I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

  1. They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.

  2. The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.

  3. This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.

  4. Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

  • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    6 months ago

    I’ve had legacy systems that would encrypt user passwords, but also save the password confirmation field in plain text. There was a multitenent application that would allow front end clients to query across any table for any tenant, if you knew how to change a header. Oh and an API I discovered that would validate using “contains” for a pre-shared secret key. Basically if the secret key was “azh+37ukg”, you could send any single individual character like “z” and it would accept the request.

    Shits focked out here, mate.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Rules I’ve learned from software engineering for almost 2 decades.

      • Never roll your own ORM
      • Never roll your own Auth

      No matter what you think, someone else did it better. Trying to do either of those outside of a hobby environment is pure hubris. “But I can do it better” - no you fucking can’t. I have wasted much much more time debugging shitty “home grown” ORM solutions that clearly some dev just was bored and did than I have spent figuring out the quirks of whatever one I’m using. Same goes for auth. Just learn it.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    One time, I had to request firewall access for a machine we were deploying to, and they had an Excel sheet to fill in your request. Not great, I figured, but whatever.

    Then I asked who to send the Excel file to and they told me to open a pull request against a Git repo.
    And then, with full pride, the guy tells me that they have an Ansible script, which reads the Excel files during deployment and rolls out the firewall rules as specified.

    In effect, this meant:

    1. Of course, I had specified the values in the wrong format. It was just plaintext fields in that Excel, with no hint as to how to format them.
    2. We did have to go back and forth a few times, because their deployment would fail from the wrong format.
    3. Every time I changed something, they had to check that I’m not giving myself overly broad access. And because it’s an Excel, they can’t really look at the diff. Every time, they have to open it and then maybe use the Excel version history to know what changed? I have no idea how they actually made that workable.

    Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, please just let me edit an Ansible inventory file instead. I get that they have non-technical users, but believe it or not, it does not actually make it simpler, if you expose the same technical fields in a spreadsheet and then still use a pull request workflow and everything…