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Old 07-06-2004, 05:17 PM   #1
AZDAVE
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setting up password protected web forms on an apache web server


Good day,
There has been some talk about setting up some password protected forms on our web server. This seems a bit scarey. Before I start into the pro's and con's of this idea, I wanted to know if it was possible and where I could go to get some instructions on how to hande this. I am running an apache web server . Has anybody performed this on a web server? A little help on this would be nice. Thank You.
 
Old 07-06-2004, 08:22 PM   #2
Capt_Caveman
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Doing something like htaccess is pretty straight forward to setup. Once you set it up, a user would navigate to the page with the web form on it, before being granted access to the form, a standard username/password combo-box pops up. Once the user authenticates, then the page loads and they can access the web form. There is a pretty good howto on basic Apache authentication here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/howto/auth.html

More complex authentication mechanisms, such as db authentication are available with Apache as well.
 
Old 07-07-2004, 09:31 AM   #3
AZDAVE
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Thanks... I don't know the security risks involved but it seems that it would open up some holes . Do you know of any security issues with .htacess? I really don't want to setup accounts on the server for people to access a form. The only users I have setup are webmasters and they only have access to their web sites. Thanks again for any ideas you can give me.
 
Old 07-07-2004, 12:03 PM   #4
Capt_Caveman
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Basic htaccess transmits the passwords in plain-text which is not particularly great. A step up from that would be to use digest mode, where an md5 hash of the password is generated and transmitted over the internet rather than the password itself. The downside of that, is that not all browsers support md5 encryption (all of the major ones like IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc do have support). To increase security even further, you could use https.

If you want to put the web form on serious lock down and get draconian for whatever reason, you could use radius authentication or a mandatory VPN.

There are also various third-party Apache modules available that support other authentication types like Kerberos, LDAP, PAM, etc.

Here is a good overview of the basic Apache authentication types and the security implications of each:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/howto/auth.html
 
  


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