Currently, Firebase offers the option to send an email to a users email who wishes to change their password. Unfortunately, Firebase does not allow you to edit their password requirements which I believe is locked at requiring only 6 characters.
For many people this is inadequate and insecure.
I recently made an application that allows users to create quizzes either for themselves or for others. In this application, I stores personal information of my users and I wanted to make sure that their accounts were secure so I required more from my passwords. Unfortunately, when a user wishes to change their email, the default Firebase function does not keep my security which leads to confusion as a user can change their passwords according to Firebase's lax constraints but then they still couldn't log in because they used an invalid password. (I blocked invalid passwords from the text box before even checking with Firebase).
After I encountered this error, I came to StackOverflow for help to see if anyone else had this issue and came up with a solution. Unfortunately, I was met with harsh criticism and harassment by users who claim to be Firebase officials and Administrators who did not care about my question.
Then, I after a week of research and testing, I found the solution using React and 3rd party libraries to handle this.
Please, see my answer below and if you have a more creative solution, I would be interested in seeing that as well.
To solve this problem, the only answer is to create your own mailer service with your own basic mailer service, host website, and API.
What you need:
An application which uses Firebase.
A hosted API which uses Firebase and a 3rd party Mailer such as Node with NodeMailer - hosted on Heroku
A React app which can communicate with the API
What I did:
First, I created my API which accepts calls from my specified IP addresses. This API can receive requests to reset a password when the password is known or unknown. When the password is known, I send an email to the user using NodeMailer and I send a special HTML file so the email looks official. It is quite easy to copy the layout of Firebase's emails if you wish.
More Info can be found here: https://nodemailer.com/message/
Then, I created a React App that is hosted on Heroku. When the user clicks a link in the email, it will send them to this website with the required information in the query. This app, much like when the Firebase link is clicked is just a simple text box and submit button. However, now you can customize it to require password confirmation with a second text box. You can also add a company logo and custom colors so it isn't so HTML 1 looking like the link you see from Firebase. Most importantly, you can now control the password that the user enters to add your unique requirements.
On submit, the app will send the new password, username and old password if available to the API.
If you do not know how to create a React App or a Node API, you can see a detailed tutorial here: https://www.techandstartup.com/tutorials/build-api-with-node-express-and-mongodb
Finally, the API can log into the users account if a password is present and then change the password. Detailed steps can be seen from: https://www.codegrepper.com/code-examples/javascript/firebase+user+change+password
If a current password is not present, then the API can delete the user and recreate it with the desired password. Deleting a user can be seen: https://www.codegrepper.com/code-examples/javascript/firebase+delete+user Then you simply recreate a user. Example code: https://www.codegrepper.com/search.php?q=firebase%20createUserWithEmailAndPassword
With these steps, you can now send a password reset email to a user. The email will be completely unique as you will be designing it yourself. The password will be to your exact specifications as your React App will control the data on submit. And the page itself will look much more user friendly as it's not the default Firebase page.
Hopefully this helps you or your company with working around the Firebase reset password with email function. I am still holding out hope that another user may have a more elegant or basic solution than this as creating an API and hosting a website just for 1 function is not appealing in many cases.
I am working on a integration with Salesforce using REST APIs and, as part of the project, I need to send updates to Salesforce and these updates are not user triggered, they are system triggered.
Because of that, what I expect to see on Salesforce Field History is not a user name but the name of our Connected App (the app that made the update).
What I see today is the user name because the way the integration was made initially using OAuth Authorization Code flow.
To change that part of the project, I followed the link (OAuth 2.0 JWT Bearer Flow for Server-to-Server Integration): https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.remoteaccess_oauth_flows.htm&type=5
Making that, I was expeting to generate a token for a System, not for a User, but that's not what happened: when I used the token generate from the JWT Bearer Flow and ran the update, the Field History still shows the user name.
What could I do then?
Which are the options in Salesforce to achieve the behavior I'm expecting?
The most important, in my opinion, is to have a Token for our system, not for a user.
Thanks!
Everybody is an user in Salesforce. Even if you access unauthenticated pages (some contact us form? case or lead capture) - it gets tracked under special Guest User.
It sounds stupid but gives you unified interface to control permissions (Profiles/Permission sets). You want guests to access only FAQ articles and make cases? Sure thing, do it in profile, don't get paranoid about people trying to guess right URLs. You think an app was hacked? You can terminate the session just like any other "user". Want to allow login only in certain hours and from certain IP? Sure.
An app connecting with JWT will still need username (main difference being it's "just" certificate for signing the request instead of password).
