I'm trying to give security to my APIs using WSO2 API Manager. I could achieved the configuration of WSO2 Identity Server to use an LDAP server with some users and made WSO2 API Manager to use this Identity Server as Key Manager. My questions are:
How can I configure end user to access an API? Is it needed to associate all the users to an application role in API Manager carbon?
The end users need to have two access token to access an API? One to authenticate in IS using (OAuth Client Key/OAuth Client Secret) and other to generate the access token to the API in API Manager using (Consumer Client Id/Consumer Client Secret)?
Is there any tutorial explaining all this steps and how to protect an API just for some users?
Basically, the token generation flow is different from grant type to grant type. For example, the jwt-bearer grant type that you are using to generate an access token has several steps such as,
Service provider requests the JWT from the IDP
Generating an access token from API Manager exchanging the JWT assertion.
This is because the usage of each grant type is different and using grant types depends on your security requirement.
The JWT Bearer grant is usually used in client apps, where user logs in providing user name and password and the rest are done in the application itself without any interaction with the end-user.
If you need to generate the token as the end-user, you can use the password grant type.
These are the steps that I made to configure WSO2 Identity Server and WSO2 Api Manager:
I've created a Service Provider in Identity Server and configured an OAuth/OpenId Connect. This generated an OAuth Client Key and OAuth Client Secret.
I've created an Identity Provider in API Manager, import a Public Certificate to authenticate the response from identity provider and use the OAuth Client Key as Alias to be checked by WSO2 API Manager when verifying the JWT Token.
I've created an API in WSO2 API Publisher, associated this API to an Interna/subscriber role and my end users to this role.
I've created an Application in WSO2 API Store to consume my Rest Service and subscribed my API to this Application.
I followed this article to these steps:
how-to-protect-your-apis-with-self-contained-acces
The problem are the steps to consume the Rest Service.
Request in WSO2 Identity Server to generate an access token to API Manager:
curl -u (OAUTH_CLIENT_KEY:OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET) -k -d "grant_type=password&username=END_USER_USERNAME&password=END_USER_PASSWORD" -H "Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded" https://localhost:9443/oauth2/token
Request in API Manager to generate an access token to the API.
curl -i -X POST -u (CONSUMER_KEY:CONSUMER_SECRET) -k -d 'grant_type=urn:ietf:params:oauth:grant-type:jwt-bearer&assertion=IS_ACCESS_TOKEN' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' https://localhost:9444/oauth2/token
Request to API Manager to get the resource from API:
curl -v -H "Authorization: Bearer AM_ACCESS_TOKEN" http://172.19.0.1:8281/jwt/1.0.0/REST_API
Is there any easy way to accomplish these steps?
Please refer to the API security section in the documentation for more information on securing an API using roles, scopes, and tokens.
https://apim.docs.wso2.com/en/latest/learn/api-security/api-authentication/api-authentication-overview/
https://apim.docs.wso2.com/en/latest/learn/api-security/authorization/api-authorization/
This doc consists of information on how you can use different grant types with APIM and IS according to your requirements.
A newbie question about API security:
When I applied API service from some API providers, usually I just login and generate an api key or token in their api management site. After that I can embed this api key or token in the request to access the API.
I was told that the this is OAuth 2. But, after reading a few articles about OAuth 2, it seems the OAuth-2 token issued from OAuth server will expire and a refresh-token is required to fetch a new token.
But the API keys I got from those API providers does not mention about the expiration, instead, I can manually revoke the API Key on their API management site.
So, if I have some APIs which I want to use the similar way (let the user manage their own api key on my site) to protect, how can I achieve that by using the OAuth 2 server?
I think what you explained above are 2 different ways to authorize a request:
A. Using API Keys
These API keys are usually a long string that you generate inside a dashboard
You as a developer would usually have 1 API key throughout your app, and you append this API key to requests to the API provider
B. Using OAuth 2.0
OAuth 2.0 uses a different kind of token to authorize requests, it usually involves a short-lived access token and long-lived refresh token.
These tokens are usually for Users, each user will have a different token that expires every X days.
To acquire a token, the user has to "log in" to your site or an Identity Provider's site (like Google Accounts) and enter their credentials every time the token expires.
