Goal: A single page application that uses Facebook authentication to login, but does nothing with Facebook after that.
Tech: Facebook Javascript SDK, AngularJS, angular-ui, .Net Web Api
I'm creating a Single Page Application (SPA) in Javascript using AngularJS. I'm using the Facebook SDK which is working to authenticate the user; it returns me a facebook user id, an access token, token expiry time, a signed request, and some other stuff, all on the client side. I then pass this information to my service, mostly because I feel I should. After this I don't really care about Facebook. But I want to make calls to the server to load the user's data.
I could just make all requests using the facebook user id, but there would be no security because any client could just call that endpoint and pass any user id until they found a valid one.
I could use the access token on each request as well, but I still think this is a security failure; when the user first logs in and I pass it to the server, well that endpoint could also be called by any client... "LoginServer('myfakeaccesstoken', $knownUserId)
I get the feeling that I should validate the token on the server side back with facebook, and then I can safely rely on teh token on future API calls, but I'm wondering if there are any other approaches?
The Facebook documentation seems to focus too much on me wanting to make follow up calls to their graph API when I really don't care after my user is authenticated.
Related
Using angularjs in the client , and c# in the server side.
I want to learn how can i create a website with users.
I know how to store the data in the db.
My real question is how the site remember the user session
After refreshing.
So the user dont need to login again.
Thanks guys.
Microsoft created a JWT (JSON Web Token) package for .NET Web API projects specifically for this purpose. And since you're using Angular.js, working with JSON is perfect.
There are plenty of tutorials for understanding how JWT works and securely saves a user's session like this one: https://scotch.io/tutorials/the-anatomy-of-a-json-web-token.
The idea is that your server sends your client/user a long encrypted string. The client saves it in their cookies and sends it to your server whenever you want to verify the user.
Most of the complicated details regarding encryption you don't need to worry about. Just follow the tutorials for setting up the exchange of the JWT tokens.
Back in the days, we use cookies to do this.
In the Restful html5 world of today, we can use several other options.
Websql, Localstorage, IndexedDB.
Probably you are using something like JWT to store an authentication token you use to make authenticated api calls.
The way to go, or as i do is store that token in localStorage and then, inject in every call to the api.
Then in the angular run section i check if the user is authenticated checking if i have the token stored, and if is not, send to the login page.
angular.module('Scope', ['ui.router', 'ngStorage'])
.run(function($localStorage, $state){
if (!$localStorage.authenticationToken) {
$state.go('login');
}
}
});
In this example, every time the app reloads, angular execute the run function, and checking if we have stored the token, if is not, send the user to the login webpage.
I find the documentation provided by microsoft confusing(Link).
How can I for example get an authentication token and where can I download the javascript libraries? I couldn't find any information on this.
Basically I want to know how to get the calendar of an user in my javascript webapp.
I did try sending an request to
"https://outlook.office365.com/api/v1.0/me/calendarview?startDateTime="+begin+"&endDateTime="+end"
This shows me an authentication popup but after submitting the correct username/mail and password, it doesn't do anything. There is no response back.
To get an access token, you need to use the OAuth2 Authorization Code Grant flow. https://dev.outlook.com/RestGettingStarted walks through the process. Basically you need to register your app to get a client ID and secret, then use those to go through the process.
I'm currently building a frontend client for my own Apigility API.
The API uses OAuth 2.0 Authentication which is working fine.
I want to create an AngularJS Landingpage to let the users authenticate by entering their credentials. Because the Client is created with JavaScript,
I shouldn't save the client_secret in the Client, correct?
I have read a lot of posts, but still haven't the right solution.
Is it correct to use the implicit grant type for this scenario?
This procedure is working, I'm being redirected to the authentication server,
after the client authorization and entering credentials, I get back to the client (authenticated).
But I don't want to get redirected to another authentication page.
Is it also possible to authenticate directly and secure on the angularJS frontend?
Thanks,
Simon
You should take a look at this post i made:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/42443878/2963703
It details how to do this using the Spotify API. Your page won't get redirected, instead a popup window will open in which the user authorizes themselves. Once they're authorized the window will close itself and in your main page you will have the access token you need.
I'm running a webview from a cordova app and want to authenticate a user, I know they have the OAuth strategies but I need to use the email/password combination.
I'd like to keep things simple but may end up having to generate a token.
Open an InAppBrowser that loads an auth flow for firebase
Listen for that auth flow to be completed using this method: http://blogs.telerik.com/appbuilder/posts/13-12-23/cross-window-communication-with-cordova%27s-inappbrowser
Grab the result from the webview again and insert it into the webview firebase instance
I'm guessing that's not possible due to security.
My app is using Amazon login (required) so my alternative would be:
webview loads InAppBrowser with our external url
that loads Amazon auth, then generates a token for Firebase
webview listens for token and grabs it, stores it in localstorage
Edit:
In the firebase docs on logging in with a username/password, I see it returns a token for the session and more information in the authData object:
https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/guide/user-auth.html
Could I then take all the information from that object and send it back over to the cordova webview and then populate that Firebase ref with the information?
Some answers from the wonderfully helpful support at Firebase:
First:
You’re correct – anyone can make a request to sign up, and we don’t expose any capability to secure the url which people can sign up from for email / password authentication.
The main reason that we require / enable origin whitelisting for OAuth authentication, but not for email / password authentication, tends to revolve around sessioning.
