I'm working on a project in which we need to authenticate the user in an application by using his/hers windows credentials. Frontend is using Angularjs and backend java.
After doing a sensible amount of research, I discovered that there is no way on the the frontend to obtain directly the Windows user & pass due to security concerns.
But I'm thinking that the whole process should start here, from the frontend, by obtaining these two encrypted credentials or at least a token and sending them to the backend in order to kickstart the ntlm authentication process.
And also, not sure if the user should have to log in the app by typing his windows credentials or if it should automatically be done with ntlm passthrough.
I do not have a good grip on the concept, and that is because most of the related sources that I found are referring to backend solutions (C# 80% of them), but almost nothing for fronted. So, I humbly require some clarifications on this topic. Is there some sort of middleware or npm package that I should use in order to obtain the user & pass, or what would you advise?
Web servers expose certain server variables to code handling requests they serve.
For me, using IIS, these are described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/iis/6.0-sdk/ms524602%28v%3dvs.90%29
Since I am using IISNode; my node.js environment is completely embedded into IIS; I have access to these server variables. As the link described, each programming language seems to have their own way to access these variables.
So I would doubt it if Java does not have those as well. The exact code to use will depend on you back end.
But a quick search for "java server variables" already yields me the following:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19534-01/820-3288/gawim/index.html for the java access manager.
http://users.polytech.unice.fr/~buffa/cours/internet/POLYS/servlets/Servlet-Tutorial-CGI-Variables.html for old school JSP.
How can I obtain server variables using apache wicket 1.54? for java wicket server.
So have a look at the documentation of your specific web server software or Java API.
There should be a list and example code of how to access these.
Once you obtain this data server side, you can do the LDAP query and then return the results client side.
I am developing an application that extracts Swagger specifications of other applications and extrapolates an UI for them, with all the needed functionalities to interact with the API.
Now I am facing a problem when trying to implement the OAuth2 authentication. With OAuth2 you always need a registered cientId to get the access token. The problem is that the swagger specification doesn't require providing a clientId in the OAuth2 security definitions.
This means that the clientId should be registered for my own application in any OAuth2 server that the users want to access, and get the data for my application, and not for my user's applications. Of course this is not the way my application should work, as it's supposed to maintain the user's application identity.
My questions are:
Should the clientId be added to the OAuth2 definition?
Is it possible to implement what I need without having to register my app for all the OAuth2 servers that my users want to access?
Maybe I am missing something, any help would be much appreciated!
Thank you
I don't think ClientID would be part of the definition--it's typically part of the credentials that are provided to a specific implementation for connecting to a service. So each integration would be a different "client" and therefore a different ClientID
I would to ask a few questions to better understand some procedures. I'm trying to write a web api project which will be a backend for both web and mobile clients.
The problem that i've in mind is about security. I don't want to use Identity or any other providers. I want to use my own database user and role structures.
Only authenticated client applications should be consuming my application. So that anonymous applications should not consume it.
So what should be the approach ? I 've written a custom AuthorizationAttribute and check some custom headers like "AppID","AppSecurity" key which i store in my own database and if the client sends the right appId and the key it means the app is authenticated to consume the API which does not sound very secure to me.
Another issue is that ; Lets say i've developed a javascript web application and i've to first authenticate the application itself before making GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc requests which means i've to add some kind of authentication data like username, appkey, password in one of the js files for sending the "AppID" and the "AppSecurity" keys in the header. A client who knows how to use some developer tools or fiddler can easily capture my header values that are being sent to the server side? Even if i pass authentication values on the body of my json request it still can be found on the js files that are sent to the client. I'm also confused about that tooç
So basically i want to build a server side api that will serve the data and get data from the authenticated client applications only. What i need is a simple example for that without using any identity providers.
I'm trying to use Doorkeeper in a Ruby on Rails API app for authentication. From a client-side AngularJS app, I want to get an access token. Currently, this involves a GET request to /oauth/authorize, which gives me a code, then I POST that code along with a client_id and a secret to /oauth/token. I don't want to have to send the client ID and secret from my client-side app, since they're stored in plain-text in a JavaScript file. I would like to follow this flow where response_type is token, not code, but I can't figure out how to do that with Doorkeeper. Their wiki examples all seem to involve POSTing the client ID and secret to /oauth/token.
Is Doorkeeper the right gem for this? How can I do Google OAuth2 from a client-side app, where no secrets are passed from client-side to the server?
Edit: looks like what I want is Implicit Grant, which Doorkeeper supports. Now I just have to find out how to do that in my Rails app...
No extra server-side configuration necessary.
When I created a new Doorkeeper::Application in my Rails app, the Doorkeeper interface gave me an Authorize link with response_type=code in it for that application.
I changed that to response_type=token and when I do a GET request to that, it responds immediately with access_token instead of code. The Authorize URL looks like http://my-rails-doorkeeper-app/oauth/authorize?client_id=1234&redirect_uri=http://my-angularjs-app&response_type=token.
Update :
This can only be applied when we also allow implicit grant for the grant flow.
By default, doorkeeper will allow its four kinds of flow (implicit grant, authorization grant, password, and client_credentials).
You can configure it in initializer/doorkeeper.rb if you don't want to let it happens since sometimes it can be dangerous.