Here's a picture to show the difference:
If you want to provide an API service for other developers:
Use OAuth 2.0 to log in the developers to their dashboard (this means your server routes that interact with the dashboard would be protected by the OAuth 2.0 tokens, requiring the developer to log in to update some settings)
Use API Keys to access your provided API routes. Developers have to log in and generate API keys from the dashboard. Then they can use this API key to fetch resources from your API.
Here's a more thorough explanation about OAuth 2.0, access tokens, and how to implement it on your site.
For the past 10+ days I've read an watched ALL the content I could find on understanding OAuth2 and OpenID Connect, only to find that many people disagree on the implementation, which really confuses me.
To my understanding, all the articles and examples I found assume you want access to eg. google calendar, profile info or emails if you eg. login with google, but I do NOT need to access other than my own API's - I only want to use Google, Facebook etc for logging in, and getting an id which I can link to my user in my own database - nothing more than that.
I'll try illustrate my use case and use that as an example.
A note on the diagram: the Authentication service could probably be built into the API Gateway - not that i matters for this example, since this is not about "where to do it", but "how to do it the best way" possible, for an architecture such as mine, where it's used for my own API's / Microservices, and not accessing Google, Facebook etc. external API's
If you can understand what I'm trying to illustrate with this diagram above, please tell me if I've misunderstood this.
The most basic requirements for this architecture you see here are:
Users can login with Google, Facebook, etc.
The same login will be used for all micro-services
OpenId user will have a linked account in the database
User access is defined in my own db, based on groups, roles and permissions
I do not intend to use external API's after the user is authenticated and logged in. No need for ever accessing a users calendar, email etc. so I really just need the authentication part and nothing else (proof of successful login). All user access is defined in my own database.
So a few fundamental questions comes to mind.
First of all, is OpenID Connect even the right tool for the job for authentication only (I'll have no use for authorization, since I will not need read/write access to google / facebook API's other than getting the ID from authenticating)?
People generally do not agree on whether to use the ID or Access token for accessing your own API's. As far as I understand the ID token is for the client (user-agent) only, and the access token is for eg. accessing google calendar, emails etc.... External API's of the OpenID Provider... but since I'll only be accessing my own API's, do I event need the access token or the ID token - what is the correct way to protect your own API's?
If the ID token is really just for the client, so it can show eg. currently logged in user, without going to the DB, I have 0 use for it, since I'll probably query the user from from the db and store it in redux for my react frontend app.
Dilemma: To store user details, groups, roles and permission inside JWT or not for API authorization?
By only storing the user identifier in the token, it means that I always allow authenticated users that has a valid token, to call endpoints BEFORE authorization and first then determine access based on the db query result and the permissions in my own database.
By storing more data about the user inside the JWT, it means that in some cases, I'd be able to do the authorization / access (group, role, permission) check before hitting the API - only possible with user info, groups, roles and permission stored inside a JWT issued upon login. In some cases it would not be possible due to eg. the CMS content access permissions being on a per-node level. But still it would mean a little better performance.
As you can see on the diagram I'm sending all API requests through the gateway, which will (in itself or with an authentication service) translate the opaque access token into some JWT with an identifier, so I can identify the user in the graph database - and then verify if the user has the required groups, roles and permissions - not from an external API, but from my own database like you see on the diagram.
This seems like a lot of work on every request, even if the services can share the JWT in case multiple services should need to cross call each other.
The advantage of always looking up the user, and his permissions in the db, is naturally that the moment the user access levels change, he is denied/granted access immediately and it will always be in sync. If I store the user details, groups, roles and permission inside a JWT and persist that in the client localstorage, I guess it could pose a security issue right, and it would be pretty hard to update the user info, groups, roles and permissions inside that JWT?
One big advantage of storing user access levels and info inside the JWT is of course that in many cases I'd be able to block the user from calling certain API's, instead of having to determine access after a db lookup.
So the whole token translation thing means increased security at the cost of performance, but is is generally recommended and worth it? Or is it safe enough to store user info and groups, roles, permissions inside the JWT?
If yes, do I store all that information from my own DB in the ID Token, Access token or a 3rd token - what token is sent to the API and determines if the user should be granted access to a given resource based on his permissions in the db? Do I really need an access token if I don't need to interact with the ID providers API? Or do I store and append all my groups, roles, permissions inside the ID token (that doesn't seem clean to me) issued by OpenID connect, and call the API and authorize my own API endpoints using that, even if some say you should never use the ID token to access an API? Or do I create a new JWT to store all the info fetched from my database, which is to be used for deciding if the user can access a given resource / API endpoint?
