Rails 5 - Can't verify CSRF token authenticity - Only sometimes - ruby-on-rails

I have a Rails 5 app and am using a form to submit data. I am using CSRF protection and the form generates a hidden field 'authenticity_token'. Works great!
But sometimes a user gets and error 'Can't verify CSRF token authenticity'. And I am wondering why this happens? I can only imagine that the user has cookies disabled. But which normal internet user does that? Are there any other reasons?
I am not able to reproduce this error on my computer. So the only solution I have is to disable CSRF protection which is not really what I would like to do.
Any ideas?

Can't verify CSRF token authenticity results in 500 Internal Server.
I am wondering why this happens? I can only imagine that the user has cookies disabled. But which normal internet user does that? Are there any other reasons?
Yes, this happens. Or maybe the user(or hacker) tries to make an API request to the endpoint and since, it can't verify the authenticity token it will throw this error. A normal user doesn't do this, but maybe someone who values their privacy and may turn these settings off, or maybe they want to use Tor browser and so on. As developers, all we can do is try to provide best possible experience to the end user.
So, A better practice is to catch 500 Internal Server error with some custom message and then display it to the end user, while also sending the Stack trace to yourself(slack notification etc.) so that you can work on if it's a critical issue.
This way, If everything is good from user's end, this will work normally. But If someone disables cookies(or anything that results in some error), you can display custom message about the issue.

Related

Twitter App showing code: 89 Invalid or expired token

I have an app that uses the Twitter API where users can authenticate via twitter and retweet/like/follow through my app. Randomly this week the logs are showing "code: 89 Invalid or expired token".
Naturally, I go login to twitter to see the status of my app, and nothing seems out of the ordinary. I saw others with this issue had success regenerating their keys and replacing them in their application.
This didn't help.
One important thing to note is nothing has changed in the code of my application for the last 3-4 months, so I doubt it's anything in there. It's been working for over two years without any issue.
The thing I suspect the most is perhaps Twitter decided to suspend my app; Although, I don't see anywhere that is the case, and I thought I'd receive an email from them about it if it were.
I'm at a loss and would appreciate some possible solutions or alternative avenues I can pursue to find the culprit.
The keys associated with your app are the API Key (Consumer Token) and API secret key (Consumer Secret). The error you're getting is for the Access token, which belongs to the user. It sounds like the user associated with that request needs to authorize your app again before it can operate again with their access key. This can happen if the user removes authorization for your app by visiting their Settings/Privacy and safety/Apps and sessions.
If you were using your own access token in a scenario like single-user authorization, then regenerating the key might work, but in this case, the only way to get new keys for that user is for them to go through the sign-in process to authorize your app again. e.g. you could log who the user was that the error occurred on and send them a notification to re-authorize.

iOS authentication process

I am working on an app which needs the authentication. The backend is built with Flask python, and I am using POST request with a JSON to send the username and password. There are two questions I have actually.
First one, is it unsafe to authenticate with POST and JSON?
Second one, how can I keep the status of log in. I mean, like Facebook App, once user logged in, they don't have to input the password again even the app is restarted.
There is nothing wrong with sending your auth credentials with POST, in fact, that's what you should be doing, never send these information via GET
As for how to keep the status, check out Documentation on the class to store your cookies, then check if they exist.
Also, I assume you know the HTTP status code as well? Just to give you more info, just because your cookies exists doesn't mean the user is also logged in, for example, cookies may be expired (time length depends on your server configuration). So in that case you might want to return status error 4xx. HTTP Status Documentation, and maybe presentViewController(logInViewController, animated: true).

IOS MDM denying checkin request not working

I have a custom mdm solution running for IOS.
during enrollment, I am using HTTP basic authentication to pass the user name and password to be verified against our db/AD.
if the user is denied access, I send a 401.
however, on the IOS side, it pops up an error that says "safari could not install a profile due to an unknown error". Seems like a pretty bad error where I want it to say access denied.
Also there's an issue that safari decides to cache the credential used, so I don't get a chance to re-enter the user/pass again unless I clear all the cookie/cache data.
Anyone have met this issue before?
Looks to be issue with my code.
I've sent a 401, but actually the specification calls for a WWW-Authenticate header to be sent as well. With that added it, it's working normally now.
Have you considered using a more widely tested MDM solution such as AirWatch? A solution such as this has integration with AD and would be an excellent option for you to evaluate.

