the site because I use django-axes to block repeated attempts, and I have a strong password.  On several of the sites I require logins with a YubiKey.

In my worthless opinion, I think it would be better to leave it in the urlconf but commented out with a note that says "you might want to change the admin URL to something different before you enable it for $REASONS".  Maybe have something in the docs on deploying your code into production that goes over it too.

-A

[Daryl]

My 2c:

The analogy is pretty straightforward here; 

- changing the admin URL is like putting your house's front door key slot in a strange, unique place, so that additional *knowledge* is required to unlock it.

- django-axes, fail2ban, etc is like having a bouncer standing beside the door, watching for suspicious activity and ejecting anyone who clearly doesn't have a genuine key.

Changing your admin URL is not a waste of time, but if your time is precious, spend it on ensuring your users have strong passwords, and that your logon page can't be abused.

D

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