Please do not just link to general specs or general info, since I've already read it all - I just failed to understand how to apply all that info to my actual use case (the diagram above). Try to please be as concrete as possible.
Made another attempt to try and simply the flow:
The following answer does only apply for a OpenID Connect authentication flow with a 3rd party IDP (like Google). It does not apply for an architecture where you host your own IDP.
(There are some API gateways (e.g Tyk or Kong) which support OpenID Connect out of the box.)
You can use JWTs (ID token) to secure your APIs. However, this has one disadvantage. JWTs cannot be revoked easily.
I would not recommend this. Instead you should implement an OAuth2 authorization server which issues access tokens for your API. (In this case, you have two OAuth2 flows. One for authentication and one for authorization. The ID and access token from the IDP are used only for authentication.)
The following picture shows a setup where the API gateway and authentication/authorization server are two separate services. (As mentioned above, the authentication/authorization can also be done by the API gateway.)
The authentication flow (Authorization Code Grant) calls are marked blue. The authorization flow (Implicit Grant) calls are marked green.
1: Your web app is loaded from the app server.
2a: The user clicks on your login button, your web app builds the authorization URL and opens it. (See: Authorization Request)
2b: Because the user hasn't authenticated and has no valid session with your authorization server, the URL he wanted to access is stored and your authorization server responds with a redirect to its login page.
3: The login page is loaded from your authorization server.
4a: The user clicks on "Login with ...".
4b: Your authorization server builds the IDP authorization URL and responds with a redirect to it. (See: Authentication Request)
5a: The IDP authorization URL is opend.
5b: Because the user hasn't authenticated and has no valid session with the IDP, the URL he wanted to access is stored and the IDP responds with a redirect to its login page.
6: The login page is loaded from the IDP.
7a: The user fills in his credentials and clicks on the login button.
7b: The IDP checks the credentials, creates a new session and responds with a redirect to the stored URL.
8a: The IDP authorization URL is opend again.
(The approval steps are ignored here for simplicity.)
8b: The IDP creates an authorization and responds with a redirect to the callback URL of your authorization server. (See: Authentication Response)
9a: The callback URL is opened.
9b: Your authorization server extracts the authorization code from the callback URL.
10a: Your authorization server calls the IDP's token endpoint, gets an ID and access token and validates the data in the ID token. (See: Token Request)
(10b: Your authorization server calls the IDP's user info endpoint if some needed claims aren't available in the ID token.)
11a/b: Your authorization server queries/creates the user in your service/DB, creates a new session and responds with a redirect to the stored URL.
12a: The authorization URL is opend again.
(The approval steps are ignored here for simplicity.)
12b/+13a/b: Your authorization server creates/gets the authorization (creates access token) and responds with a redirect to the callback URL of your web app. (See: Access Token Response)
14a: The callback URL is opened.
14b: Your web app extracts the access token from the callback URL.
15: Your web app makes an API call.
16/17/18: The API gateway checks the access token, exchanges the access token with an JWT (which contains user infos, ...) and forwards the call.
A setup where the authorization server calls the API gateway is also possible. In this case, after the authorization is done, the authorization server passes the access token and JWT to the API gateway. Here, however, everytime the user infos change the authorization server has to "inform" the API gateway.
This is a very long question. But I believe most can be summarised by answering below,
To my understanding, all the articles and examples I found assume you want access to eg. google calendar, profile info or emails if you eg. login with google,
You do not necessarily use Access token (ID token in some occasions) to access the services offered by token issuer.You can consume tokens by your own APIs. What these Identity Providers (synonym to Authorization server, or IDP in shorthand) is to hold identities of end users. For example, typical internet have a Facebook account. With OAuth and OpenID Connect, the same user get the ability to consume your API or any OAuth/OIDC accepted service. This reduce user profile creation for end users.
In corporate domain, OAuth and OIDC serves the same purpose. Having a single Azure AD account lets you to consume MS Word as well as Azure AD's OIDC will issue tokens which can be used to Authorise against an in-house API or an third party ERP product (used in organization) which support OIDC based authentication. Hope it's clear now
A note on the diagram is that the Authentication service could probably be built into the API Gateway - not sure if that would be better?
