I am looking to implement SSO in all my future php/angular applications. I see there are services (Auth0, oauth.io, etc) that are sort of the middle man of an SSO app and there are protocols such as OAuth 1.0/2.0 but in regards to creating a custom SSO solution (using aforementioned OAuth protocols, I assume), I am a little foggy on the complete flow of the process.
What I do get:
App gets Access Token
(optional) App validates Access Token
App (with Access Token) gets access to a particular API and returns result. For
example, Facebook profile information.
What I don't get:
What to do with that information once I have it. Do I retain the access token and request information from the API source each time they login? How do I relate my own application data to the API data? Would I create a different kind of user record that just contains the access token and application's userid?
Do I retain the access token and request information from the API source each time they login?
If the token does not expire, you can hold on to it in a data store and use it with each request. Many times, though, the token will expire, and you need to request a new one each time you start a session. In this case you'd probably store the token in memory instead of a permanent storage location.
How do I relate my own application data to the API data?
I think we'd need to know a little more about your application to answer this question.
Would I create a different kind of user record that just contains the access token and application's userid?
Again, we'd probably need a little more information about your application. If you were persisting the token (in the case that it doesn't expire), then you need to make some considerations about how you want to store it. If not, you can probably just put it into a local variable or session.
Related
My Setup
I am using React and Django as frontend & backend. For authorization purposes I chose Django-rest-knox, which works via tokens stored in a database.
My Problem
Now if an attacker gets a hold of the token (stored in local storage on the client side after a login), he can do anything that the user is able to. There is some expiration on the token and the ability to destroy all tokens of the user by the user himself. But I'd like to be on the safer side.
My Solution
My idea is to map all tokens to the IP address (of the user) that was used to login. That way the token would only be usable on the machine that was used to login. That token-to-IP-address relation would be checked on the backend.
My Questions
Is the idea feasible at all or is there anything in the nature of those IP addresses that breaks my intent?
What is the best way to get the client IP-address?
Do you think that is a secure approach?
Thanks for the help!
The idea is feasible but not efficient. The main problem is, not everyone using static ip address and this will cause you a big feedback by your users because everytime some user's ip address change(via modem reset, power cut, provider problems etc.) he/she/it will have to be authenticated again.
You use 'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR' meta for almost all backend framework as well as django. you can check this link. How do I get user IP address in django?
This idea may come with security but i ll give you a better one that i am currently using on my own application.
My solution: Refresh tokens. With refresh tokens, every time an access token expire(avarage 15 min ideal) user will request a new access token via his/her/its refresh token. With this way even an attacker get user's access token, he/she/it will be only available for 15 minutes(you can make 5-10-15-... mins as well)
I am developing an application where users are playing a game and upon completion their results are sent to my back end through a POST request. Since I do not want this POST request to be done manually by someone who finds this endpoint (and mess with his results), I need a way to restrict it so that it can be done only through the application. However is it safe to hardcode a token that provides this access?
What is the correct way to go around this problem ?
I would not recommend to use hard-coded tokens, if the token gets compromized, you have to change the server as well as the client.
I would recommend some sort of auth mechanism as JWT with ssl with one rudimentary username/password system.
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.