I could do with some help on my REST API. I'm writing a Node.js app which is using Express, MongoDB and has Backbone.js on the client side. I've spent the last two days trying to work out all of this and not having much luck. I've already checked out:
Securing a REST API
Securing my REST API with OAuth while still allowing authentication via third party OAuth providers (using DotNetOpenAuth)
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/designing-a-secure-rest-api-without-oauth-authentication/
http://tesoriere.com/2011/10/10/node.js-getting-oauth-up-and-working-using-express.js-and-railway.js/
I want to keep my backend and frontend as separate as possible so I thought about using a carefully designed REST API would be good. My thinking is that if I ever get round to developing an iPhone app (or something else like that), it could use the API to access data.
BUT, I want this to be secure. A user has logged into my web app and I want to ensure my API is secure. I read about OAuth, OAuth 2.0, OpenID, Hmac, hashes etc... I want to avoid using external logging in (Facebook/Twitter/etc) I want the registering and logging in to be on my app/server.
...but I'm still confused here. Maybe it's late at night or my brain is just fried, but I could really do with some steps on what to do here. What are the steps for me to create a secure API?
Any help, any information, any examples, steps or anything would be great. Please help!
In order of increasing security / complexity:
Basic HTTP Auth
Many API libraries will let you build this in (Piston in Django for example) or you can let your webserver handle it. Both Nginx and Apache can use server directives to secure a site with a simple b64encoded password. It's not the most secure thing in the world but it is at least a username and password!
If you're using Nginx you can add a section to your host config like so:
auth_basic "Restricted";
auth_basic_user_file /path/to/htpasswd;
(Put it in your location / block)
Docs: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpAuthBasicModule
You'll need to get the python script to generate that password and put the output into a file: http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/contrib/htpasswd.py?format=txt
The location of the file doesn't matter too much as long as Nginx has access to it.
HTTPS
Secure the connection from your server to the app, this is the most basic and will prevent man in the middle attacks.
You can do this with Nginx, the docs for it are very comprehensive: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule
A self-signed certificate for this would be fine (and free!).
API Keys
These could be in any format you like but they give you the benefit of revoking access should you need to. Possibly not the perfect solution for you if you're developing both ends of the connection. They tend to be used when you have third parties using the API, eg Github.
OAuth
OAuth 2.0 is the one to go with here. While I don't know the underlying workings of the spec it's the defacto standard for most authentication now (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.) and there are a ton of libraries and docs to help you get those implemented. That being said, it's usually used to authenticate a user by asking a third party service for the authentication.
Given that you doing the development both ends it would probably be enough to put your API behind Basic HTTP Auth and serve it over HTTPS, especially if you don't want to waste time messing around with OAuth.
Here's a different way of thinking about it:
Let's suppose for a moment that you're not using an API. Your user logs into the app, providing some credentials, and you give a cookie or similar token of some sort to the user, which you use to identify that user has logged in. The user then requests a page containing restricted information (or creating/modifying/deleting it), so you check that this token to ensure that the user is allowed to view that information.
Now, it sounds to me that the only thing you're changing here is the way that information is delivered. Instead of delivering the information as rendered HTML, you're returning the information as JSON and rendering it on the client side. Your AJAX requests to the server will carry that same logged-in token as before, so I suggest just checking that token, and restricting the information down to 'just what the user is allowed to know' in the same way.
Your API is now as secure as your login is - if anyone was to know the token necessary for accessing the api, they would also be logged into the site and have access to all the information anyway. Best bit is, if you've already implemented login, you've not really had to do any more work.
The point of systems such as OAuth is to provide this 'logging in' method, usually from a third party application and as a developer. This would potentially be a good solution for an iPhone app or similar, but that's in the future. Nothing wrong with the API accepting more than one authentication method!
The answers so far do a great job of explaining, but don't give any actual steps. I came across this blog post that goes into great detail about how to create and manage tokens securely with Node + Passport.
http://aleksandrov.ws/2013/09/12/restful-api-with-nodejs-plus-mongodb/
Tips valid for securing any web application
If you want to secure your application, then you should definitely start by using HTTPS instead of HTTP, this ensures a creating secure channel between you & the users that will prevent sniffing the data sent back & forth to the users & will help keep the data exchanged confidential.
You can use JWTs (JSON Web Tokens) to secure RESTful APIs, this has many benefits when compared to the server-side sessions, the benefits are mainly:
1- More scalable, as your API servers will not have to maintain sessions for each user (which can be a big burden when you have many sessions)
2- JWTs are self contained & have the claims which define the user role for example & what he can access & issued at date & expiry date (after which JWT won't be valid)
3- Easier to handle across load-balancers & if you have multiple API servers as you won't have to share session data nor configure server to route the session to same server, whenever a request with a JWT hit any server it can be authenticated & authorized
4- Less pressure on your DB as well as you won't have to constantly store & retrieve session id & data for each request
5- The JWTs can't be tampered with if you use a strong key to sign the JWT, so you can trust the claims in the JWT that is sent with the request without having to check the user session & whether he is authorized or not, you can just check the JWT & then you are all set to know who & what this user can do.
Node.js specific libraries to implement JWTs:
Many libraries provide easy ways to create & validate JWTs, for example: in node.js one of the most popular is jsonwebtoken, also for validating the JWTs you can use the same library or use express-jwt or koa-jwt (if you are using express/koa)
Since REST APIs generally aims to keep the server stateless, so JWTs are more compatible with that concept as each request is sent with Authorization token that is self contained (JWT) without the server having to keep track of user session compared to sessions which make the server stateful so that it remembers the user & his role, however, sessions are also widely used & have their pros, which you can search for if you want.
One important thing to note is that you have to securely deliver the JWT to the client using HTTPS & save it in a secure place (for example in local storage).
You can learn more about JWTs from this link