Your best bet is to create dedicated "Mr System", "SystemX integration" account. It sounds like waste of license but in the long run saves you questions "why did you edit my account at 1 am" and you could even use it as backup account if you use SSO and it ever fails...
I need to set up Shibboleth IdP to validate user name and password against a custom application.
Our application exposes a REST API to which one can pass a user's credentials and either returns a 401 on failure or a JSON object with some user metadata on success.
I was able to achieve this in SimpleSamlPHP IdP with a 30-line class, but having to switch to Shibboleth, I am having a hard time finding directions to do the same there.
Reading through the documentation the suggested solution seems to be to create a custom back end for the password login flow but the Wiki does not explain in detail how to do this.
Can somebody point me out to some tutorials or sample code on which files need to be created or changed in order to do this (even basic examples of checking against a credential file or database would be fine)?
You are looking for an [External Authentication Flow] (https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/IDP30/ExternalAuthnConfiguration)
For an example, see the shib-cas-authn3 project (https://github.com/Unicon/shib-cas-authn3). It uses the CAS Server to authenticate the users. It then creates an IdP session from information retrieved from CAS.
I have an app that requires login for users. However, to keep matters simple, we are only supplying the user with a unique code, so that they just enter the code and that code logs them in. This code is only valid for two weeks, and will never be repeated.
However, our Admin also needs to log in but the admin requires a username and password.
How will I modify the AppController to allow for both logins? I'm using the AclExtras plugin for Authentication
The one login is located under APP/Users/enter (for the users), the other is under APP/Users/login (for the admins)
Implement a custom Auth adapter that checks for the token. No need to have a separate action except you explicitly want that.
Cake is iterating over all loaded auth adapters so you can have username and password and the token in the same form. If the regular form adapter returns false but the token auth adapter true the user is logged in.
Check the books section about auth. It has all information you need to understand what needs to be done.
You can just make a simple if/else in your AppController checking if the field for unique code is passed, if not then you can implement login with username/password. In all other cases you can implement login by unique code.
I'm looking into implementing OpenID, but I drawing a blank as to how the database would look with new / existing users. How does stackoverflow do it? I understand the concept that an external site does the authentication for me, but as far as storing user information on my end I need help with.
Since this is one of the top search results when searching for OpenID
Database Structures on Google, and the Plaxo link referenced in the
previous answer is no longer around. I've copied and pasted the
content of the Plaxo instructions below. I was able to get them by
using the wayback machine page referenced
here.
Keep in mind that because of StackOverflow's 30000 character restrictions, I will have to crop certain sections, and Joseph Smarr included some images in his
instructions, so you might want to look at the wayback machine page I
referenced.
-Jason
A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site
Prepared by Joseph Smarr at Plaxo on July 18, 2007.
This is a step-by-step tutorial guide for implementing OpenID consumer-side support with a web site that already has users with accounts. It will explain how to easily let new users sign up for an account on your site using their OpenID URL and how to let existing users attach their OpenID(s) so they can sign in using them.
I developed this guide by talking to fellow OpenID developers at the Internet Identity Workshop and elsewhere, and by implementing OpenID support for Plaxo using these instructions. I've also posted detailed screenshots of Plaxo's implementation for reference. I've intended for this guide to be clear and complete and to follow best-practices, but if you have any questions or feedback, please let me know at ob_male('joseph','plaxo.com'); or by posting a comment on Plaxo's blog.
This guide may look a bit long, but my hope is you can just follow it straight through without thinking much, and you'll be completely done by the time you reach the end! :)
Overview
I'm assuming your web site currently has:
A user database with rows for each user
Each user has a unique internal user ID
Users currently sign in using a username/e-mail and password
A registration flow for signing up new users and getting collecting basic profile info
A signin page for authenticating users
Internally you authenticate users based on username/e-mail and password, look up their unique user ID, and use it in the rest of your site
A settings page for users to manage their account info.
If your site doesn't look like this, you should still be able to follow along, but some of the sections may not be relevant to you.
Snipped.. so check the wayback machine link up above for the rest.
Implementation details
Install an OpenID consumer library
There are OpenID libraries already available in many popular programming languages that will do almost all of the heavy lifting for you. The team at JanRain wrote a bunch of them and are generally super-smart and knowledgeable when it comes to OpenID, so they'd probably make a good resource if you need help here.
Depending on the library, you may need to provide a persistent store for associations with OpenID provider sites. Essentially this is just storing a mapping from a server/handle string to an association string. You'll need to store the association at least for the session (to verify an OpenID authentication) but ideally you should store them longer so you won't have to re-associate every time you redirect to the OpenID provider (doing so will result in a faster redirect). You can use memcached, a database, or any other persistent storage medium you have access to.
