Currently, I'm trying to access Graph API from within a (Standard) Logic App to search for Sharepoint documents. To do so, I try using the following flow (I need delegated permissions, application permissions cannot use search endpoint):
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/integrations-on-azure-blog/calling-graph-api-from-azure-logic-apps-using-delegated/ba-p/1997666
As one can see in the blog post above, there is a step where the following string gets passed into the body of the first request to get an access token for a delegated user:
grant_type=password&resource=https://graph.microsoft.com&client_id=client_id&username=serviceaccountusername&password=serviceaccountpassword&client_secret=clientsecret
Now the client secret and service account password are two things which I absolutely don't want to have visible in the Logic App code and/or designer screen. Is there a way to securely read these from for instance the 'app settings' (in which I could reference them from a KeyVault)? I really can't find a good way on how to achieve this and I think it's a must to not be able to read these secrets/passwords from the Designer/code view.
Definitely use a KeyVault and make sure that for all steps involved, secure the inputs/outputs where ever that secret information may be visible.
The below example is the call to get the secret and therefore, I only want the outputs to be secured.
Result
With your HTTP call, it's likely that you'll only want the inputs to be secured.
Be sure to use a managed identity on your LogicApp and then assign that managed identity to the KeyVault Secrets User role on the KV itself.
There's plenty of documentation on this topic ...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/create-managed-service-identity?tabs=consumption
Related
This is my first question, so I hope I don't miss a thing. To be clear from the start: I don't expect an answer which dives deep into detail. This is just about getting a general understanding of how to work with this kind of software.
So I don't know if "Identity Management System" is a suitable term for what I mean but when I talk about Identity Management Systems I think of something like Azure AD, which as far as I know provides e.g. web developers the possibility to integrate a way users can authenticate (including access privilege etc.) on their website.
What I'm quite unsure about is how to work with/ integrate such tools in a project. I will try to make it clear with an example: Assuming I have a website let's say this website is a blog. The blog consist of different posts which are stored in my own database which is connected to the website. The posts are written by different users which authenticate with a tool like Azure AD. The user's data is stored somewhere on a server run by e.g. Microsoft. If I want to display the posts togethere with the name, email.... of the user who wrote them, how would I do this?
Is it possible to query the user's data directly from the Identity Management System and display it? This does not sound ideal to me as the consequence would be that data the website uses is stored in two different locations.
Would you kind of copy the user's data from the Identity Management System to the websites database and query it from there? This does not sound like a good solution either because then data would be duplicated.
So whats the "right workflow"?
I appreciate any hints and further information I can get:-)
AFAIK To get the user's information like name, email etc. you can add these claims while generating the JWT token.
To generate access token, you have multiple authentication flows such as Authorization code flow, ROPC flow, Implicit flow.
To add the claims that you need to return with the token, you can make settings like below:
Go to Azure Portal -> Azure Active Directory -> App Registrations -> Your app -> Token configuration -> Add optional claims
When you decode the token via JSON Web Tokens - jwt.io you can find the user information that you need.
To know how to generate access token, you can refer SO Thread which I solved it before.
I'am creating application which can be used by unknown and logged in users. Only difference is that logged in user can use some additional functions like saving its content in database.
All communication is based on ajax calls, so what I need is to deny access to some controller functions (end points) in backend for unknown users and on the client side I need to know that it is in logged in state to set this extra functions active. Only one page, login form should be in dialog. I'm little bit confused, because standard Spring Security aproach doesn't fit this case. I was reading this tutorial but I cant't fully understand it.
First: What Principal object does? They send credentials to this endpoint on submit with login() function but where is handled password check? What if I have my users in database?
Second Is it possible to write this configuration in XML style? I guess that it can be done with <intercept-url/> in spring-security.xml file.
Principal Object
The Principal Object is used to be able to get basic information about a user that is attempting to login when using automatic server authentication (i.e. LDAP). However, you will only be able to get a username from the principal object. With a server JBoss/WildFly, for example, you can link the server to Active Directory to allow Microsoft Windows to authenticate users.
Simple Solution
First, Spring Security will add additional complexity to your application where it doesn't sound like you are trying to do that. Instead, use a simple Servlet Filter. If you are using LDAP on a JBoss/WildFly sever, you can make a POST to j_security_check and the server will send the request to the filter if correct credentials are provided. Inside the filter, you may use the getName() function of the Principal object to get the username so that you may store it in the user's session. However, if you are not using LDAP, you may make a simple POST to a Java Servlet or Spring Controller (with an #RequestMapping) to attempt to login the user and store the user's information in the session.
At this point, you can filter out what URLs you will allow users to see. For example, the URL that contains /administrator/some/other/stuff.jsp could be restricted if the URL contains the word "administrator" in the first directory of the URL.
I am creating an Angular application, and I am having trouble wrapping my head around the proper way to ensure my application and its users is secure.
I've been reading around many stack discussions, but I believe I am missing some core understanding of what is happening, please correct any errors you see written below.
So far I have a Sinatra server with many (currently mostly hypothetical) resource routes. A user can create an account using an email address and password that is stored in a database after being hashed with BCrypt. When a user logs in, the record is retrieved from the database by email and the password checked for authentication. It is from this point I am not sure how to proceed.
Prior to this I have simply set a session variable and had the server check that the variable exists in order to correctly route logged in users. Now my application is (currently) a single HTML page that uses Angular and ui-router to display different content, so most of the requests are simply returning JSON content.
It is my understanding that Restful applications should generally not use sessions, or rather that the server should respond identically to identical requests and not have its own data that shapes a response. But if I do not store something in a session variable, how could the server know that the client making the request has the correct permissions? And are sessions not stored in the browser anyway, thus not part of the server?
