New Password Masking Feature in HttpWatch 10

calendarMarch 13, 2015 in HTTPS , HttpWatch , Security

One of the commonly voiced concerns with previous versions of HttpWatch was that the log file  may record passwords used to log into web based systems. If you looked at the POST tab after logging into a site you would usually be able to find the password in clear text:

Password on POST Data tab

HttpWatch 10 for Windows and iOS now includes a feature that will mask out the passwords for most commonly used login pages. It works by looking for form submits where the POST parameter name suggests a password or some other form of sensitive data. Any POST field that meets the matching criteria will have each character of input replaced with an asterisk (*).

For example, here’s the POST Data tab in HttpWatch showing a login to a Google account:

Masked Password

The password characters have been masked out and colored in green. The banner and icon on the tab also confirm that password masking has occurred. The masking also applies at the network level in the Stream tab:

Password Masking in Stream

Although the actual password was sent to the web server, HttpWatch only records the masked version of the password in the Stream tab.

The criteria used to select POST fields for masking is based on checking whether a list of sub-strings occur in the name. The default sub-strings of ‘pwd’, ‘pass’, ‘secure’ and ‘secret’ catch passwords on most sites but the list is configurable in Tools->Options:

Password Masking Options

You could change the list if a password field is not being masked or if you want to turn off the feature completely.

The same masking functionality is built into the POST Data section of the iOS app:

Password Masking on iOS

and a new Settings view allows the substrings to be modified:

ios_mask_options

There are still some security related issues to consider when recording and sharing log files:

  1. The password masking feature doesn’t hide the length of the underlying password as it uses a character for character substitution.
  2. Cookies used for session management are still recorded in the log file and could be re-used to access the logged in session if they have a long expiration time.
  3. Content seen in the logged in session is recorded, e.g. html and images
  4. Query string values are recorded but it’s probably  best to not put anything of a security sensitive nature in a URL

However compared to previous versions, the masking of submitted passwords is a significant improvement to security when sharing log files with third parties.

A Simple Performance Comparison of HTTPS, SPDY and HTTP/2

calendarJanuary 16, 2015 in Firefox , HTTP/2 , HTTPS , HttpWatch , SPDY , SSL

Firefox 35 was released this week and became the first browser to enable support for the HTTP/2 protocol by default.

The HTTP/2 specification has not been finalised so Firefox actually enabled the Draft 14 version of HTTP/2 but little is expected to change in the final draft. Google is now supporting HTTP/2 draft 14 on its web servers alongside the SPDY protocol giving us a chance to compare the performance of raw HTTPS, SPDY and HTTP/2 on the same web page.

We also updated HttpWatch this week so that it supports HTTP/2 within Firefox. It has new columns to display information about the protocols being used by each request:

New HTTP/2 Columns

The Performance Comparison

The performance test used HttpWatch with Firefox to run a series of simple page load tests against the Google UK home page using the three protocols:

  • Raw HTTPS
  • SPDY/3.1
  • HTTP/2

We switched between the protocols by enabling and disabling the following entries in Firefox’s about:config page:

Controlling FIrefox Protocol Support

Each test was performed in a fresh instance of Firefox with an empty browser cache. Although this testing was simplistic and only used a simple page it does highlight some important differences between the protocols.

Test #1 – Size of Request and Response Headers

Most sites already use compression when downloading textual content as it provides a significant performance benefit. Unfortunately, HTTP/1.1 doesn’t support the compression of HTTP headers that are attached to every HTTP request and response. SPDY and subsequently HTTP/2 were designed to address this shortcoming using different types of compression.

SPDY uses the general purpose DEFLATE algorithm whereas HTTP/2 uses HPACK that was specifically designed to compress headers. It uses predefined tokens, dynamic tables and Huffman compression.

It’s possible to see the difference in the generated header sizes by looking at a request that has no content. On the Google UK home page there is beacon request that returns no content (a 204 response). These screen shots from HttpWatch show the size of the request headers in the ‘Sent’ column and the size of the response headers in the ‘Received’ column:

HTTPS header sizesSPDY header sizes

HTTP/2 header sizes

WINNER: HTTP/2

HTTP/2 has significantly smaller header sizes due to its use of the HPACK algorithm.

Test #2: Size of Response Message

The response message from the server is made up of the response headers and the encoded response content. Given the fact that HTTP/2 creates the smallest headers shouldn’t it always have the smallest response message?