The Firebase login server does not maintain sessions (via cookies or any other method), and so requests to the login server for password auth. requires a user credential (the password) for every request. CSRF is typically a risk when a malicious party can take advantage of a user’s session browser, i.e. make requests on behalf of the user to some page where cookies are automatically sent by the browser.
Furthermore, we don’t have a great way to actually do ideal origin-based whitelisting for these pure HTTP requests. We could use CORS, but would have to fall back to JSONP for older browser environments that don’t support it. To complicate matters further, PhoneGap / Cordova apps don’t have the same notion of an “origin” at all, and from the perspective of a server – the calls are indistinguishable from any malicious party making an HTTP request with the same headers.
The OAuth providers, however, use cookies for sessioning and do not require user invention for each auth. request. If you’ve approved a particular Facebook app, you won’t be shown any UI/UX or be prompted the next time that app requests your data – it will be invisible. When we do OAuth, we never have to send any user credentials to Facebook / Twitter / etc., because those are stored in browser cookies for facebook.com / twitter.com / etc. What we need to protect is a malicious party pretending to be a popular, valid Facebook app. and taking advantage of that short-circuit behavior that would get access to user data without the user’s knowledge.
My response:
So, how is that secured? If anyone can make a request to sign up from a
cordova webview (which comes from no specific url, just the app iteself)
then I can't secure from which url people can sign up from? So any site
could use our url "xxx.com" in their config and start registering
users?
That doesn't seem right to me.
I think I still need to have an external url that is whitelisted by you
guys. That would have the login form and do the auth.
But then my question is, can I transfer that auth back to my cordova app?
Is it somewhere in localStorage I can check? I'll have to run some tests.
And final response:
Sure thing – we’re happy to help. I wrote much of the original client authentication code, and can speak to the design decisions and rationale that went into it. Be sure to let me know if you have further questions there.
While we don’t store user passwords in cookies, of course, we maintain a Firebase auth. token in LocalStorage. Our authentication tokens are signed by your unique Firebase secret (so they cannot be spoofed), and can contain any arbitrary user data that would be useful in your security rules.
By default, and when using the delegated login (email + password) service, these tokens will only contain a user id to uniquely identify your users for use in your security rules. For example, you could restrict all writes or reads to a given path (e.g. write to /users/$uid/name) by the user id present in the token (“.write” = “$uid = auth.uid”). Much more information on that topic available on our website.
Your plan to spin up a server to authenticate users with Amazon and generate tokens sounds correct. This is a common pattern for our users who wish to use authentication methods that we don’t support out-of-the-box (ie Amazon OAuth) or have custom auth requirements. Note: once you’ve created those tokens and sent them down to the client, they’ll be automatically persisted for you once you call ref.authWithCustomToken(…). Subsequent restarts of the app will use the same token, as long as it has not yet expired.
This is a topic of interest to me too as I have implemented something similar , twitter digits (native android) + firebase custom login in webview.
I think, as recommended by firebase, you can use other authentication providers and then the firebase custom login.
Do you use the Amazon login in android native code ? If so after login, then generate a JWT token for firebase and use it to access firebase.
If all code is in Html/js app, then maybe you can use custom login and generate a token on your server after making sure its logged in to the Amazon.
The trouble with Android hybrid apps is the following: the JWT token (for firebase) should be created on secure system (eg. server side) not with android java code, other option for hybrid app is to do a http request to generate the token, but I find that less secure, anyone would be able to get a token by finding the URL, than I resort to generate token within android app code, you can change security key/seed for token when doing new releases.
In summary, I don't think firebase studied the problem of mobile hybrid apps.
I know the issue of securing connexion between a JS app (let's say just 'app') and an OAuth2.0 server (let's say just 'server') is an age-old question.
However, I can not find a lot of information about the special case where the app and the server are coded by the same entity and stored at the same place (i.e. same domain, or at least, two subdomains of the same domain).
First of all, as far as the OAuth grant type is concerned, I think the right one is the Resource Owner Password Credentials Grant, since the server and the app have the same author. The issue here being that the Client ID and Client Secret are available to the user in the client. This can be dealt with either by developing a proxy on server end or by using short-life tokens and disabling CORS (if I understood correctly). Is there any other property we can take advantage of as far as security is concerned when server and app have the same author?
My second question relates to the optional use of a Facebook Login authentication (or whatever well-known app OAuth login system: Google, Twitter, etc.).
Ideally, I want users to log in using either:
My-app-related credentials (if they registered without using FB login option)
Facebook credentials (if they registered using FB login option)
The first log in method is the classical one: upon log in, are sent to the server the user credentials along with the client ID and client Secret, we get back an access token and everything works well.
I must confess I'm a bit lost with the second method: upon login, user Facebook credentials are sent to Facebook server, which responds with an access token, and my app get access to my user Facebook information (such as email address and UID). But I do not know what to do with this FB information, and especially what I should sent to my own OAuth server so that:
The user gets connected to my server
The connection is secure (i.e. no one can impersonate the user by only having to get her Facebook UID for instance).
In other terms, there should be something secret related to Facebook sent to my server but I can not figure what.
I have found the answer to my second question, so I share it here:
What should be passed on to the server is the Facebook access token, so that the server can :
make a request using Facebook PHP SDK and the given token
retrieve user data (such as Facebook UID for instance)
match it against your website user database (which should have users FB UIDs)
actually connects the user if there is a match
Step 1. and 2. can be done nicely with the helper class FacebookJavascriptLoginHelper of the FB PHP SDK. In this case, the access token is stored by Facebook Javascript SDK into a cookie that is read server-side by the FacebookJavascriptLoginHelper.