I believe from what I have read, it is possible to create a token which is essentially a large random string, return that string to the client and also store it in a database with a timestamp. The client then provides this token when making requests and the server hits the database to verify it exists and valid. But would the client not also have to store that string in a cookie? I suppose the angular application could store the token in a variable, which would persist while using the ui-router but not if the users navigates using the address bar.
I also do not understand how Basic Auth may or may not fit into this picture. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as well as a pointer to some good resources where I may find a better understanding of these concepts in general.
You want to read up on JWT. There are JWT libraries for Ruby and Angular.
I know you aren't using Node for your backend but a very easy way to see all the pieces working together is to run the angular-fullstack Yeoman generator. It uses JWT and the code is easy to follow.
As far as I can see, whatever you are doing with your sessions can work just fine.
This can be a sample JSON response from the server in case the user is not loged in :
{
"errorCode": 1,
"error": "User not logged in",
"data": {}
}
You can set your own error codes and handle what you want to do. You will send any data only if the user is logged in. For all the pages which don't require authentication, you can set data to whatever you want.
On the angularJS side, you can handle based on error codes, you can redirect the user to the login page and so forth.
The alternate way to support the same on multiple platforms is to use token based approach. The token based approach in simple words work this way.
The user logs in for the first time with his / her credentials.
The server verifies these information and creates a token from which the server is able to decode the user id.
Whenever the client makes the requests, it passes its token with every request.
As the server can decode the user information from the token, it sends or doesn't send the data based on whether that's a right token or not.
The token depends on a secret value. It can be same for all the users or differnet for each based on how you want to implement.
This is all done and you can look at
http://jwt.io/
As #andy-gaskell mentioned, you can look at
http://angular-tips.com/blog/2014/05/json-web-tokens-introduction/
I'm very bad at explaining. Please let me know if any of this doesn't make sense.
you are missing the point of the REST concept. One of the main concepts in the REST apis is that the server should be stateless - this means that you should not store sessions or other "state" in your web server. Every HTTP request happens in complete isolation. Every request should include all data needed by the server to fulfill the request.
But if I do not store something in a session variable, how could the
server know that the client making the request has the correct
permissions?
You can store request scoped variables. This means that they should be only active during the same request. You can store the current logged in user in the request scoped variable. In that way you can get the current user in your invocation of the business method. I'm not familiar with Sinatra but here is the doc: http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro.html#Request/Instance%20Scope
But would the client not also have to store that string in a cookie?
of course you should store your access token in the client side
https://stormpath.com/blog/where-to-store-your-jwts-cookies-vs-html5-web-storage/
as #Andy Gaskell suggest take a look at JWT and fullstack application code generators and forget about the basic auth because it's really "basic".
more useful links:
If REST applications are supposed to be stateless, how do you manage sessions?
http://www.sitepoint.com/php-authorization-jwt-json-web-tokens/
I've got AngularJS and Web.API WAAD authentication up and running. For client side I use great library ADAL.JS. For backend I use Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth. This part went quite smooth.
Now I want to implement authorization based on roles (which will be mapped to WAAD groups). Groups are not included in authentication token so I must ask Azure Graph API for them. I saw various ways to do it, using custom claims providers, adding web services to project, etc. Some examples already providing mapping between groups and roles to use in [Authorize] attribute.
But what is just the simplest example of how to get a list of group ids/names from WAAD providing User ID or username, when I'm already authenticated?
Also, is there any way to get this data in JS to use in Angular frontend, or should I create an API service which Angular should call for roles info?
In the non-JS case, the simplest way of getting groups in the token is by opting in. Download your application’s manifest, locate the “groupMembershipClaims” entry, change its value to “SecurityGroup” or “All”, upload back the manifest.
However note that this won't work for your scenario, because it uses the implicit grant - here the token is returned in an URI fragment, hence a big token would risk blowing past the URL length limits of the browser.
You can always request groups to the Graph and make it available to your frontend via custom action on your API, but from what you wrote you are already familiar with that. Let me discuss the matter here - if there's a simpler route to make this work in SPAs, I'll get back to this thread.
HTH
V.
Update: I verified and in the implicit grant case you will receive groups always via the overage claim. Please refer to https://github.com/AzureADSamples/WebApp-GroupClaims-DotNet/tree/master/WebApp-GroupClaims-DotNet - it will show you how to process the overage claim to retrieve groups. All you need to do is apply the same guidance to a web API instead, and if you need to make the info available to the client expose one or more actions doing so.
I am writing an travel itinerary app engine application which will interact with the calendars of my users. In order to manage access to my user's calendar I intend to use OAuth 2.0. I looked online for various code examples and the closest to what I am trying to acheive is (http://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client/source/browse/calendar-appengine-sample/src/main/java/com/google/api/services/samples/calendar/appengine/server/?repo=samples). I have the following questions
1) I find that the server needs access to the application's client id and client secrets. Most of the sample code I have seen so far loads this from a local file. Does AppEngine give some API which will enable me to retrieve the client id and client secret without me having to worry about storing it ?
2) If I have to store the client secret in a secure fashion what are my options ?
3) What is the best way to store a user's access token and refresh token ?
It almost never changes, so hardcode it. It's only really loaded from a file in the sample programs so that you can get the samples running without touching the code.
See 1.
You can use the Google provided Credential class which uses a dedicated kind. Or, given that they are simply strings, you can store them as part of the User kind which your app almost certainly has to track your registered users.
As a tip, separate writing your oauth code from writing your calendar code. I would start by writing an app that only authorises, stores the refresh token, and refreshes the access token. You can test your access token using curl. Once you have that all working, then add your Calendar functionality as phase 2.