Random Facebook iOS SDK auth token invalidated by API

I randomly get the following message when trying to access the graph from my iPhone using Facebook iOS SDK:
response string: {"error":{"type":"OAuthException","message":"Error validating access token: The session was invalidated explicitly using an API call."}}
I'm not sure why this is because I call the graph immediately after I login, so the token should be valid. Also, this happens randomly around 30% of the time. Does anyone know how to go about debugging this issue?
I've been experiencing the same issue. It happens with any graph request after calling authorize immediately after a successful logout callback (with the idea being that a different user can log in from there).
The authorization screen will say that the user's already accepted the permissions (even though they're supposed to be logged out now...) and if they hit ok it will cause the issue. Almost as if the auth process reissues an invalidated token because it doesn't get the memo that they've logged out. However it won't happen if the user hits the "not you?" link and logs in as someone else as intended (or if they log in again as the same user), so this isn't a major issue in my case.
As for an answer / fix, I made mine fix itself by detecting the error response from the graph call and then making another call to authorize. Not ideal though, since it annoys the user with two consecutive app switches...

Keep getting OAuth::Unauthorized error when using oauth and twitter ruby gems

I am using the ruby twitter gem and oauth to gain access to users twitter accounts. In my code, I have:
unless #user.twitter_authd?
oauth = Twitter::OAuth.new('token', 'secret')
session[:twitter_request_token] = oauth.request_token.token
session[:twitter_request_secret] = oauth.request_token.secret
#twitter_auth_url = oauth.request_token.authorize_url
end
where token and secret have my actual token and secret inserted. When I click on the link to the #twitter_auth_url, I am taken to twitter and asked to grant access. I click allow and then twitter redirects me to my callback URL http://www.mydomain.com/twitter_callback/?oauth_token=fmy2aMvnjVgaFrz37bJ4JuB8r5xN79gsgDQRG4BNY which then hits this code:
oauth = Twitter::OAuth.new('token', 'secret')
logger.info("session[:twitter_request_token] = #{session[:twitter_request_token]}")
logger.info("session[:twitter_request_secret] = #{session[:twitter_request_secret]}")
oauth.authorize_from_request(session[:twitter_request_token], session[:twitter_request_secret])
session[:twitter_request_token] = nil
session[:twitter_request_secret] = nil
#user.update_attributes({
:twitter_token => oauth.access_token.token,
:twitter_secret => oauth.access_token.secret,
})
redirect_to root_path
The twitter request token and secret are being set just fine. However I end up with an authorization error:
OAuth::Unauthorized in MainController#twitter_callback
401 Unauthorized
RAILS_ROOT: /Users/TAmoyal/Desktop/RoR_Projects/mls
Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/oauth-0.3.4/lib/oauth/consumer.rb:167:in `token_request'
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/oauth-0.3.4/lib/oauth/tokens/request_token.rb:14:in `get_access_token'
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/erwaller-twitter-0.6.13.1/lib/twitter/oauth.rb:29:in `authorize_from_request'
/Users/TAmoyal/Desktop/RoR_Projects/mls/app/controllers/main_controller.rb:70:in `twitter_callback'
The code is failing at this line:
oauth.authorize_from_request(session[:twitter_request_token], session[:twitter_request_secret])
when it tries to get an access token. You can see the source code of authorize_from_request here. I am not sure why this is happening. Anyone have ideas?
A bit late to the party but just ran into the same issue myself. I tracked the issue down to the setup of my OAuth app in Twitter. I had initially not specified a callback URL as I was unsure of it.
Once I had setup my rails app I went back to find Twitter had assumed I was a desktop application as I hadn't specified a callback URL. Once I changed this to website and entered a callback URL I stopped getting 400s.
If you're getting error 401 - OAuth::Unauthorized, make sure you edit the settings of your Twitter application as follows:
Application Type: Browser
Callback URL: http://127.0.0.1:3000/auth/twitter/callback
this is an issue about time synchronization of your system with twitter server.
Twitter doesn't allow localhost as part of a valid callback URL.
Instead use http://127.0.0.1:3000/auth/twitter/callback
Hope this helps
This was one of the most annoying things to debug that I have come across. I was outputting in a couple places by accident because the URL's are dynamic and they happened to not be defined in my test case (i use this to display chart data and there is not enough right now so the google chart api URL's are blank). This caused my browser to make multiple requests to my localhost when some pages were loaded. Somehow that made the oauth process crap out. Obviously there is no way for people on S.O. to know about my application specific issue so I had to answer my own question.
I had this same problem and none of the suggestions in this thread worked for me.
I found the problem for me was the TIMESTAMP on my request. The mobile device I was running my scripts on had a jacked up clock. When I updated the system time on my device to the correct time (i.e. now), all of my requests came back "200 OK" instead of "401 Unauthorized".
This problem seems to be caused by twitter not being able to handle connection keep-alive correctly. Make sure you set connection=close http header in the request to twitter. Wasted a weekend debugging this.
not enough info for me, but when was twitter gem last updated? twitter changed their oauth 'stuff' in mid may approx. perhaps you have an old one. I'd update your question to show the callback_url, and make sure you have the right token and secret, which it looks like you don't have.
also, did you put the right callback url in your twitter app page? alot of times that screws you up too.
if that fails use mbleighs twitter_auth instead. it worked for me and is pretty slick.

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