I am developing an app to be hosted on Google App Engine. Users will be able to use their Google IDs to login to the app. The app also has a client counterpart in the form of a Blackberry Application.
My question is - is there a suggested way for my app to collect the user's Google credentials so that I can authenticate it against Google using OpenID semantics? In Android, for example, I can use the Accounts API so that I don't need to explicitly ask the user to enter credentials. What's the way to do this in Blackberry?
I see 2 ways, neither of which is ideal:
Write my own form in my native Blackberry app where the user enters Google ID and password, which I then use to obtain the authenticator token and perform the rest of the authentication behind the scenes. But the point is - it is inappropriate to ask a user to trust my app with their Google credentials.
Use standard Google Open ID Authentication mechanism - which opens up the web browser and displays Google's Open ID login page. Although this is a one-time thing (after which I can save the authentication token so that future requests to GAE do not require any prompting for credentials), the user experience is still disruptive since it involves opening the browser in addition to my native BB app.
So, what's the suggested way forward?
Using the browser to authenticate is pretty much the only standard way to do this. A number of Android apps do this for OAuth or OpenID endpoints too. Depending on how the Blackberry's protocol handlers work, you should be able to set a continue URL that results in your app being called back by the browser when authentication completes.
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I'm working on a product with two apps: one a single-page web app, and the other a native mobile app. Both make use of the same backend API. Currently the user authenticates using username/password credentials to establish a session cookie. I'm planning on adding support for authentication using OpenID Connect.
For the web app, I'm looking at following the advice for "JavaScript Applications with a Backend" in "OAuth 2.0 for Browser-Based Apps". In that scenario, the authorization code gets sent to the backend, which obtains the ID token and begins a cookie-based session.
I'm trying to work out how this would work on Mobile. The "go to" implementation of OAuth/OIDC on mobile appears to be AppAuth. From what I can see, AppAuth uses a different approach where you end up doing the auth code exchange on the device to get the ID token.
Should I have the mobile app send the ID token on to the backend to prove the user identity (and then begin the session)? Is there any best practice around doing this? Presumably at least the backend would need to validate the JWT and verify the signature?
Alternatively, can AppAuth be used to do a similar flow as done on the web app as mentioned above?
The mobile case does indeed work differently, and is defined in RFC8252, which defines the AppAuth pattern. Both the web and mobile cases have this in common:
Open a system browser at the Authorization Server URL with a Code Flow request URL
Cookies are not used in mobile views, and mobile apps can store tokens securely, unlike browser based apps. The mobile app will send access tokens to APIs, and also make token refresh requests when needed.
Out of interest there are easy to run versions of each in my online code samples, if you want something to compare against. Both flows are tricky to implement though.
I am building a reservation system in Google App Engine using Go. I need 2 forms of authentication in my program.
Public Form -- form built in Angular that is on our public website. I want my front-end to have some sort of credentials.json file to use when requesting the book and getOpenDates endpoints in my RESTful API running in Go on Google App Engine.
Private Companion App -- protected by username and password that the user supplies in my app built in Flutter. The app is requesting many endpoints in App Engine. I would like to use JWT to authenticate this portion, but I'm not 100% sure JWT is what I need.
I'm not sure if this tutorial on Identity Platform is what I want. I'm very new to App Engine and authentication in general, so I am a bit lost.
Please describe how I could implement these authentication methods in my RESTful API in Go running on Google's App Engine. I think I may be able to implement the username/password method using a tutorial like this but I'm very lost on the 1st form of authentication with just a credentials file as authentication. If I'm going in the complete wrong direction to accomplish what I want please tell me, but what I'm looking for is code or a tutorial describing how to authenticate using these 2 methods. Thanks for any help.
From what I understand, you want to have a golang backend API in App Engine that serves both your web frontend (1.) and your users app (2.).
I am going to suppose that any user with username/password can use both your frontends: the web app and the mobile app with these credentials.
The credentials.jsons are not designed to authenticate users of your services, but rather server to server communication.
With that in mind, I have found the guide Session based authentication in golang, that could help you to set up your backend to accept only authenticated requests over HTTPS. The web browser will automatically save the cookie, however you need to store the cookie in your mobile app.
For much more complicated scenarios for authenticating from different webpages, it is required to use OAuth2 as you can see in this thread. If you don't find any of your requirements listed in here it is probably overkill to use Auth0 nor OAuth2.
I'm new to web dev, and trying to build an application using google app engine's java standard environment, which will require user authentication. I'd like to provide authentication which requires only a username and password of the user, as opposed to a phone number or social account.
As I look through the options listed in app engine's auth tutorial, if I'm understanding them correctly, none of them allow login without a phone number or social account? https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java/oauth/
If so, are there alternatives available while still using app engine? I've read some about 'web container managed authentication' but I'm not sure if its something app engine will support, or if its a full solution.
Is it possible/feasible to roll fully custom authentication in the app engine standard environment? As I search for custom authentication tutorials I see a lot of articles recommending against this, but it's not clear to me what the alternative is.
