I am new to Extjs. My question is if I have to communicate to Server and get records from database. How can I secure my Ajax or rest calls as every communication to server is done via ajax or Rest. Is SSL is the only way to secure our ajax/ rest calls to server?
It depends very much on the nature of your application, but HTTPS is best practice when transferring any sensitive information to a remote web server such as a password or session token. OAuth 1 or 2 is probably the way to go.
This link describes different options https://stormpath.com/blog/secure-your-rest-api-right-way/
Also, to save yourself time, you may want to consider using a platform like DreamFactory to provide a REST API interface for your SQL/No-SQL database. This provides user session management and saves you the extra effort of coding your own REST API.
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The following is the architecture of my Web application.
Web UI(Angular JS) running on nginx
Back-end data access layer (Java App) running on glassfish app server
My question is, how can I prevent a valid user from tampering or manipulating the REST service JSON request using some proxy tool.
One thing that I thought of was to encrypt the JSON but this will still expose the public key and the source code of how to encrypt it since its done on client side scripting. Is there a better way of doing secured JSON request?
P.S: I'm not talking about "Man in the middle Attack". This is not related to session hijacking. This is about a valid session user tampering the POST request using tampering tools.
You can't.
Anything that runs on client-side is exposed. Almost everything there can be tampered.
So your best bet is that you have a strong server-side validation before you process the data from the client.
I've been googling the entire afternoon and I'm still not able to figure out what's the best solution to implement the following:
We have build a webapp in AngularJS that consumes interacts with REST API build using Symfony. The app allows users to register, login and do stuff. Now, these users need to upload very big files (>60GB) into their personal folders. A separate VM have been setup for this purpose (data server), located in the same VLAN as the frontend, backend and the MySQL db serving the data. The data upload will be done using either HTTP (using JQuery File Upload plugin) or an FTP client.
I'd like the users to authenticate into the data server (both via FTP or HTTP) using the credentials they already have for the app. For the FTP case, I'll use PureFTP as FTP server, which validates user/pass directly from the MySQL. As far as I know, this is the most convenient solution, but criticism is accepted.
For the HTTP upload, we could proceed in a similar way: POST user/pass, validate against DB and return true/false. Since all the communication will happen within the VLAN, security issues are less problematic. Nonetheless, I believe much more sophisticated solutions have already been developed.
My first thought was to build an OAuth server on Symfony and then authenticate the uploader (and future services) with their respective clients. Is this a right approach or is this a too complicated solution?
Alternatively, a service in the dataserver could validate user's credentials sent by the client against the REST API, receive a JWT and generate a new session for that particular client to list and update files on a particular folder. I'm not sure how to build this middleware though, do I need another Symfony instance or a simple PHP script will do the trick?
Please do not hesitate to share any thought you have on this. Any point of view will be much appreciated.
Thanks a lot
I am building a real time web application with angular js, express js and passport js.
The passport authentication is working fine on the main server. I have written a second logging server also in express js and want to use this to simply receive http POST requests from an angular js service. This will enable client side exceptions/errors to be recorded and available for debugging purposes etc. I don't want to introduce a dependency on logging in the main server so to have this logically separated.
I am thinking about introducing a redis store for passport/express sessions so that the logging server is also subject to authentication and sessions can be shared across the two servers. I am not sure how to implement this session sharing though.
In this scenario what is the best practice is for authenticating across the two servers - I don't want the user to have to log in twice.
You nailed it down. redis store yes. There's no need for manual implementation. Have both servers use same instance of redis server (i.e. cloud redis, installed locally on only one machine etc). express sessions have the ability to use redis store (take a look at connect-redis package). Sharing is accomplished automatically since both stacks will communicate with same redis store.
The way it works in details, when the user is auth the connect.sid cookie gets written to the browser. then subsequent requests (i.e. to second server) will transmit this cookie. second server sees the SID and looks it up and finds it and retrieves the same session from redis.
It's hands off implementation.
Similar questions have been asked before, but this a one is a little different. I created a REST API to send an XML document with `POST. I send data from my (Windows) application to the servers, which includes: open time, operating system, version, etc.
I have one problem though. How can I make sure people can't use the REST API? How do I know that the information sent to the server is from an application and not from someone who knows the URL? How do analytic software companies solve this problem?
Thank you.
Update
I would like users to use my application without having to log in. I am pretty sure that companies that create apps that do not force you to log in are able to see whatever you are doing.
Well there are several way to secure your service.
You can always setup authentication & authorization for the service - this way the service will be available only to registered/known users.
Here are links few links for more details:
Best Practices for securing a REST API / web service
http://www.stormpath.com/blog/secure-your-rest-api-right-way
Also there are less sophisticated ways such as setting firewall rules to allow connections only from certain places -- I don't think it is a recommended approach.
Could someone please explain to me in a simple way, what is a web service?
Please correct me if I'm wrong. I have a DB hosted somewhere in the web, and I want to perform DB transactions from a desktop application as well as a mobile application. Can this be done through a web service ? Someone mentioned it to me and I wanted to make sure this could happen.
Here's a good explanation on Wikipedia.
A middle dynamic content processing and generation level application server, for example Ruby on Rails, Java EE, ASP.NET, PHP, ColdFusion platform
The middle tier of a 3-tier application is often the web service
i want to perform DB transactions from a desktop application and a mobile application, can this be done through a web service ?
This is Exactly what a web service is for.
A web service allow you to create multiple front ends if needed, and serve your database data to all of those front ends. You can also open up the API and allow third party developers to access the web service and thereby access the data of your application in a controlled environment.
It's considered a better practice for larger applications to access a web service or a middle tier rather than directly access the database.
In your case, a web service would involve setting up your DB behind a web server that listens for incoming requests, performs the appropriate DB operations, and returns whatever data is appropriate. Then, your desktop and mobile applications could send a http request and the DB would respond appropriately. This would let all your applications access the same DB.