I am trying to implement a Google APPs Marketplace application. Some parts of the application are web-based and other parts simply need offline access to users data.
During installation, the Google domain administrator grants access to the data required by the application (e.g Calendar).
For the web-based part of the application, users use OpenID+OAuth, so the application can access the user's data (this works fine).
Questions:
What should be the best practice for the offline part to gain access to users data ?
Do I have to store a persistent access token for EACH user in the domain ?
Can I avoid the need for each user to grant access to their data (after domain administrator has already done this at the domain level) ?
Is there a way to utilize OpenId from a background application ?
Since Sean M in fact answered you to the question no. 4 with his comment, I will handle other three:
You can use 2-legged oAuth. Using 2-legged oAuth, application can access services and data that were granted to it during installation process (for example Read/Write access to Calendar) without any additional approval from user.
In 2-legged oAuth there are no tokens. Instead, the app is provided with oAuth key and secret and uses these to access Google services and read/write data.
More reading:
http://code.google.com/intl/cs/googleapps/marketplace/tutorial_java.html#Integrate-OAuth
Related
Our current system contains two web applications with OAuth2 centralized user management. Application A is an OAuth client and application B is the OAuth provider. And application A is for internal users and application B is for external users as well as internal users.
To integrate with CIAM for external user onboarding, our system needs to call the user invitation API. That only can be done by application A due to some restriction. Is that doable as an external user will only have access to application B. To invoke CIAM APIs, the client needs to be registered with Azure application ID. That won’t be a problem if the same Azure app ID can be shared between two applications or the invitation could be for another application with a different Azure app ID.
• As you have said CIAM here, thus considering Azure AD B2C as the IdP and authorization provider, the application B that you have stated here which will act as an OAuth provider for application A thus resulting in it being a client and the other application being a provider. Thus, as a matter of fact, you cannot share tokens between the apps for inviting a user from one app to another app. Also, sharing the same application ID between two different applications registered in different tenants is also not possible.
• But you can acquire a token interactively on the second application, i.e., application B and once the silent call fails, then the interactive flow will rely on the Azure AD B2C session cookies to give the user Single sign-on. You can achieve the above said through configuring the Azure AD B2C session behaviour with regards to single sign-on on an application. This setting allows you to maintain a user session exclusively for an application, independent of other applications. For example, you can use this setting if you want the user to sign into Application B regardless of whether the user is already signed into Application A.
Thus, in this way, you can share a sign-in between two applications. For more information and details regarding this, kindly refer to the below documentation below: -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-b2c/session-behavior?pivots=b2c-custom-policy#configure-azure-ad-b2c-session-behavior
ADB2C How to share user token between two different applications?
As shown by many samples I have two AAD application registrations, one for my javascript-based front end, and one for my JSON-only web APIs.
If I fully trust my client AAD application, why does AAD require me to create a second AAD application for my web APIs?
For example, assuming I add specific roles to my client AAD application, if client signs in with AAD and gets an id token and access token containing my roles, it only needs to send the access token to my APIs. The API only needs to crack the JWT, validate the audience, issuer, tenant, roles permissions, and signature. In this world, no client secret is needed in the web APIs, a second AAD application registration not needed, and still no call to AAD from my APIs. Unfortunately, without two AAD applications, I cannot figure out a way to have AAD include roles into my access token.
If I didn't fully trust the issuer from mucking with claims, I can see why I would need two AAD applications and a client secret. But since I do trust my AAD application and the signature of the JWT, why the extra complexity? Or maybe there is a way to do this that I haven't found?
Thanks!
Responding to Marc here because just not enough characters in the comments field -- The sample you referenced is an excellent sample, specifically the JavaScript one calling the Web API. It is what I am doing right now in fact. However, the problem is that Web API in the sample is open to anybody who has authenticated on the tenant. I need to secure the Web API down to certain individuals in the tenant, and simply checking the client/app id is not sufficient as anybody who can create an AAD app can fake it.
So what I need to do is have roles added to the the access token so I know that my application authenticated the user, and that user has been granted the required roles. For example, here is a Microsoft sample. And even here a Microsoft video walking through the process.
If I don't have two AAD applications w/client secret, the roles claims is never provided in the access token. It is always provided in the id token, but not the access token.
I feel like I am missing something obvious here. If AAD would just put the roles I requested into the JWT when I authenticated against it, and I validated its signature, audience, issuer, and roles, I wouldn't need any of this extra complexity?
Ah, I think I understand where you are going: you would like to control which users can access an API, no matter what client app they are using to access the API with. That's a function of the API - you cannot control that through AAD. In AAD you can control which users can access which applications (UI) using either user access restrictions (enterprise tab) or role-based access. However, access to an API is controlled in AAD at the calling application level via scopes. APIs are never accessed directly by users but only by other apps so controlling access permissions at user level would cause admin havoc. So, you can control what permissions a user has in the app they are using and you can control what permissions that application (client) has in other applications (APIs, resource servers) it is using.
In other words: role is about user access to UI, scope is about one apps' access to another.
App secrets provide added security for getting tokens - they have no bearing on what permissions are included in the token.
Can you provide a link showing that two apps are needed? That should only be the case if the API you want to call is not provided by the web app which served the JS to the browser. None of the 'official' samples require you to register two apps (Graph API, used in some of these samples is a separate API and it is already registered). A problem with tokens passed from the browser is that they were acquired by a public client, not using any secrets apart from user creds. Therefore, they are easier to steal and re-use. Your own back-end app may want to use a secret to get its own token (extension grant) to call yet another API using a token that does not reside in a public client.
