Using CORS to restrict who can send a post request - angularjs

I'm currently trying to configure a route we can call it sub.domain.com/route and on domain.com I have a angular app that sends a post to that end point.
What I'm trying to figure out is do I have to add in CORS to sub.domain.com/route to only allow post requests from domain.com? Or do I have to create a tokening system on domain.comto prevent someone from being able to send curl requests and use that route or to use that route on their website/app without my consent?
I'm trying to limit people who can access that route to only people who are physically on domain.com using my application and clicking the button that sends the post request.

You will need to use some other form of authentication (e.g., tokening, password, etc...) as CORS will only affect whether or not resources such as scripts, served to a user's browser from one domain will be able to interact with services hosted on another. This will do nothing to help against CURL requests, proxies, etc...

Related

Prevent my React / Gatsby contact form from being hijacked

I've a Gatsby (React) page with a contact-form which sends the params to an API endpoint.
The form is on the browsers client side.
That Api Endpoint sends to an Email service provider, so far so good.
BUT how can I prevent people from sending emails directly to that endpoint /api/contact-form, in my contact-form I have a ReCaptcha to do that, but the API endpoint is not "secured".
First I thought I can do that with a "host"-check... but the page is on the client side...
Is it the right approach to create a token, when the page is delivered to the client, and check it then against on the API endpoint?
I assume you're talking about CSRF token. It is definitely one way to prevent CSRF attacks. The other option could be setting cors to allow only specific origins to access your API endpoints.

Using Multiple Angular App and Session Management

I have 4 angular applications one is a landing app which asks user to login and has to redirect the user according to its type
to one of the other 3 applications. I am unable to figure how to should i achieve that.
Have the three apps running on different subdomains. Upon login backend send a redirect response, figuring out what type of user it is?
But this leads to cors Error. Also i am not sure whether the cookie which i am setting will be accessible in all the subdomains or not.
Is there a way out?
You can do a redirect, but it seems like an unnecessary step (and kind of convoluted for this type of application).
Instead of returning a redirect based on login, it seems more straightforward to just return the address you want to redirect to in the response. Trigger a lookup to determine which app you should be directing to (however you're doing that) and then return the address of the app in the response data. From within Angular, you can extract the address from within response.data in $http. (see angular docs). The nice thing here is you also keep routing control and knowledge of state within Angular itself.
As for the apps themselves--instead of a subdomain, you can simply put the apps into different folders on your domain. This deals with CORS and the cookie issue.
Otherwise, you'd need to set a CORS header. You would do this on whatever backend you're sending the requests to--there's usually some sort of library to make it easy, for example, Flask CORS for Flask. If you need to share cookies in this case, this StackOverflow answer discusses one way of doing it (using an intermediary domain).
Generate a security key for the user session with some TTL in an authentication table when you authenticate the user with your App1
Redirect the user to any other app in any domain with this security key where they can query the authentication table and verify the user.
Let these other applications work on their own (in the front end) and communicate with the back-end with the security key when necessary.
Lot of PHP frameworks has built-in support for this mechanism. My favorite is Silex.

Is a single Cookie Based API for multiple frontends possible from a CORS perspective?

I originally wrote an REST API to work with a previously written mobile app. The mobile programmer requested from me to generate an auth_token on login that he will pass as a header on each request that needed authentication. This API runs at api.example.com.
Later on, I was commissioned to write an AngularJS app that communicates with this API, so I had to use Access-Control-Allow headers on the backend for OPTIONS requests to be CORS compatible CORS so my browser allows the connection (looks like iOS does not look for this headers). This app runs at one.example.com.
Now, I have to write a second AngularJS app that will run at two.example.com and there's a third being planned for the near future at three.example.com.
My problem is that my Access-Control-Allow-Origin header looks like this:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://one.example.com:80
* is not allowed, nor I'm able to set this header to more than one origin. So as far as I can see I have two solutions:
Implement token-based authentication in parallel to the current cookie-based one. I'm thinking on this. This will of course take some time I'm willing to save.
Send the requester a header or param to the API endpoint identifying the app on the OPTIONS request and server-side, produce the CORS headers accordingly. I don't even know if it's possible and this looks nasty for even thinking it.
Any better ideas?
If they have the same origin, example the same domain (example.com) or the same subdomain (1.ex.example.com and 2.ex.example.com) they can share the same cookie. Because cookie is based on the domain itself.

Siteminder SSO + Spring Security + Angular JS

I have seen lot of examples where, there is a custom Login page with Angular JS, and then we make a rest POST call with the username/pwd, and then Spring authenticates based on whatever Auth Service we provide. Then we receive a success, grab the user object from Spring Security and then create a Session cookie in Angular.
https://github.com/witoldsz/angular-http-auth/blob/master/src/http-auth-interceptor.js
I also have seen, integrating Siteminder with Spring Security where we install a policy agent on the web server, and then grab request headers with Spring Security, and then pull the roles and build a user profile object.
I'm looking for a solution where I can combine both the above. This is the scenario :
When the user requests for index.html (Angular), the policy agent on the web server intercepts, authenticates with a Siteminder login page and then passes the headers to the app server. The Spring Security on app server will read the headers and pull the roles from our app database and then build a userprofile object. Now here, I want to continue the flow and display angular page, but Im trying to figure out, how do I send the user profile object to angular, because angular is not making a POST call at this point. Also, how do I get the http-auth-interceptor in play, because I need to keep checking if the user is still authenticated on the change of every view/state in Angular.
Help appreciated ! Thanks !
You may implement a tiny JSON REST service "/your-app/profile" which is protected by SiteMinder, reads and evaluates the headers and returns the result as a JSON object.
Your Angular App (e.g. /your-app/index.html) should better also be protected by SiteMinder so you receive an immediate redirect to the SSO Login when accessing it without session. In addition, it must read the JSON REST resource "/your-app/profile" when loaded. It must also expect that SMSESSION is missing when reading "/your-app/profile" and react accordingly - perform a reload of the protected index.html page to trigger a SM SSO re-login (if "/your-app/index.html" is protected, otherwise you must trigger login by a redirect to some protected resource).
If you want to constantly check to see if SiteMinder session is still present, you may either access the "/your-app/profile" or check for the presence of the SMSESSION cookie (only in case it is not set as HTTP-only).
One SECURITY NOTE: If you rely on the seamless SSO which is provided via SMSESSION cookie, be aware of the possible CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks!
Apparently both roles and the username will be available in spring if the integration is done as this describes
Integrating Spring Security with SiteMinder

Laravel angularjs cross origin session

I have a problem with communication between angular and laravel.
Its about mobile application that needs to log in to a laravel framework and get some data.
Mobile application is angularjs based, and for login i user standard $httpd function.
Login works fine, and i get expected response from laravel, but when i make another request assuming that im loged in, laravel returns NULL for session and auth. When I upload mobile app to a server where laravel is installed all works like a charm. But my app needs to be on mobile device, so thats not a solution.
I assume that the problem is in cors or cross domain communication. It seems that laravel destroys session made from cross origin requests, because that session is not accessible from another request, and on another request laravel tries to make a new one.
I need help solving that session problem (access session after login or keep session), i hope some of you have some kind of a solution.
i tried :
changing headers in my login controller
changing get to post
adding content type to my angular http req (Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded)
tried requerst with jquery ajax
changed laravels app/config/session.php values of driver, cookie, domain...
setting vendor/laravel/framework/src/illuminate/http/frameGuard.php x-frame options to false
no luck!
Use json web tokens, and simply set it up so that you request a JWT on login, and you can share that token around - the only way it invalidates, is either if you lose the token, or it times out.

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