It’s fairly well established that you shouldn’t be storing your application’s deployment-specific configuration options directly in your source code. Keeping secrets in your code unnecessarily expands your application’s circle of trust. But did you know that by keeping secrets in your code you may inadvertently be leaking them to your clients?

The Setup

Let’s pretend that we have a Meteor method that’s called whenever a user purchases something in our application. Knowing that we want to leverage latency compensation, we define this method in a shared location so both the client and server have access to it. In a server block, the method adds a transaction to our payment processing system. In order to add this payment, we need to pass along a secret key associated with our application to verify that we authorize the transaction.

Take a look at the method:

Meteor.methods({
    purchase: function(item) {
        // checks and validation
        ...
        if (Meteor.isServer) {
            Payments.add(..., 'XYZ-SSECRET-KEY');
        }
    }
});

It’s very important that we keep our secret key a secret! If anyone other than our server has access to our key, they would be able to add payments on our behalf.

The Problem

Unfortunately, in this scenario, our secret key is not being kept a secret. To grab our key, a malicious user would simply need to open their browser console anywhere in our application and grab the purchase method’s source:

Meteor.connection._methodHandlers.purchase.toString();

"... 'XYZ-SSECRET-KEY' ..."

Our fundamental error here is assuming that our Meteor.isServer guard prevents code from being shipped to the client. This isn’t always true! When a method is defined in a location that is visible to both the client and the server, it’s entire handler function is passed to the client, server-only code and all.

Check out my post on black box auditing Meteor methods to get a better understanding of what code is made visible to the client.

The Solution

The quickest solution to this problem is to move our secret key out of our code and into our settings file:

{
    "payment_secret": "XYZ-SSECRET-KEY"
}

Our updated purchase method would look like this:

Meteor.methods({
    purchase: function(item) {
        // checks and validation
        if (Meteor.isServer) {
            Payments.add(Meteor.settings.payment_secret);
        }
    }
});

From a client/server perspective, nothing has changed. Our Meteor.isServer block is still being sent to the client. The fundamental difference with this approach is that Meteor.settings.payment_settings is not available on the client. Even if a malicious user digs into the method’s source on the client, they won’t get to our secret key.