From: Tanaka Akira <akr@...17n.org>
Date: 2005-12-12T11:32:48+09:00
Subject: Re: About open-uri and ENV["HTTP_PROXY"]

In article <3665a1a00512111049n6fe237a1i7cefbceb25bf07cf@mail.gmail.com>,
  Anatol Pomozov <anatol.pomozov@gmail.com> writes:

> I am investigating problem with Gems and proxy authorization and I have
> question about open-uri code.
> To be precise code from OpenURI.open_loop(uri, options) (Current version
> from CVS)
>
>     when :proxy
>       opt_proxy = options.fetch(:proxy)
>       proxy_user = nil
>       proxy_pass = nil
>
> proxy option mostly come from ENV and could contain information for basic
> authorization: username and password. Something like this
> http://anatol:pwd@www.proxy.com:8080/
> and right way is parse this string and put proxy_user to anatol, proxy_pass
> to pwd and proxy_url to http://www.proxy.com:8080/

Environment variables are not appropriate place to store
passwords since they are visible from other users.

Note that RFC 3986 deprecates "user:password" in the
userinfo field.

| 3.2.1.  User Information
| 
|    The userinfo subcomponent may consist of a user name and, optionally,
|    scheme-specific information about how to gain authorization to access
|    the resource.  The user information, if present, is followed by a
|    commercial at-sign ("@") that delimits it from the host.
| 
|       userinfo    = *( unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims / ":" )
| 
|    Use of the format "user:password" in the userinfo field is
|    deprecated.  Applications should not render as clear text any data
|    after the first colon (":") character found within a userinfo
|    subcomponent unless the data after the colon is the empty string
|    (indicating no password).  Applications may choose to ignore or
|    reject such data when it is received as part of a reference and
|    should reject the storage of such data in unencrypted form.  The
|    passing of authentication information in clear text has proven to be
|    a security risk in almost every case where it has been used.
| 
|    Applications that render a URI for the sake of user feedback, such as
|    in graphical hypertext browsing, should render userinfo in a way that
|    is distinguished from the rest of a URI, when feasible.  Such
|    rendering will assist the user in cases where the userinfo has been
|    misleadingly crafted to look like a trusted domain name
|    (Section 7.6).
-- 
Tanaka Akira