I have successfully configured qn Azure AD App Registration, allowing a client_credentials based OAuth 2.0 flow to work. This allows a third party application to access Microsoft Graph API. The app has "Calendar.Read" permission. Meaning the app can pretty much read any of the calendars (including CEO's).
I now have a conversation with security. What is out there in the Microsoft world, that I can use to lock down usage of API access via this Application Permission? Is there ability to do things like:
Restrict IP ranges the App can be accessed from?
Restrict users that can access the App? (However in Client_credentials, there is no user context)
Log traffic / activity happening via the App?
The only thing i can think of now is to say the Redirect URL configuration on the app means, no other application can get an access token using the Client_credentials, even if the application id & passkey get compromised
Any advice on further security controls that can be put in place?
Restricting access: You would need to do this in your application. The Client Credential flow doesn't allow for restricting what users as you point out. However there is nothing stopping you from adding user authentication to your application, possibly using a delegated graph auth flow to determine who they are.
IP Ranges: This is not possible currently.
Logging Traffic: This is not possible on the graph side currently, however you could/should log traffic on your applications side.
Redirect urls will not help you because they are not used int eh client credential flow.
In general application only auth (client credential flow) + a broad authorization scope is very powerful, but must be managed correctly. You don't inadvertently want to build a totally new users/permissions model over the top of the graph :)
There are very few options available currently available to offer these controls at token issuance (in Azure AD) or at API access (in Microsoft Graph). However, you can achieve similar results by carefully managing access to the app's credentials. Here are a couple steps you can take (not exhaustive):
App credentials: keep them secret, keep them safe
Use Key Vault. You can configure many of the restrictions you mention for access to data in Key Vault, including IP ranges and which users access. Key Vault also offers auditing of access to secrets. Don't forget to also be careful about which users have management access to the Key Vault (e.g. other users with access to the same Azure subscription).
Use certificates (public/private key pair), rather than client secrets (passwords), to authenticate the app. People tend to manage certificates much more carefully than they manage shared passwords, and developers are much less likely to hard-code the secret into scripts/code.
Be careful and deliberate about which users can manage the app's credentials
This is often overlooked. A user (or another app) who can access existing credentials, or add a new authorized credential to an app can act as the app and (mis)use all the permissions the app has been granted. This includes:
Users (and apps) in the "Company Administrator", "Application Administrator" and "Cloud Application Administrator" directory roles.
Users who are set as owners of the app registration (Application object) and enterprise app (ServicePrincipal object) for the app.
Users (or systems) who have access to the server or service the application resides on (which will have, or have access to, the credentials).
For all of these cases, ensure this is the smallest possible number of users, and they actually have a legitimate need. For users who do need access, wherever possible enforce just-in-time, time-limited access (not persistent access), such as with Azure AD Privileged Identity Management, for time-bound, just-in-time access for Azure AD directory roles and Azure resources.
I'm building an app using which the users registered(from the IAM page) for the project can access the resources of that project. I need the authentication when the URL is hit. Is there a way to achieve this?
Is it possible to provide IAM roles specific for a user request (assuming that the user will login using his email id) to access the resources based on IAM level permissions?
In the early days of AppEngine it was pretty easy to do some basic auth/access-control, but lately they're moving it to something called IAP.
From your wording I am assuming you are trying to abstract administrative tasks of a GCP project to lesser privileged administrators.
Questions 1 and 2 can be quickly solved by defining privileges in IAM using a pre-built roles or creating a custom role if you need to be more specific. Hereby you can use GSuite, GMail, Google Group accounts and let them sign into console.cloud.google.com. They will consequently only be able to see and act upon what you've assigned to them to in IAM.
If you still want to go through with building it yourself, every product does provide an API including authentication. Best practice for your use case is to instead of assigning an individual user access to a resource, you rather create a service account and then allow the user to call that service account. For this GCP has the Service Account Actor Role described well in the official documentation and also Salmaan Rashid provides a good practical insight on medium.
We have a bit of a dilemma that we are running into with a couple applications that are trying to read a given users email without user interaction to authorize. The key to this approach is that we want no user interaction, and want to load the client server application with the proper JSON credentials downloaded from the Google Developer Console.
I have this approach working for programs where we create a service account in the Developer Console, and then delegate domain wide authority to that account with the proper scope access. However what we are hoping is that we don't have to delegate domain wide authority, and just read the users email who created this developer console project. I have tried many different types of solutions for this, but always run into the same limitation that I have to grant domain wide access.
What I am wondering is if there is any way to gain access to a single users mailbox using a server to server type approach and not have to grant domain wide access?
I appreciate your help with this issue!
There is no supported authorization flow for what you want to do. You must either use a service account that has been delegated domain-wide authority, or you must use a 3LO flow that involves user consent.
It seems you're looking for OAuth for Server to Server Application. You will also be using a service account. But, granting of domain-wide authority for service accounts is an optional thing. You don't have to enable it if you don't want to.
To support server-to-server interactions, first create a service
account for your project in the Developers Console. If you want to
access user data for users in your Google Apps domain, then delegate
domain-wide access to the service account.
Then, your application prepares to make authorized API calls by using
the service account's credentials to request an access token from the
OAuth 2.0 auth server.
Finally, your application can use the access token to call Google
APIs.