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Twin-Cities-Mutual-Aid / twin-cities-aid-distribution-locations

A webapp to coordinate aid and care in the Twin Cities.
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Security concerns #36

Open andyinabox opened 4 years ago

andyinabox commented 4 years ago

Wanted to open an issue so we can have an ongoing discussion for how to address security related to this project. A first step is captured in #27.

My main concern in raising this is the possibility that this map could be used to target donation centers for harassment, but that's also just a risk inherent to the project. I'm sure there are other concerns as well.

This doesn't necessarily need to be limited to technical solutions but anything that will help keep our volunteers safe and prevent any malicious attacks on the site.

jdalt commented 4 years ago

I can't speak too deeply to the massive volunteer data sourcing project, but these folks provide an enormous amount of moderation and insight before anything gets on the map. There's no automatic way something to just put data on the map. It all goes through people.

That said it's not completely obvious how to contact these folks if you're at a site and something is wrong. Creating a fast and usable mechanism to correct problematic data could be really valuable. It would be nice to get more insight on this from the volunteers though. We don't want to create an extra hitch in their workflow they're not ready to handle.

jasonthibeault commented 4 years ago

I think with a decent moderation team, and all our data living in a tightly controlled Google Sheets, the real attack vectors are going to be human engineering and possibly attacks on Google itself -- which I'm not sure we can do much about. Another potential vector would be somehow defacing the site at Netlify and changing the URL for the source spreadsheet to something garbage. These seem unlikely and rather outside our control, though.

We may also need to consider just throwing CloudFlare between the internet and Netlify. I don't know how well they handle DDoS attacks but if this gets big and relied upon enough, disrupting it could really suck for the people on the ground.

kmarekspartz commented 4 years ago

A one-click "hide a location" button in the sheet, so the data curators have control over this, seems like a good compromise.