Create a new OpenID database table
Use a schema like this (this will work with MySQL, but you may have to tweak it slightly if you use a different database or if you represent your internal user IDs differently): create table user_openids (
openid_url varchar(255) not null,
primary key (openid_url),
user_id int not null,
index (user_id)
);
Keep a single global table so you can use it to look up OpenIDs for all your users (even if you have your users partitioned into multiple databases).
Store OpenID URLs in canonicalized form for robust lookup (i.e. so if users enter their OpenID slightly differently next time, you can still map it to their account). Most OpenID libraries will provide a canonicaliztion function, but briefly you should add http:// if it's missing and you should convert the protocol and domain to lowercase (but NOT the rest of the URL), so e.g. "WWW.AOL.COM/myOpenID" should be stored as "http://www.aol.com/myOpenID". You should also probably remove any trailing slashes from the URL.
If you usually have a layer of database-access code, you should expose the following functions to your application (in each case I've sketched the SQL to implement the function). As a reminder, all functions that take an OpenID as input should canonicalize it prior to looking it up in the database.
GetUserId(openid_url)select user_id from user_openids where openid_url = openid_url
GetOpenIDsByUser(user_id)select openid_url from user_openids where user_id = user_id
AttachOpenID(openid_url, user_id)insert into user_openids values (openid_url, user_id)
DetachOpenID(openid_url, user_id)delete from user_openids where openid_url = openid_url and user_id = user_id
DetachOpenIDsByUser(user_id)delete from user_openids where user_id = user_id
Add OpenID UI to your registration page
Add a section to your registration page where OpenID users can sign up using their OpenID. The UI goal should be that OpenID users can easily identify that your site supports OpenID, but that users without OpenID can continue to register normally without being confused. You can either put an OpenID input box directly on the page or link to an OpenID page where users can enter their OpenID.
Wherever you put it, you should follow the community standards for naming and styling the text field where users enter their OpenID:
Use "openid_url" as the ID and name attributes of the text field (this will allow plug-ins to easily identify and handle OpenID input boxes across different web sites)
Add the small OpenID logo as a background image to the text box, using CSS like this:background: #FFFFFF url('/images/openid-icon-small.gif') no-repeat scroll 0pt 50%;
padding-left: 18px;
It's also a good idea to provide a brief explanation of what OpenID is and how your users can use it on your site (since you'll probably get curious people clicking through to take a look).
Wrap the OpenID text box in a form that will submit to your OpenID login CGI, which we'll build below.
Upon providing an OpenID and signing in to the OpenID provider, you'll need to redirect your user back to your registration page with a couple of small tweaks. First, you should show the OpenID that the user is registering with, preferably with the small OpenID logo next to it to consistently identify it as an OpenID (see the screenshots below for an example). Second, you should NOT ask the user for a site-specific password, since they'll be signing in with their OpenID. So hide the password fields and make sure your registration code will allow this (you may need to stick in a random password behind the scenes if your code requires some password text, just don't show it to the user). [Note: it's fine to let users enter a site-specific password later by using your account settings page, but the point here is that one of the major benefits you're providing OpenID users is that they no longer need to maintain separate credentials for each site they use.]
Here are some screenshots of how we added OpenID to Plaxo's registration flow:
Add OpenID UI to your signin page
Add a section to your signin page where OpenID users can sign in using their OpenID. This will work both for existing users of your site that have attached an OpenID to their account and new users, who will be able to sign up using their OpenID (using the same flow as above). Like with the registration page, the UI goal should be a balance between being obvious to OpenID users without overly distracting or confusing the rest of your users. You should name and style your OpenID box as specified above in the registration page. And like above, the form surrounding the OpenID input box should go to the OpenID login CGI you're about to build.
In addition to your main signin page, you may also have signin UI in your home page or elsewhere. You should ideally provide an option to sign in using OpenID in every place you provide a traditional signin option.
Here are some screenshots of how we added OpenID to Plaxo's signin pages:
Create a new OpenID login web page / CGI
Your CGI should take two basic input (query) parameters:
openid_url: the OpenID entered by the user (for registration, signin, attaching, etc.)
action_type: the operation the user wants to perform. Possible values will be login, complete, attach, list, and delete. (If you're using Rails or a similar system, these could also be controller methods and thus part of the URL itself.)
Implement the login action (this is where the UI you added to the registration and signin flows will both submit to)
Look up the provided openid_url using the GetUserId function described above.
