I have an aplication which is using jwt authentication, so i have an api /login, where i generate jwt like:
res.cookie('Authorization', 'Bearer ' + token, {httOnly: true});
When i login in on front end, in react js, the server generate jwt token.
Questions:
How to manage jwt on front end, after log in? (now the token is sent in cookie and i can't read it using javascript), and when i go to another route after login, i have to send back from front end the token, but it is only on /login page not in second route. I now that i can handle token using localStorage, but this s not secure. So, how, in my situation to send back the token if i navigate after login on another page?
If you don't switch domains, and the cookie path is global, then you can access it from any page in the front-end. See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies
Also, I would think twice before going with cookies. I would suggest using short-lived tokens (30 mins) with refreshTokens (30 mins) in localStorage and send them using the standard Authorization header, and not having to worry about someone stealing them. (Just don't store sensitive data in there). The refresh token will periodically require a new pair of token/refresh, before the time runs out.
There is also sessionStorage if you wouldn't like to persist the data for a long time: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/sessionStorage with the trick that, each tab/window has separate sessionStorage.
Related
I'm currently working on a project with expressjs. For user authorization I use JWT tokens but until now only access tokens, because I just don't understand them together with a real example. So can somebody explain to me what the steps are the authorization goes through when someone logs into his account.
f.E.:
Refresh and Access Tokens get generated
Token gets stored into database etc.
Thank you in advance and have a great day
User sends a POST request with login credentials
Server authenticates and if successful, returns a JWT (usually in a httpOnly cookie). Server does not store JWTs in a database. The whole point of JWT is that authentication state is stored by the bearer of it.
For subsequent requests to protected endpoints, client needs to attach JWT. Server should check if JWT is expired and whether it has been altered.
Extensions that you might want to think about:
How to refresh JWTs:
There are different refreshing patterns that can be used. For
example, you can check the expiry of the JWT every time that your
server receives a request. If JWT is expiring soon, issue a fresh
JWT.
How to maintain authentication state on client-side without having to log in every time you refresh the page
How to really log a user out:
If you set the expiry as 30 minutes and a user logs out at the 15th minute mark, that JWT can technically still be used to access protected endpoints for another 15 minutes.
I am making a react application and using JWT for authentication.
As soon as a user logs in I issue a access token and set a http only cookie named jwt and value is refresh token. As per some articles I have read online it is suggested that access token have a short validity and refresh token have a long validity, so I set validity of access token to be 1 day and refresh token to be 25 days, (numbers are not very relevant). Now as soon as refresh token expires The user is automatically logged out.
Now the app I am developing is a data entry dashboard and I do not want the user to suddenly logout after entering a lot of data even if that happens once a month, so I want to know the industry standard to manage this kind of situation
There is a way to update refresh token without login-password pair:
When a refresh token expires a client have to get a new token pair (access, refresh tokens).
The client sends its access AND refresh tokens and receives a new pair (just like when authenticating with username:password).
You should track expiry of refresh tokens to prevent their reuse.
It is as safe as your flow because when a client gets logged out it understands that someone else already used its refresh token once. So it has to authenticate using username:password and invalidate the last refresh token.
I found an article explaining this flow
I am using Firebase authentication to authenticate users. Whenever, the user is logged in, I get the user's ID token with user.getIdToken(true) and set it on the local storage. With that token in the authorization header, I am requesting my back-end API.
On the back-end side, I am using Firebase admin SDK to authenticate the request and the user with the client-side ID token passed in the request authorization header.
This works for a while. But after some time I get error:
ExpiredIdTokenError: Token expired, 1620908095 < 1620915515
I saw that Firebase refreshes the ID token on its own. But I don't think that's the case. I have looked through the developer tools network tab, and there's also an observer method to check whenever the token has changed => onIdTokenChanged(), but the token is never refreshed.
I couldn't find any information on the Firebase docs either, and I was hoping if you could help me:
How can I generate a token without expiration limit to last until signed out or at least for some more time (1 week maybe)?
If I cannot the set the expiry limit of the token, what steps should I take so that I can send a valid unexpired token when I am request data from my back-end? Do I have to call user.getIdToken(true) every-time and get a fresh token before I request from my back-end API?
The idTokenChanged() observer is a bit misleading. It will fire when the token is refreshed, but the token is only refreshed automatically when you also use other Firebase products (like its database or file storage). In other cases, as you said you should call user.getIdToken(), which will refresh an expired token for you if necessary, everytime you call your API. You don't need to pass true into this method unless you want to have a completely fresh token everytime (which you most likely don't need).
To my knowledge you cannot control the expiration of tokens generated with the client SDK, for that you would need to generate your own tokens on the server.
I'm new to webdev and have implemented access token & refresh token based authentication in my express project. However, the more I look over the implementation I'm starting to question why access tokens exist when it appears that refresh tokens make them redundant. Perhaps it's just my implementation.
For any task that needs authentication, I send off a cookie with both an access token and refresh token to an auth server. It looks at the access token, and if it is both valid and unexpired, it will send a 200 back and allow any express middleware to continue on.
However if it has expired, it will then query a database to see if a matching refresh token exists and, if so, will send a new access token.
As the lifetime of the access token decreases, the auth server will need to do more database searches to verify the refresh token. At that rate, why bother with the access token and instead why not rely solely on the refresh token? After all, the refresh token can be removed from the database and the authorisation server can reject any requests made with it.
The only reason I can think of the access tokens existing is to reduce how often a page will need to query a database, but that seems too simple. Since I'm fairly new to this, I know I must be missing some larger concept. Can anyone enlighten me?
My simple application written in Javascript is using a service (which is written as a wrapper on Auth0) for authentication. On successful login, if I refresh the home page, application again goes to login page (even if I have stored the access token in cookies)
I also tried to store the access token in browser session storage.
As my index.html is launched, i am checking if my application url contains access token. If there is no access token, I redirect it to login page.
if (((window.location.hash).indexOf('access_token') < 0)) {
location.replace(redirectUrl);
}
On successful login, as url has access token in it, app works fine further.
But next time when I refresh the home page, it don't have access token in URL.
As per my understanding, as I have access token in cookies, it should not ask me for login again as long as token is valid.
It is still asking for login. What should be the strategy should I use to persist the token ?
On logout, I am setting the cookie to expire. Is there any ideal way to do log out other than this?
This can often be troubleshooted with a HAR file capture to follow the trail being left in the authentication flow. However since we don't have that option at this juncture here are a couple things to look at.
Are you using Dev keys in your auth scenario?
Expiry time
Where is the access token being stored?
https://auth0.com/docs/tokens/overview-access-tokens
Currently, you have a somewhat incomplete implementation.
As per my understanding, as I have access token in cookies, it should not ask me for login again as long as token is valid.
Saving token in the cookie storage and local storage does not have any relation with user authentication state. It is just a way of persisting the token and reading the data. In each navigation, you need to read the token and extract the information from the token to make sure user is authenticated.
The architecture you should follow:
Redirect the user to /authorize endpoint if there is no valid token in the application.
Once auth0 finish the user validation, the user will be redirected in the whitelisted callback URL. Make sure this URL is unique and save the token from URL fragments. It is very important to complete the token validation on the client side. Otherwise, it will be a major security issue. https://auth0.com/docs/tokens/guides/id-token/validate-id-token
Redirect the user to the secured URL.
I would highly recommend using auth0 SDK as it mitigates all the security issues including token signature validation using RS256 algorithm.
https://auth0.com/docs/quickstart/spa/vanillajs/01-login
You may find folloiwng thread useful
Why my auth0 token expires when refreshing page or clicking link in my Angular app?