In HttpWatch this seems to be the case for image resources:

HTTPS Image Response Size SPDY Image Response SizeHTTP/2 Image Response Size

However, for textual resources SPDY consistently has smaller response messages even though its headers would be larger than HTTP/2:

HTTPS Text Response Size SPDY Text Response Size HTTP/2 Text Response Size

The reason for this is the optional padding bytes that can be added to the HTTP/2 DATA frame. HttpWatch doesn’t currently show the padding but in our debug logs we can see that the Google servers add padding to the data frames of textual resources. The reason given in the HTTP/2 spec for using padding is:

Padding can be used to obscure the exact size of frame content, and is provided to mitigate specific attacks within HTTP. For example, attacks where compressed content includes both attacker-controlled plaintext and secret data (see for example, [BREACH]).

Padding isn’t used for image resources because they already have a compressed format that will not contain attacker controlled plain text.

WINNER: SPDY

The larger response bodies seen on the Google servers are due to the use of padding in data frames. Although, HTTP/2 produces larger responses than SPDY its encrypted connections could potentially be more secure. This may be an area where tuning can be performed in a trade off between security and performance.

Test #3 : Number of TCP Connects and SSL Handshakes Required During Page Load

Browsers achieved a performance boost in HTTP/1.1 by increasing the maximum number of connections per host name from two to six or more. This allowed greater concurrency during the download of a page at the cost of extra TCP connections and SSL handshakes . Increasing concurrency allows the bandwidth of the network to be used more effectively because it reduces the blocking of requests.

SPDY and HTTP/2 support concurrency on a single TCP and SSL connection by using multiplexing to allow more than one request at a time to send and receive data on a single connection.

By adding the ‘Connect’ and ‘SSL Handshake’ timings as a columns in HttpWatch you can see that SPDY:

SPDY Connections

And HTTP/2:

HTTP/2 Connections

Only create connections for different host names. Whereas, raw HTTPS may create more than one connection per host name to improve concurrency:

HTTPS Connections

EQUAL WINNERS: SPDY & HTTP/2

The multiplexing support added in SPDY and HTTP/2 reduces the number of connections that have to be setup to download a page. As a side benefit web servers will not have to maintain as many active TCP connections when HTTP/2 usage becomes more widespread.

Test #4: Page Load Time

The ‘Page Load’ event in HttpWatch shows when the page was fully downloaded and available for use. In most cases this a reasonable measure of the speed of the page as seen by a visitor to a web site.

The screeen shots below show the Page Load time for each of the three protocols:HTTPS Page Load

SPDY Page Load HTTP/2 Page Load

WINNER HTTP/2

The Page Load timing was worse for raw HTTPS probably due to the lack of header compression and the additional TCP connections and SSL Handshakes required. For more complex pages the speed advantage of SPDY and HTTP/2 should be even greater.

We also found that HTTP/2 was consistently faster than SPDY even though its response messages were often larger. The advantage was probably due to the smaller GET request messages produced by HPACK compression. Our network connection to the internet, like many others, is asymmetric in nature – the network upload speed is less than the download speed. This means that any saving in uploaded data has much more impact than the equivalent saving in downloaded data.

Conclusion

HTTP/2 is likely to provide significant performance advantages compared to raw HTTPS and even SPDY. However the use of padding in response messages is an area of potential concern where there could be a trade-off between performance and security.

You can check for HTTP/2 using our new SSL test tool SSLRobot . It will also look for potential issues with the certificates and TLS/SSL configuration used by your site. Try it now for free!

 

Google Has Given HTTPS A Huge Boost

calendarJuly 7, 2014 in HTTPS , HttpWatch , Optimization , SPDY , SSL

For a while now there’s been talk of Google favoring secure HTTPS pages in its results. We just noticed this week that any Google searches for content on our web site now return secure HTTPS URLs instead of HTTP:

Google HTTPS Results

It’s not clear when this happened but a quick check on our web server shows that nearly 75% of all connections were HTTPS:

HTTPS Connections Chart

Only a year or so ago HTTPS connections only made up about 10% of all connections. The percentage of HTTPS URLs being used is only going to increase as more people find HTTPS based results on Google and then share them in web pages, emails and social media.

So if your site supports based HTTP and HTTPS then HTTPS is now the most important in terms of optimising performance. The good news if that HTTPS isn’t necessarily much slower than HTTP and may be even faster if you support SPDY.

UPDATE July 7, 2014: There’s been a lot of interest in this post and some people have been jumping on the SEO implications of this. We’re not implying that your site will get ranked higher than other sites if you have HTTPS. What we’re saying is that if your site has both HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same content that Google will now return an HTTPS link. The biggest implication is that if you support HTTPS most of traffic will now be using HTTPS rather than HTTP.

UPDATE August 6, 2014 – Google has confirmed that HTTPS will be used as a ranking signal in Google Search.

You can check SSL/TLS configuration our new SSL test tool SSLRobot . It will also look for potential issues with the certificates, ciphers and protocols used by your site. Try it now for free!

 

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