If you are planning to implement an API gateway, think twice. If things are small scale and if you think you can maintain it, then go ahead. But consider about API managers which could provide most of your required functionalities. I welcome you to read this article about WSO2 API manger and understand its capabilities (No I'm not working for them).
For example, that API manager has built in authentication handling mechanism for OAuth and OIDC. It can handle API authentication with simple set of configurations. With such solution you get rid of the requirement of implement everything.
What if you can't use an API manager and has to do it yourself
OpenID Connect is for authentication. Your application can validate the id token and authenticate end user. To access APIs through API Gateway, I think you should utilise Access token.
To validate the access token, you can use introspection endpoint of the identity provider. And to get user information, you can use user-info endpoint.
Once access token is validated, API gateway could create a session for a limited time (ideally to be less or equal to access token lifetime). Consequent requests should come with this session to accept by API gateway. Alternatively, you can still use validated access token. Since you validated it at the first call, you may cache for a certain time period thus avoiding round trips to validations.
To validate user details, permission and other grants, well you must wither bind user to a session or else associate user to access token from API gateway at token validation. I'm also not super clear about this as I have no idea on how your DB logic works.
First Appreciate your patience in writing a very valuable question in this forum
we too have same situation and problem
I want to go through ,as images are blocked in our company in detail
Was trying to draw paralles to similar one quoted in the book
Advance API In Practise - Prabath Siriwerdena [ page 269]Federating access to API's Chapter. Definitely worth reading of his works
API GW should invoke Token Exchange OAUTH2.0 Profile to IDP [ provided the IDP should support TOken Exchange profile for OAUTH 2.0
The Absence of API Gateway , will result in quite bespoke development
for Access Control for each API Check
you land up in having this check at each of the api or microservice [ either as library which does work for you as a reusable code]
definitely will become a choking point.]
If I have an API secured with Azure Active Directory, what is the flow when an external API wants to talk to my internal API?
Is this just an API to API call as normal or is this a special circumstance and needs handling a different way?
Is this just an API to API call as normal or is this a special circumstance and needs handling a different way?
The special circumstance may depend on the confidentiality of the resources served by these api(s) and the level of security your application needs. In the end it is an api to api call only.
There are two approaches you can use if Azure Active Directory (AAD) is your Identity Provider for the entire application.
Application Identity with OAuth 2.0 client credentials grant provided by AAD. The calling API makes a request to AAD token endpoint with its client id, client secret (credential) and the application id (the unique id for the callee API) to receive an access token as response. This token is used as Bearer token to call the downstream API. In this approach client id, client secret, application id that are exchanged for an access token, are static values. Some one who has access to these values may find a way to compromise application security (highly unlikely).
The second approach is Delegated User Identity with OAuth 2.0. A request is made to AAD token endpoint with client id, client secret, the access token received as part of calling the tier1 API and a special on_behalf_of parameter to receive an access token, refresh token as response. We preferred this approach as it uses a dynamic value (access token from tier1 api) and also provides a refresh token.
You can read more about these approaches here
If you do not want to use AAD, you can use asp.net built in OwinAuthenticationMiddleware to generate and validate your own access tokens. As said earlier it all depends on your application requirements and implementation details, but in the end it is an API to API call.
Hopefully this is helpful, please let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you,
Soma.
oAuth is done for loggin user to a webservice (see also reference here).
Use OAuth to give your users access to their data while protecting their account credentials.
As another webservice wants to consume one of your service best way to do so is to have another authentication method in order to authorize
Other API, I assume you are talking of machines and not users (alias humans).
So best way is to provide another auth mechanism in order to authorize machines to connect to your API in a safe way.
A simple way to do a machine connection is using a private PKI with public/private key.
A good reference for PKI : http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/security/certpath/CertPathProgGuide.html
I am creating a headless service that I intend to use to access a third party API. To do this, I need to authorize myself with this third party API using a google access token. since I want this service to run in a headless fasion (i.e. no user input), I created a special account with Google and now I want to get the access token and google id using OAuth - the caveat is that this is a headless service, so I need to do this without the 'user' entering their username / password.
how do I do this?
Regarding your comment, you can get a refresh token through the web flow. Refresh tokens never expire (although the user can revoke them) and can be used to obtain access tokens as often as needed. See https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2WebServer for more info.