We have a requirement that user account can provide username/password for database. This means that after user account is loaded, the user should use his own database connection for persistence.
How do I configure that in Spring Data?
Which database?
Which ORM implementation?
Spring has the AbstractRoutingDataSource, which lets you change the DataSource at runtime.
You could also use a delegation pattern, where the web server connects as a limited user, and then changes role to a different user if their authentication is successful. See How to run SQL SET statements against db at start of connection/session using Hibernate? and Switch role after connecting to database
You'll probably need to disable caching in your ORM too.
Related
Good afternoon,
I am writing a front-end for a research database that holds sensitive health information. My institution has a policy that user actions be logged by the SQL server so that they can perform audits on the server log files in the event of a breach.
Because of this policy, I cannot connect Django to the db as a system user (otherwise, all users of the front-end actions would be logged by the server as the Django system user instead as the actual user individually).
Is there a way to connect to the DB using per user credentials so that actions performed on the front end will be logged as that user on the db server? I have been able to find a lot of information about using multiple databases, but nothing about per user authentication of those databases.
Thank you in advanced!
I don't think you can do that, the user that connect to the database need to have access to all the tables.
I had a similar issue when I wanted to use Django models outside Django and restrict access to certain models for certain users.
I ended up using SQLAlchemy and its automap feature on the existing Django database. Then you can connect to the database using your SQL users.
However, if you don't mind all the users accessing all the tables and are only concerned about the logs, maybe you can use a different settings.py or at least a different DATABASES configuration for each user?
I was able to accomplish this by giving the SQL user the IMPERSONATE permission and performing EXECUTE AS prior to the DB queries that I needed to have logged in models.py.
cursor = self.connection.cursor()
try:
cursor.execute("EXECUTE AS " + get_current_user()
except DatabaseError as e:
cursor.close()
raise e
I'm attempting to develop a .NET Core Identity Server but I can't seem to figure out where to hook in to persist consents in a database. My understanding is that when the use consents to the scopes of an application and checks the Remember Consent checkbox that in only stored in memory by default and if the Identity Server were to restart, the user would have to consent again. Is there a way to persist consent in something like a database so it can be remembered beyond a service restart?
you can use something like Entity framework to persist data in the database,
here is the docs for how to configure EF with Identity Server.
Just had a query that can WSO2 Identity Server be integrated with both LDAP and DB at the same time. To elaborate my query more, say we have a group of users defined in LDAP and another group of users defined in DB and I want Identity Server to act authorization gateway for both of these groups. Is it possible?
Also, while integrating with DB WSO2 adds its own tables in our existing DB. Is there any way we can add custom attributes(claims) support in DB without altering the WSO2 tables?
WSO2 Identity Server supports only one active user realm at a given time. But if your requirement is to use WSO2 IS as an authorization gateway which connects to a LDAP server as well to a DB for populating claims, etc then it is possible to use XACML support in WSO2 IS with a custom PIP(policy information point). In that case, you can connect to the LDAP server as the primary user store and write a custom PIP to connect to the DB to read the required claims.
Following two posts on PIPs will be helpful.
[1] - http://xacmlinfo.com/2011/12/18/understanding-pip/
[2] - http://blog.facilelogin.com/2011/04/xacml-policy-information-point.html
Answering the second query, with the default configuration in the JDBC mode, WSO2 IS uses its own set of tables for maintaining its user store. But if required, you can write your own user store implementation which connects to your database.
We have an application that uses Windows authentication to authenticate users with the database, and the SQL Server user accounts need to have certain read/write access to database tables.
The trouble is that the users can then install SQL Server Management Studio and potentially use the database in ways it's not supposed to be used, which isn't what I want.
Everything that I have read says that using integrated authentication is more secure but at the moment, any user can use Management Studio or Access/Excel to just connect to the database.
I have read question SQL Server Authentication or Integrated Security?, which suggests some workarounds, but I don't really have the option of changing the app as drastically as re-factoring all of the stored procedures etc. so I was hoping there might be another option?