If the OpenID is already attached to a user in your system, check to see if the user is currently signed in to your site.
If the user is not signed in, they are attempting to sign in as an existing user, so prepare to redirect to their OpenID provider, but set a flag to NOT ask the provider for registration info (since the user is not signing up for a new account).
If the user is already signed in, and this OpenID already belongs to them (i.e. the OpenID URL is mapped to the same user_id as the currently signed-in user), then you don't have to do anything (this user is already signed in and already attached that OpenID, so this is a no-op). This is an edge case.
If the user is already signed in but the OpenID belongs to a different user, show an error message saying that this OpenID has already been claimed by another user. You can also provide the user the option to sign out and try again. This is an edge case.
If the OpenID is NOT currently in your database, the user is trying to sign up for a new account, so prepare to redirect to their OpenID provider and ask for registration info.
Save the provided openid_url in your session, since you'll need it to remember it when the OpenID provider redirects back to you, and the provider may not return it to you. If you don't have a session, you can use your database, but it has to be somewhere persistent and protected from user-tampering (i.e. not in a cookie or something that could be changed or forged by the user). (The reason you need to store the requested OpenID is that OpenID lets users delegate their OpenID to another provider behind-the-scenes. For instance, if I try to sign up with the OpenID josephsmarr.com, I may have actually delegated that URL to a different OpenID like jsmarr.myopenid.com, and when the provider returns to you to complete authentication, you need to remember that I wanted to sign up as josephsmarr.com and not jsmarr.myopenid.com. Luckily your OpenID library will most likely handle this for you, but you still have to keep the originally requested OpenID in your session for now. This may be solved in the upcoming OpenID 2.0 spec.)
Construct your return_to URL for the OpenID provider to return to after the user has authenticated. This will be your OpenID login CGI with the complete action specified.
If you've determined above that the user is registering for a new account, decide what registration info to ask for. Most OpenID providers support the simple-registration extension, which is a list of common registration fields that you can request as required or optional for your site, including full name, e-mail, nickname, gender, date of birth, gender, postal code, country, language, and time zone. If you ask for these fields and the user consents to provide them, you can pre-fill them into your registration flow, thus removing time and friction from your registration process. If your OpenID consumer library doesn't natively support requesting simple-registration parameters, see if they have a general facility for supporting extensions, or worst-case you can manually add it to the generated redirect URL before redirecting.
Call checkid_setup in your OpenID library to generate the URL to redirect to the user's OpenID provider. Pass in the (canonicalized) OpenID provided by the user and the return_to URL you constructed above. Also pass in the simple registration info you want if appropriate. Depending on your library, you may need to trap and handle some errors from this function. But assuming everything goes well, it will give you back a URL to redirect to.
Have your CGI redirect to the provided URL, ideally by issuing a server-side redirect response.
The user will be redirected to their OpenID provider's web site. They will be asked to sign in (unless they've recently signed in there), they will be asked whether they trust your web site, and if you've asked for simple registration info, they'll be asked what info they want to share with you. Once they complete this process, the OpenID provider will redirect the user back to the return_to URL you supplied, which will then let you initiate your complete action to finish the job.Here are some screenshots of signing into an OpenID provider (myopenid.com in this case) and being prompted to share some registration info with Plaxo:
Implement the complete action (this is where the user gets redirected after signing in to their OpenID provider):
When the OpenID provider redirects to your return_to URL, they will add a bunch of additional query string parameters that contain the information needed to verify the user's authentication with this OpenID. Depending on the OpenID library you're using, you may need to gather these up into a data structure to pass in to the verification function, or it may do it for you.
Get the OpenID the user initially requested from your session (you stored it before redirecting to the OpenID provider above).
Call id_res in your OpenID library to verify the authentication data you've been sent by the OpenID provider. Pass in the OpenID that the user initially requested, along with the query parameters as needed. This function will check to see if everything looks valid. If you get an error back, display an appropriate error message to your user. Otherwise you've now confirmed that the user has authenticated the OpenID they provided to you.
Optional: after successfully verifying the OpenID, you may wish to set a persistent cookie for your site with the OpenID used so that you can recognize that the user has an OpenID next time they come to your site and pre-fill the OpenID box on the signin page. If you do this, make sure to also clear the cookie when the user explicitly signs out.
