Backbone swtich from Http to Https - backbone.js

I have certain knowledge using Bakcbone.js, and my backend is Restlet Java, but have no idea regarding user authentication
I have built a single-page web app using them, but now the problem arises that, what I am going to do after user login? There are pages that can be viewed by both logged in and not logged in user, and logged in users should be able to see additional content.
By default the page uses http, but after user Login, suppose an Ajax Post, how do I switch entire Backbone App from http to https? And suppose user logs out, how do I switch back?
Are there any convient ways just to switch all my routes in Router, Url/Urlroots in Collection/Model between Http and Https? (using relative address)
Can I deal with this using Server Redirect..and how can I do that, doesn't that make Http and Https sections completely separated like two apps?

woha - that's a lot stuff you are thinking ..half of which doesn't even belong to Backbone's scope.
Let's split this up:
but have no idea regarding user authentication
read this. I just answered this yesterday.
what I am going to do after user login?
the normal pattern here is that login is usually one page. If the user successfully logs in then she is redirected to another page which has all the Backbone stuff in it e.g. take a look at a backbone app classdojo.com . Login is simple HTML with no fancy stuff. Once user logs in, she navigates to a single-page app with all heavy client side.
Are there any convient ways just to switch all my routes in Router, Url/Urlroots in Collection/Model between Http and Https? (using relative address)
Backbone Router ONLY looks at the route which comes '#' e.g. in example.com/user#details Backbone router will only navigate based on #details . It has nothing to do with your http protocol.
Your Url/Urlroots can be relative or absolute both. So you can specify full URL with http protocol in them.

Related

Incorporate Keycloak login into SPA

We're currently evaluating Keycloak as our SSO solution and while it works for our servlet-based applications there's a question regarding our (React-based) SPAs.
What our designers want: as an example let's say we have an email client spa. The user is in the process of writing an email but then gets distracted. When he returns the SSO session has already timed out and a re-login is required. The user should now be presented with a login form and after login it should be possible to send the email that's still in the SPA's local storage (i.e. re-login without restarting the SPA or losing data).
AFAIK Keycloak doesn't provide an authentication-api (for good reasons) and uses a redirect to the login page and back to the application (as I understand it for mobile apps the system browser would be used). If I'm not mistaken that redirect would then mean the SPA is then reinitialized and thus the data would be lost.
So here's the question: is what our designers want possible to do with Keycloak?
If yes, how would it be done? Directly posting to the login-url that Keycloak is using seems like a bad idea since the tokens would probably not be stored correctly and there might be same-origin policy problems. Would doing it inside an iframe or popup-window work?
For someone who comes back to this question,
I think it's better to stick to the best practice for oAuth2/OpenId Connect for SPAs which is currently "Authorization Code Flow" with PKCE.
https://oauth.net/2/pkce/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-security-topics-13
A normal flow here needs a complete redirect to the auth server and back so your app will completely re-initialize. Or you use check-sso like Sébastien already mentioned with silent mode.
https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak-documentation/blob/master/securing_apps/topics/oidc/javascript-adapter.adoc
You can configure a silent check-sso option. With this feature enabled, your browser won’t do a full redirect to the {project_name} server and back to your application, but this action will be performed in a hidden iframe, so your application resources only need to be loaded and parsed once by the browser when the app is initialized and not again after the redirect back from {project_name} to your app. This is particularly useful in case of SPAs (Single Page Applications).
This way the login will happen in an iframe and the app initializes only once and should preserve state.
Even if it's not considered as a best practice you can turn on Direct Grant Access for your client which enables to login through a REST call.
Anyway, about not loosing the state of your app, this is a bit outside the scope of Keycloak but you should be able to achieve that with having the state in your redirect URL for instance ?
Also, if you don't want your app to automatically reidrects to the login page you can use : keycloak.init({ onLoad: 'check-sso' }) instead of login-required

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.

