General Security Enhancements

Disabling the login for the admin user as part of the brute force attack prevention improves security by ensuring that the admin privileges are not used by potential attackers using brute force attacks.

The TAE mechanism is designed to ensure both confidentiality and integrity of your data. Whenever you opt for TAE encryption of an attribute in items.xml, the attribute should not be visible to or changeable by unauthorized parties.

As part of our continuous improvement efforts, we have modified the current configuration of TAE to provide increased security for the most sensitive values in your database.

A new configurable property has been added to the advanced.properties file:

toggle.disallowTaeEncryptionFallback.enabled.

This property controls the system's behavior when an unauthorized party attempts to overwrite encrypted attribute values using plaintext directly in the database. Setting this flag to true prevents the use of attacker-provided values in case of a decoding error. The system will not fall back to raw values but will report a data breach and return an exception.

While setting the toggle.disallowTaeEncryptionFallback.enabled to true significantly enhances security, it may potentially impact system behavior in cases where decryption failures were previously silent. System administrators should be aware that applications may now encounter exceptions in scenarios where they previously received plaintext data.

To mitigate possible unwelcome impacts, consider these recommendations:

• Review and update error handling in applications that interact with encrypted data to properly handle the DecryptionException.
• Monitor security logs for decryption failures, as these may indicate attempted security breaches or issues with encryption keys.
• Ensure that encryption keys are properly managed and backed up to prevent legitimate decryption failures.

The creation of administrator and anonymous users during system initialization no longer relies on plaintext.

Previously, the default users: admin and anonymous were set with explicit plaintext encoding to prevent logging failures if there's a change in the default password encoder.

We have redesigned the responsible method to eliminate potentially insecure storage of initial passwords as plaintext. Following the change, admin and anonymous users are initially created as inactive accounts with a null value for both password and password encoding and with the disabled login.

These changes enhance the overall system security by disabling plaintext fallback and refining the user initialization process.

By implementing these modifications, we ensure that the TAE mechanism and user creation process achieve both confidentiality and integrity objectives, providing robust protection against unauthorized access and data tampering.

Logging permission changes ensures that information about such changes can be easily retrieved from log files, which allows you to have a better control over internal processes.

The customer coupon campaign URL was re-factored to improve security.

Implementing a support for verification during B2C or B2B customer registration through OCC API. This verification provides additional security by confirming the owner of the given email.

The rate limit settings prevent generating verification tokens too many times in a given time period.

This feature is activated by default. For more information, see:

• Activating Customer Registration with Verification Token
• Activating Rate limit for Generating Login One-Time Verification Token
• Activating Rate limit for Generating Registration One-Time Verification Token

Automatically unlocking user accounts improves user experience and productivity, reduces IT workload, and maintains security consistency.