Thank you,
NIco
Everything that I have read says that
using integrated authentication is
more secure
--> It's more secure in a way because it's more difficult to get the password.
If you use SQL Server authentication, the connection string contains user and password. If you know where the connection string is (often in a config file), you can open it and see user and password.
On the other hand, if you use Windows authentication, the connection string just says "Integrated Security=True" and you connect to the server with your Windows account, with the actual password buried somewhere deep in Windows' guts and more difficult to retrieve.
Of course, the big downside of Windows authentication is that if your users need write permissions on a certain table for your application, this means that they can write to the same table with ANY other application as well.
There are some workarounds, but none of them is THE silver bullet:
If your app only needs certain tables of the DB, you can just give permissions on these. So at least, the users can't do stuff in all the other tables
If the users are not allowed to access any tables at all from outside your application, there are unfortunately only two things you can do:
Change your app to SQL authentication and remove all permissions for Windows users
(you can also use a proxy service like Will Hughes suggested, but the effect is the same when the app accesses the DB directly...the point is that your users' Windows accounts don't have any permissions anymore!)
Create views and stored procedures (if they don't already exist anyway) for the stuff your app can do with the database. Give the users permissions to use these, and remove the permissions to the real tables.
--> the users can access the views and SPs directly with other tools (even if they don't have any permissions on the underlying tables...permissions on the views and SPs are enough), but they can't do anything that they can't do in your app as well.
If you don't want users to have access to your database, don't grant them access.
If you need to control what they can do - then you should do your access control in a webservice (or some other form of proxy service), which will then execute approved queries, return data, etc.
I believe Windows auth is the best practice to use to connect to SQL DB. I am hear talking about application user account..
Is it true that SQL auth is only great for multiple role apps and window auth is only good for single role app? I never heard that windows auth with muitple role os only good for smaill internal app?
multiple Windows logins = multiple connections = no pooling = poor scaling?
The problem with using Windows auth for a web application is that many web applications store their application users' credentials in the same SQL database that is used for other application data.
So you have a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't authenticate the user before connecting to the database, and you can't connect to the database without authenticating the user.
It should be possible to use Windows authentication, and then also have application-specific attributes of the user stored inside the database. But most people find this cumbersome to administer, and also limiting to portability of the application.
For example, if one of the feature of the application allows users to change their own password, then the process running your web application needs the privilege to alter a Windows password, which may mean that the application needs to run with Administrator privileges.
If you let the application manage user ID for the context of the application, then to change a user's password is just an SQL operation, and your application is in charge of enforcing security for that.
I'm not sure what you mean by single-role and multi-role app. I have built apps before where there are multiple SQL Server Database Roles, each with a Windows Domain Group of users allowed in that role. So user management is completely within Active Directory, with a 1-1 correspondence between the Domain Group and the Database Role.
We typically did not manage the security within the application itself except obviously declaratively during the database creation where each object was granted access by particular roles according to the design. Typically, in a simple case, we relied on db_datareader role being granted for general usage to non-specific groups of users like database and network administrators for troubleshooting or report-writers or business analysts for ad hoc reporting. Actual users of the app would be granted execute on the relevant SPs to be able to modify any data (so all data creation or modification was through SPs and only explicit members of the ThisAppsUsers AD group could do it). Any advanced SPs (say, merging or deleting accounts) would only be accessible by ThisAppsAdmins AD group. And that was usually all we needed for moderate-sized applications. For more complex functionality, it was also possible to interrogate AD directly for custom attributes (user is an admin only for this customer account but for others is just a user)
This same technique can be used with SQL Server logins, but of course the individual SQL Server logins have to be added to the database roles, and you don't have the richness of AD and have to build some kind of directory service into your database.
The ability to even use AD may not be possible for many applications, so in that case, the security architecture would obviously have to cater to that model.
using the integratedSecurity=true option for SQL JDBC , by including the JDBC auth .dll, should give you database connectivity without authenticating...