Thanks for any information
As it's mention on the OpenID Connect documents of Google Cloud, it's important for you and your users security to authenticate using well proven and debugged code. Google offers Firebase Authentication which let's users log in with an Email and password.
If you still want to implement the authorize part on your own, you can use your preferred web framework and probably it will have an authorizing process.
For example, in python you can use Django authorize system to provide users for a custom way to log in.
But, as I said before, I highly recommend you to use the Google APIs for authorizing as they are OpenID certificated.
This is in relation to my other question about the need to create a Facebook app.
I've been reading a lot about how to best approach login for mobile apps users (iOS and Android) that access my web service running on Google App Engine. I'm still not clear how to best do it as I would like to offer login with both Google and Facebook. The app and the web service does nothing with Facebook or Google other than I would like to piggyback on their login.
Having only login with Google for GAE is very easy and the same goes for using OpenIDConnect. Facebook unfortunately does not support this.
Reading an old question here on SO where someone wanted to do the same as I it looks like the app should do Facebook Login and then get a token that it passes to my backend which needs to be validated by contacting Facebook. Is this how to do it today?
I also found Google Identity Toolkit, which seem to be what I need. However, I do not have a website or just apps. I would need to have the apps do the Facebook login and somehow provide my web service with something so it can validate the login info.
Later on an app user should be able to log in using randomly Facebook, Google and my custom username/password. The app and the web service should know the user is logged in and authorize it to access the REST API.
How do I accomplish this? BTW, I'm using Go on GAE.
I would really appreciate if someone could explain if there are several options how to do this, pros and cons, and provide an overview of the best approach and what needs to be done.
Many thanks for any help with this!
UPDATE
OK, thanks a lot everyone for the help and pointers. I have successfully run the quickstart sample app for iOS for my GAE backend. Basically, created a Facebook app and permissions credentials on my web service on GAE so that the sample iOS app can log in.
A bit of a gap still before I have an authenticated user in the datastore and can authorize successive API calls.
Main open questions at this point:
how to get the gtoken in the iOS app after successful Facebook or Google login?
should I explicitly call an API on my web service to pass in the gtoken or is this somehow automatic with Gitkit API enabled?
Thanks for any help!
UPDATE
To answer #1 and #2 myself, there's a "successful sign-in url" that can be given in the app engine config so the app knows where to call with the gtoken. Then after that it's like explained in the answers.
Looks like you have an app and a backend on GAE.
If you are using google identity toolkit, it will allow you to signin with Facebook, Google, and email/password.
When user successfully signs in to your app using identity toolkit, your server should receive a gtoken. You have two options here:
Pass the gtoken to your app and save it there. When your app makes API calls to your backend, you app should attach the gtoken to every request. Your backend should verify the gtoken(https://developers.google.com/identity/toolkit/web/required-endpoints) for every API that needs authorization.
Verify the gtoken, generate a token that your backend can recognize/identify the user. Then pass the token to your app and everything else is the same as option 1.
If you do not want to use identity toolkit, you can implement facebook login on your app/backend and use facebook token to communicate between your app and backend.
Whatever your decision is, apps that use your API should pass you something that your backend can recognize/authorize the user.
The answer is about using Google Identity Toolkit (GIT). GIT itself is an identity provider, which would be integrated with your apps and backend. The flow works along these lines:
your app requests login via its GIT API
GIT will perform the federated login with Facebook or other 3rd party provider (transparent to your app) and returns a GIT token to the app (representing a unique user from your end-to-end system perspective, i.e. apps plus backend)
the app makes a request to the backend in which it passes the GIT token
the backend verifies the GIT token validity (using this go GIT client API, for example) and from it can extract the identity of the user and thus validate the request
You can find more detailed info about the backend token validation in the backent endpoint doc, look for these sections in particular:
Understanding the Identity Toolkit cookie/token
Getting information for users
Now the actual token validation on the backend may take a few seconds, so it might not be practical to do it for each and every REST request from the app. If so you'd need to somehow:
save the info that the user of that specific app instance is
authenticated in something like a "session" managed between your app and the backend
map a specific REST request received by the backend to a specific such authenticated "session"
But I'm not sure how exactly is this "session" functionality done in the apps+backend context, I didn't write any apps yet.
We're writing a Desktop application that relies on Google Appengine to authenticate the user and retrieve and store data associated to it.
The way we'd like to authenticate the user is that on launching the application the browser is launched at the login url for our application. Then the user logins there, and then the application makes restful calls without any OAUTH object, but re-using the browser session. I'm questioned that this won't work, since we cannot so transparently use the browser session. Is that correct?
Any alternatives beside authenticating from within the app using the ClientLoginApi?
I'm aware of:
How do you access an authenticated Google App Engine service from a (non-web) python client?
The only way to do this is if you can capture the authentication cookie used by the browser, and send it yourself. Obviously, there's no browser- or platform- independent way to do this.
A better option would be to use OAuth, with OAuth for installed apps to obtain the original token.