Penetration Testing & CERT-IN Audit for FSCW Dept,Govt of Odisha

Food, Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department is a composite Department with the status of both Secretariat and Directorate. Hon’ble Minister, F.S. & C.W. is Minister in charge of the Department. Food, Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department, Government of Odisha created the 4 pillar systems i.e PDS System, Directorate of Legal Metrology, Grievance Redressal System, Food Odisha Portal.

PDS ( Public Distribution System ) Welfare Scheme, The system identifies & categories the weaker section of the population as targeted beneficiaries under various schemes. They receive ration cards from the government to claim their entitlements in the form of specific quantities of essential commodities from the retail outlets every month. The significance of PDS lies in its effort to distribute food grains equitably, & at a fairly low price to the poor of the society. Rice, Levy Sugar and APL Wheat are distributed through public distribution system

Directorate of Legal Metrology, The Legal Metrology wing of the state of Odisha is functioning at the Directorate of Legal Metrology under the Food, supplies & Consumer Welfare Department of Government Headed by a senior most administrative officer designated as Controller of Legal Metrology. All the consumers generally purchase the goods either in Weight or in volume or in length or in numbers etc and the responsibility has been cast upon this organization to ensure that the consumer gets the correct quantity whether it is in Weight, in volume, in length or in numbers for which he has paid the money to the consumer. The Department is engaged in regulating use of correct weighing and measuring instruments in production, trade and commerce to ensure that exact weight, measure and number of any commodity is provided to any customer as contracted for, or paid for by him. It also safeguards consumers’ interest by ensuring mandatory declarations on packaged commodities.

Grievance Redressal System, primarily covers the receipt and processing of complaints from citizens and consumers, a wider definition includes actions taken on any issue raised by them to avail services more effectively for Ration Card under Food, Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department.

Food Odisha Portal, that consists of Transparency Portal with PDS Depots and FPS Delaer and Procurement Societies and Registration. One Portal that managed all Ration Card Management with Farmer Registration, Verified Famer, Procurement Status under PPAS, Farmerwise Payment Status, Societies Engaged, Dealer List, Stock Management, Dealer List and all.

The Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare (FSCW) Department of the Government of Odisha is responsible for managing critical information related to food supplies and consumer welfare, including the Public Distribution System (PDS) welfare scheme, which benefits a large number of citizens. The PDS scheme deals with sensitive information that pertains to the management of ration cards for 2.5 crore citizens under the One Nation One Card initiative. Given the high level of sensitivity of this information, accessing and testing it can be challenging, as it requires the maintenance of strict confidentiality measures.

To address this challenge, the FSCW Odisha has developed four major applications, including the Directorate of Legal Metrology, Grievance Redressal System, Ration Card Management System, and the FSCW PDS Application, each of which must be tested separately to ensure that they meet the necessary security requirements by Threatsys Technologies, The Leading Cyber Security Testing Service Provider in Odisha, India. The primary objective of this testing is to perform a penetration testing and cybersecurity audit on all modules, in accordance with the CERT-in Security Guidelines and other security frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 and SANS Top 25 Vulnerabilities.

The primary focus of this web application security testing is to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data and application, enabling all online citizen services provided by the Government of Odisha to be securely managed throughout the state. Given that the portal deals with different levels of privileges, it is crucial to thoroughly check the permission-based access controls within different user access controls for each of the applications. By doing so, the FSCW Odisha can ensure that its applications are secure, safeguarding sensitive information, and providing reliable and secure services to the citizens of Odisha.

Threatsys, the well-known CERT-IN Cyber Security company of India, has appointed eight security researchers under the Project and Delivery Manager. In order to gain a better understanding of the application, the team thoroughly studied the workflow of the four modules before conducting any security testing. The testing was carried out on a host that was hosted on the staging server, using a variety of commercial cyber security tools, including Burp Suite, IBM App Scan, WhiteHat DAST, Veracode, Acunetix, Intruder, Netsparker, HCL Appscan, Qualsys Web Apps Scanner, OWASP Zap, SAINT, and Tenable.

During the manual testing phase, the team engaged in both black box and white box testing and identified significant security issues in the four applications managed by the Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare (FSCW) Department of the Government of Odisha. One of the applications was found to be vulnerable to Account Takeover due to a misconfiguration, which enabled the team to tamper with the victim’s email and redirect the reset link to the attacker’s email address. To remedy this issue, the team recommended implementing server-side validation of emails sent in response to a request, in order to verify whether they belonged to the requested user or not. With the coordination of the development team, this issue was resolved by adding server-side validation and removing the email parameter from the request.

The team also discovered multiple privilege escalation issues due to the lack of access controls in API requests. As a result, low-end users were able to access admin functionalities, compromising the system’s security. In addition, several other bugs were discovered and reported to the developers with detailed reports on their impact, evidence, and remediation strategies. The team worked closely with the developers to ensure they had a clear understanding of the issues and could address them promptly.

Overall, the team identified more than 35 bugs across all the portals of FSCW, including six critical and 13 high-level vulnerabilities. All projects were delivered and retested within the set deadline, with the development team taking three weeks to fix all the raised security gaps. Threatsys remains committed to ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of the data and applications it works on, helping to safeguard sensitive information and online citizen services managed by the Government of Odisha.

Threatsys has successfully completed the cyber security testing and CERT-IN Security audit project with the utmost diligence and professionalism. The company provided Initial Version 1 and Final Version 2 Reports with the appropriate support on time, and according to the proper security implementation, which has helped to issue the CERT-In VAPT certificate for all four modules of the Food, Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department, Odisha Government

All the modules of Food, Supplies and Consumer Welfare Departments are hosted in the state data centre, ensuring the highest level of security and reliability. The successful completion of the project means that citizens of Odisha can now use the Ration Card Management, PDS System, and Grievance System applications securely. These applications are now well-protected against external threats, and the highly sensitive data they process, store, and fetch are done so flawlessly. Threatsys is the No.1 Cyber Security Testing Company that protects the data of all the citizens of Odisha and responsible for their security, integrity and privacy.