Django Rest Framework / AngularJS - Users do not get redirected anywhere after logging in, even though I have set LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL in settings.py

According to this link: http://www.django-rest-framework.org/tutorial/4-authentication-and-permissions/#adding-login-to-the-browsable-api
I need to add the following code to my URLs.py:
url(r'^api-auth/', include('rest_framework.urls',
namespace='rest_framework')),
When I added this, users can log in by going to the "api-auth" URL and using the default DjangoRestFramework login interface. After a successful login, users are directed to "/test" because I have the following code in my settings.py:
LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/test'
I wanted a way for users to be able to log-in using my own custom interface but by using DjangoRestFramework's built-in code for logging users in, so I created my own template. The login form in the template sends a post request to
api-auth/login/
and sends the user object (which consists of a username and password in JS) along with the POST request. No errors are returned, so I'm assuming the login is successful. However, it does not redirect to any URL (I was expecting it to redirect to "/test").
Any idea why it does not redirect anywhere, and how I can make it redirect to "/test"?
Edit: I am also using AngularJS on the frontend.
LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL is basically from django.contrib.auth so I wouldn't except other auth backends to use it, at least not necessarily/automatically
Also if you're logging through REST say from an AngularJS, even if after the REST API login is successful and returns a redirect response, there is no guarantee that the AngularJS app will navigate to that page because the login REST API was hit using an XHR request (from $http or $resource etc)
I'm using a slightly different REST auth lib than you, called django-rest-auth (not the BrowsableAPI that comes with DRF), I'm authenticating from AngularJS, and after the call is done with success, I simply navigate the app to a new URL
djangoAuth.login(username, password).then(function(){
// make angularJS navigate to new page when login is successful
// $location.path(...) or some other way
});
Bottom line is, since you have an auth API, you can make a small AngularJS page, with login form, then when login is successful redirect with AngularJS
Worth a look
I'm using these two libs that are meant to be used together, they offer REST auth over DRF, and optional a AngularJS lib to help with the frontend
https://github.com/Tivix/django-rest-auth
https://github.com/Tivix/angular-django-registration-auth

Laravel 5 Middleware with angular routes

I'm using Laravel 5 with AngularJS for a project, in a way so that Laravel is used as an API and the API routes are in Laravel, while the client side routes are in AngularJS (app.js).
Is it possible to use Laravel Middleware to protect AngularJS routes, so for example, I want it to use the RedirectIfAuthenticated Middleware on the angular login form page route so people can't go to that page if they are logged in, except normally as far as I know, the middleware is specified in the Laravel controller, which doesn't have logic for angular side routes - hence, the problem.
So the question is, can I use Middleware or do I have to make angular send a get request asking laravel if the user is logged in on every page? Wouldn't that be less secure?
What I ended up doing was making a client-side cookie on login in angular to keep track of whether the user is logged in or not for user experience purposes (hiding information, redirecting before the view is rendered), and using Laravel Middleware to protect API calls to make sure the user can't interact or get information from the API on the server and to keep it secure in case the user changes their cookie to lie about their login status.
Alternatively, you could also send a request to the server before each page loads instead of the cookie check, but that adds quite a bit more overhead, and isn't any more secure - as far as I know, since that API call to check if the user is logged in is just for UX purposes too and the javascript for that can be removed by a malicious user.

How to secure Resource or controller route in Laravel and Backbone

I am integrating laravel and backbone. I have routes like
Route::resource('tasks', 'TaskController'); and backbone model uses this route for get, post and put requests. and this route simply displays raw data. I want to hide/secure this link/url so that users can't see raw data.How can I achieve this??
Short answer : you can't.
If your Backbone application can access to something, a user can access to. For your server, backbone requests are exactly like a user requests. In fact, the browser make this requests for both.
You could put a password in your Backbone code to protect the access... but it's useless because the Backbone code is public (it is client side).
The only thing you can do is to put restrictions on what Backbone (or a user) can see. For example, authenticate the user and verify that he is allowed to access data before to send it.
If your Backbone app can access data there is no reason to hide them to your users. It's like if you want to hide the raw html code in a web site, that's senseless !

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