This sprint was dedicated to making Survey Solutions more stable, robust and secure. We have introduced numerous patches addressing security concerns.
We appreciate the advice and helpful suggestions that we have received from the UN International Computing Centre (UNICC), National Institute of Statistics (INSSE) Romania, Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries and National Center for Computer Security Incident Response of Uruguay, and The World Bank security team.
The changes introduced in v21.06 are listed below.
- Configurable session length
- Autolock: protection against brute-force attacks
- Control cookies security attribute
- Other changes and bugfixes
Configurable session length
The server administrator may configure a timeout for the duration of the session. In case the device is left unattended and no new queries are submitted from it to the server, the user will be automatically logged out after a predefined interval.
[Authentication]
TicketExpirationTimeOut=00:10:00
The session is automatically extended after each query, so that the users steadily working online will not be affected.
Inactive session length was already limited for web-respondents in the earlier versions, and this limit continues to apply, see limits.
Autolock: protection against brute-force attacks
Survey Solutions defends against brute-force attacks by presenting a CAPTCHA challenge after a number of incorrect login attempts. The administrator can configure the server component in such a way that if the incorrect login attempts continue even with a CAPTCHA engaged, the user account becomes locked for a period of time automatically.
This feature is described in more details in the autolock article.
Control cookies security attribute
New policy control for cookies in the appsettings.production.ini file.
Set this parameter to true if the server is behind a load balancer
(reverse proxy) with SSL termination.
[Policies]
CookiesSecurePolicyAlways=true
Other changes and bugfixes
Update to Survey Solutions v21.05 from an earlier version may have caused a blank dashboard in the Interviewer App on tablets (data stored, not shown), which required a separate synchronization and workspace selection. This has been fixed. We would like to thank Mr. Ashwini Kalantri for promptly reporting this issue in the users’ forum.
Tracking of assignments upgrades: in the assignment history of actions, if the assignment was upgraded from the earlier version of the questionnaire, a message will be present “Upgraded from assignment ####”. Similarly in the data export, for the “Created” event the original assignment number will be exported in the old__value column.
WebTester was reporting incorrect duration of audio recording (1 second regardless of the actual duration of the audio recording). This has been fixed. The issue applied to the WebTester only, not to the actual interviews.
Survey Solutions HQ component failed to automatically verify the availability of the updates. This has been fixed. The updates to the server are now automatically verified, but not automatically installed. The server administrator(s) need to install them as needed.
API users may assign workspaces to users (earlier only administrator-level users could assign workspaces to users). Still, the workspaces which can be assigned to user account are limited by the visibility of workspaces granted by the administrator users to the API account.
Vulnerability allowing HQ-users to submit GraphQL queries beyond the assigned workspaces is now fixed.
Survey Solutions failed to export datasets which involved calculated variables, which caused overflow during calculation. This has been fixed and the data will be exported, but the calculated variable will contain a zero value. The message by Mr. Thorsten Schoel in the user’s forum reporting this issue is much appreciated.
Shapefile was not detected on the tablets if placed in the folder without workspace subfolders. This has been fixed. If there is no shapefile in the workspace-named subfolders, a shapefile in the parent folder will be suggested restoring the behavior established before the introduction of multiple workspaces for a single interviewer. The issue report in the users’ forum by Mr. Klaus Blass is much appreciated.
Interviewer App crashed after answering a categorical question under some conditions. This has been fixed.
Interviewer App crashed if the *.mmpk digital map file didn’t contain any base layer. This has been fixed: the interviewer app will not crash, but such maps are still deemed unusable. The issue report in the users’ forum and example files sent by Mr. Felipe Jimenez are much appreciated.
Updated versions of 3rd party libraries used internally by Survey Solutions.
Removed built-in PDF viewer for the Interviewer App on the tablet. Interviewers should select one of the 3rd party PDF viewers to open questionnaire’s PDF attachments:
