Website

The website is the main way to communicate with IceProd. It handles several different jobs:

• Human

  • dataset submission

  • dataset editing, other in progress actions

  • viewing progress

• Computer

  • running task communications

  • site-to-site communications

  • file downloads

  • file proxying

In order to handle the many hundreds or thousands of requests it could get, the website was built on Asynchronous Programming.

Task Communication

Tasks communicate with the server using a json-rpc interface built into the website. For most communications, this involves talking with the database using the internal RPC.

Site-to-Site Communication

Communication between sites also use the json-rpc interface in the website.

Human Interaction

The website can modify things in the database using ajax and the json-rpc interface in the website.

Nginx

The website uses nginx as a front end proxy. Nginx handles all SSL certificate checking, static files, and file uploading before proxying the request to Tornado.

Note that Apache can also be used separately, while Nginx config is built-in.

Security

Details about user accounts are in user_accounts.

CSRF

To protect against Cross-Site Request Forgery (and other session-stealing attacks), the following schemes are used:

Headers

If available, the Origin or Referer headers are checked. If they are not available, JSON-RPC requests are passed while other requests are blocked.

Note

Why are JSON-RPC requests passed?

This is because JSON-RPC serves multiple purposes. Only one of them is for website requests. One other is as an API for scripts or other external entities. But the main purpose is for IceProd task and site communication. In order to not hinder these uses, the headers are left unchecked.

Note that JSON-RPC does not use the user login cookie, so it cannnot be tricked into running cross-site requests that way.

Login

There are two different types of login, which are treated differently.

Web Login

The initial web login will save a secure cookie to identify the user, but this will not in itself grant any access to JSON-RPC or secure areas. The lifetime for the login is measured in days, and is configurable.

When loading a page that needs to make JSON-RPC requests, a very limited lifetime passkey is generated (assume 15 minutes) and inserted in a hidden field in the html. This passkey is then added to JSON-RPC requests.

Secure areas like account details will require a second login before granting access.

JSON-RPC Login

This version directly returns the passkey necessary to execute authenticated JSON-RPC requests. It has a fairly limited lifetime and is designed to be used immediately within the same script.

Warning

Anyone with the passkey can impersonate you for the lifetime of the key. Try not to save it to file, and dispose of it when finished.