Synopse Open Source

JSON Web Token (JWT) is an open standard (RFC 7519) that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed. JWTs can be signed using a secret (with the HMAC algorithm) or a public/private key pair using RSA or ECDSA.

They can be used for:

• Authentication: including a JWT to any HTTP request allows Single Sign On user validation across different domains;
• Secure Information Exchange: a small amount of data can be stored in the JWT payload, and is digitally signed to ensure its provenance and integrity.

See http://jwt.io for an introduction to JSON Web Tokens.

Our mORMot framework now implements JWT:

• HS256 (HMAC-SHA256) and ES256 (256-bit ECDSA) algorithms (with the addition of the "none" weak algo);
• Validates all claims (validation dates, audiences, JWT ID);
• Thread-safe and high performance (2 µs for a HS256 verification under x64), with optional in-memory cache if needed (e.g. for slower ES256);
• Stand-alone and cross-platform code (no external dll, works with Delphi or FPC);
• Enhanced security and strong design - per instance, it is by design immune from https://auth0.com/blog/2015/03/31/critical-vulnerabilities-in-json-web-token-libraries
• Full integration with the framework.

After weeks of implementation and testing, we introduce today a new feature of our mORMot Open-Source Framework.

Asymmetric encryption, also known as public-key cryptography, uses pairs of keys:

• Public keys that may be disseminated widely;
• Paired with private keys which are known only to the owner.

The framework SynEcc unit features a full asymmetric encryption system, based on Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which may be used at application level (i.e. to protect your application data, by signing or encrypting it), or at transmission level (to enhance communication safety).
A full set of high-level features, including certificates and command line tool, offers a stand-alone but complete public-key infrastructure (PKI).

In any modern application, especially on Client/Server nTier architecture as our little mORMot offers, we often have to persist some private keys in a safe way.
Problem with such keys is that they consist in small amount of bytes (typically 16 or 32 bytes), easy to be left somewhere in disk or memory.
Given the abilities of recent forensic data recovery methods, data can't be destroyed on magnetic or flash storage media reliably.

We have just added to our SynCrypto OpenSource library the Anti-forensic Information Splitter algorithm, as proposed in TKS1, and implemented in the LUKS standard.
LUKS is the de-facto standard of platform-independent standard on-disk format for use in various tools.

Everyone knows about the pascal random() function.
It returns some numbers, using a linear congruential generator, with a multiplier of 134775813, in its Delphi implementation.
It is fast, but not really secure. Output is very predictable, especially if you forgot to execute the RandSeed() procedure.

In real world scenarios, safety always requires random numbers, e.g. for key/nonce/IV/salt/challenge generation.
The less predictable, the better.
We just included a Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator (CSPRNG) into our SynCrypto.pas unit.
The TAESPRNG class would use real system entropy to generate a sequence of pseudorandom bytes, using AES-256, so returning highly unpredictable content.

Once your application is multi-threaded, concurrent data access should be protected. We already wrote about how debugging multi-thread applications may be hard.
Otherwise, a "race condition" issue may appear: for instance, if two threads modify a variable at the same time (e.g. decrease a counter), values may become incoherent and unsafe to use. Another symptom of broken logic is the "deadlock", by which the whole application appears to be blocked and unresponsive, when two threads have a wrong use of the lock, so are blocking each-others.
On a server system, which is expected to run 24/7 with no maintenance, such issues are to be avoided.

In Delphi, protection of a resource (which may be an object, or any variable) is usually done via Critical Sections.
A critical section is an object used to make sure, that some part of the code is executed only by one thread at a time. A critical section needs to be created/initialized before it can be used and be released when it is not needed anymore. Then, some code is protected using Enter/Leave methods, which would lock its execution: in practice, only a single thread would own the critical section, so only a single thread would be able to execute this code section, and other threads would wait until the lock is released. For best performance, the protected sections should be as small as possible - otherwise the benefit of using threads may be voided, since any other thread would wait for the thread owning the critical section to release the lock.

We will now see that Delphi's TCriticalSection may have potential issues, and what our framework proposes to ease critical section use in your applications.

There is a very trendy move, since a few years, to value so called "meta-programming".
In short, it is about the ability to treat programs as their data.
It is a very powerful paradigm in functional languages, and it was also introduced to OOP languages, even in SmallTalk a long time before this concept was trendy in Ruby, C# or Java.

In OOP compiled languages, reflection is used to achieve a similar behavior at run-time, mainly via RTTI (Run-Time Type Information).
Delphi supports RTTI since its version 1, as it was heavily used e.g. for all UI streaming.
In our framework, we rely on RTTI for its main features: ORM, SOA and MVC - and even in some other parts, like Desktop UI generation.

But RTTI could easily be abused.
Here are some thoughts, started as a comment in a good old Mason's blog article about how RTTI performance may be a bottleneck.
My comment was to get rid of RTTI, and follow a SOLID implementation with explicit OOP code, like use of interface.

As we already notified in this blog, Embarcadero has been finally bought by IDERA. Delphi users received a letter from Randy Jacops, IDERA CEO. Written in my mother language, in perfect French. Nice! The letter states that they have 20,000 customers... It sounds more realistic than the numbers  […]

Illustrated Spare Parts Catalog is, as its name suggests, a software for creating and publishing spare parts catalogs. It uses mORMot for client-server communication and ORM, and SynPdf for the reporting. Sounds like a powerful solution. It is also a testimony that you could use big databases (20 GB  […]

Just a link found on Internet. Jefferies is also leading a US$425m covenant-lite credit to back Idera's acquisition of Embarcadero Technologies. Idera is backed by TA Associates. The deal, which launches on Thursday, includes a US$25m revolving credit, a US$300m first-lien term loan and a US$100m  […]