Look up the verified OpenID again using the GetUserId function. If you don't find it in your database, check to see if the user is currently signed in on your site. If they are, perform the attach action below to attach this OpenID to their existing account. Otherwise, it's time to start the registration process for a new account using this OpenID. Start by storing the verified OpenID in your session so your account creation code will remember the user has already verified this OpenID. (Do NOT use the same session variable you used to store the requested OpenID, since the user can type in anything there.) Then redirect your user to your registration flow and pass along the simple registration data you got back (if any). You will probably have to map the fields returned by simple-registration to the registration parameters that your site normally takes.
As described above, the registration page should show the OpenID prominently in the account information, and you should NOT ask the user to enter a password for your site, since they'll be using their OpenID to sign in. In addition, you should pre-fill any registration info provided from their OpenID provider. It is fine to ask for additional registration info and maintain your current policies about which fields are required and optional. (Using OpenID should be an acceleration for registering on your site, but should not require you to change what information you require or otherwise change your site's normal behavior). Finally, you should provide a link for existing users of your service to attach this OpenID to their existing account, if they have one. This will handle the case of existing users that weren't signed in and entered their OpenID and have no found themselves in the new-user registration flow. [Since this isn't common, it's better to just have a small link at the beginning of the registration flow rather than asking every user "do you want to register a new account or sign in to an existing account" when they first verify their OpenID.]
When the user completes your site's registration flow and you create a user account, attach the verified OpenID to the newly created account using your AttachOpenID function. [If your user table and OpenID table are in separate databases and cannot be part of the same transaction, there is a small chance that the attach command could fail and leave you with an orphaned user account. There's no easy way to prevent this in 100% of cases, but since it's rare and the user can always sign up again, in most cases you can ignore this race condition and just hope for the best.
If you found that the verified OpenID was attached to an existing account, you can now sign the user in as you normally would if they'd signed in through your traditional method. (If the user happens to be signed in to a different account, sign them out and then sign them in as the user the OpenID is attached to, since they just proved they own it).
Implement the attach action (for existing users to attach additional OpenIDs to their account):
(This action will be called as part of the complete action when the user is already signed in and has just verified a new OpenID. So make sure the user is signed in before calling this action.)
Attach the verified OpenID to the signed-in user's account using your AttachOpenID function.
Show a confirmation message that this OpenID has now been attached and can be used to sign in from now on. Consider redirecting to the list action so the user can now see this OpenID among the list of attached OpenIDs for their account.Here's a screenshot of Plaxo's attach confirmation page:
Implement the list action (for showing a signed-in user the OpenIDs attached to their account):
Require the user to be signed in (redirect through your signin page first if needed).
Fetch the list of attached OpenIDs for the signed-in user by calling your GetOpenIDsByUser function.
Show the list of OpenIDs in a web page with a link by each one to detach it if the user wants. The links will call the delete action below and pass in the OpenID to delete as the openid_url parameter.
Provide a link or input box to attach an additional OpenID. This will take the user through the login and attach flows (since the user is already signed in) and end up back on the list page.
If your site already has a general settings page, you should provide a link to "Manage your OpenIDs" that links to this list page. You may also decide to build this functionality directly into your current settings page.Here's a screenshot of Plaxo's list page, as well as links to it from our current settings pages:
Implement the delete action (for detaching an OpenID from a user's account):
Require the user to be signed in (redirect through your signin page first if needed).
Optional: Check whether the user is trying to delete the last credential they could use to sign in to your site. If the user has not set up a normal password on your site and this is the only OpenID attached to their account, deleting their last OpenID would essentially lock them out of their account forever. If you don't have a good way to recover users in this situation, show an error message if the user tries to delete their last attached credential, saying essentially "You can't delete the last OpenID attached to your account because you'd have no way to sign in. First attach another OpenID or create a password for this site."
Assuming it's ok to proceed, detach the OpenID provided by the openid_url parameter from the signed-in user's account by calling your DetachOpenID function. If the OpenID provided is not currently attached to the user's account, you can choose to show an error or just treat it as a no-op success.
Show a confirmation message that this OpenID has now been detached and can no longer be used to sign in to your site. Tell the user that if they want to re-attach this OpenID, they will have to go through the normal verification process to re-attach it. Consider redirecting to the list action so the user can see the updated list of OpenIDs attached to their account.Here are some screenshots of detaching an OpenID from a Plaxo account:
Add a hook to your delete-user routine to detach all OpenIDs from that user.
If your site currently lets users delete their accounts, it's important that you also detach any OpenIDs that were attached so they can be re-attached to another account later. You can do this by calling your DetachOpenIDsByUser function inside your delete-user routine, or by otherwise triggering this function when deleting a user.
...and you're done!
Snipped.. so check the wayback machine link up above for the rest. Joseph goes
through some best practices for OpenID, but at this point you should have a working
example.