Impostor is a Django application which allows staff members to login as a different user by using their own username and password.
Every such authentication is recorded in database and listed in admin interface to everyone with an access to ImpostorLog interface. However it is not possible to delete log entries through admin interface to make covering tracks more difficult.
Impostor was developed and tested with Django 1.2. It might work with other versions too. It also depends on Django's authentication system and assumes you use its usernames for authentication.
Impostor is a MMM project (http://mmm.si) developed by Marko Samastur (markos@gaivo.net) licensed under MIT license.
Impostor won't work, if you are not using Django's auth system. It currently also assumes that you use username to identify your users and not something else (like email).
First install impostor app files as you would any other Django app. Next some changes to your Django settings file are in order. To AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS add:
'impostor.backend.AuthBackend'
This will add impostor auth backend to other backends. AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS is a tuple listing backends and if you don't have it yet, then add following lines to your settings:
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
'impostor.backend.AuthBackend',
)
Also add 'impostor' app to INSTALLED_APPS.
Run 'python manage.py syncdb' to create needed table and you are set.
By now you should have a working system. This means that your staff (users with is_staff flag set to True) can log in as different user by using their password and following concatention:
staff_username as users_username
Example: Let's say my username is markos and I want to login as user fry. Then I would use 'markos as fry' as my username and my normal password for password.
Every such log in is logged in ImpostorLog table that can be seen through Django admin interface, but for obvious security reasons can't be manipulated there.
Impostor also provides a replacement authentication form, because two usernames can easily exceed 30 character limit of original form. Its name is BigAuthenticationForm and you can find it in impostor.forms.
NOTE: Only staff users can use this (you have to turn on is_staff for every user that needs this privilege) and every such log in gets recorded.
- add support for log in with emails
- record when impostor logs out*
- mark "hijacked" requests (so impostor can tell when he is using website as somebody else and avoid doing something stupid or that you can limit what is doable in such case)
- framework for easy notification of hijacked users (so you can notify them that their account has been accessed if you wish)
[*] This feature depends on django auth signals coming in Django 1.3, which I am not using yet.
None. If I knew of any, I would fix it. If you find one, then please let me know.