In Postman, I am able to successfully request a new token using the GUI. I'm wondering how to do this programatically. Or at least see the HTTP request that Postman is making. I've tried viewing it by monitoring the network traffic in Chrome, and with Wireshark, but without success. Thank you
well, OAuth2 is quite a big subject and you are not really providing a lot of details.
Postman is just a client, it creates requests based on the data you gave it so you don't need to monitor anything, you should know how you set it up and then simply mirror that in whatever language you want. Look at headers and post data specifically.
All I can do is point you to an extensive article I wrote on OAuth2, it shows a complete implementation, how to use Postman to create the correct requests and then how to write code which makes it all work.
If you don't use dot net, you can still understand all the concepts and it should be trivial to do the same thing using a different language.
https://eidand.com/2015/03/28/authorization-system-with-owin-web-api-json-web-tokens/
Related
I'm looking for some advice about authorization for a request I'm making in Power Automate Desktop using the action 'Invoke Web Service'. I'm using this request to get information from Dataverse.
I've currently set up this request using OAuth2.0 with the Grant Type set to Implicit and I've hardcoded a token value into the header. I'm pretty green when it comes to authorization, so I'm just wondering if that's the best way to use OAuth2.0 to get info from Dataverse to PAD? I'm also concerned this token will expire and how to go about handling that. If I should set this up differently please let me know. And if you know how I can refresh the token automatically somehow, advice would be great.
I'm going to make the assumption that you have an Azure instance within your org.
You should be able to execute the entire OAuth flow through PAD given you can do it through Postman ...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/data-platform/webapi/use-postman-web-api
... having said that, if you want an easier way, my suggestion would be to use LogicApps as it does all of the hard work for you. It will also protect keys, etc. that run the risk of being exposed if contained within a PAD flow and that's even if your store that sort of information in a KeyVault or something. At some point, it needs to be exposed to PAD.
You can create a LogicApp that's triggered by an incoming HTTP request ...
... and have your DataVerse connector pull the relevant data ...
... to then return back to the calling PAD flow with a response action.
This is an example flow ...
I haven't gone into detail given your question lacks specifics around filtering, etc. but you can always make your LogicApp more comprehensive by adding functionality in the payload to order, filter, expand, etc. on the OData call to DataVerse so you get exactly what you want from a data perspective.
I am making an api backend that makes use of another api,for example Twitter. (Please note the actual api isn't twitter but I am using them as an example).
Let's say that Twitter has a limit on the number of calls that can be made to their api and above this limit, it starts to charge my credit card. This is why it is very important to me that no one misuses my api.
I want to prevent people from looking at my frontend code and seeing which endpoint it hits, because if a malicious person were to do this, I would very quickly go over the limit and have to pay $$$.
My frontend code uses a get call to mybackend.com/twitter/api
Is it enough to simply add an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to my backend?
headers['Access-Control-Allow-Origin'] = 'myfrontend.com'
The reason I am asking this is because I noticed that typing mybackend.com/twitter/api directly into the browser worked, which is not what I would expect if I had access-control-allow-origin set to a specific website.
Am I doing something wrong? How do I prevent someone from simply writing a script to hit my backend since it is clear that just typing it into the url of my browser works, despite me having an access-control-allow-origin header.
There are two possible solutions for your problem. You can try to implement a request signature for your API, to know exactly the source of it on your backend. You can take a look on how this works here.
The second option, and for me, a one witch fits your problem better, is to set up a Denial of service approach on your server Load Balancer to prevent multiple requests from a same origin, and so, don't let those kind of malicious requests hit your backend.
I am making Google API request through application using RestClient library to get address.
Sample request code-
require 'rest-client'
require 'json'
gmaps_api_href = "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=18.56227673,73.76804232&language=ar"
response = RestClient.get gmaps_api_href
result = JSON.parse(response)['results']
This request works fine on my local machine and it completes within 1-2secs. But on production instance it takes 20secs to finish one request.
Due to some security measures, we can not access production instance directly. So I am unable to find pin point for this delay.
After doing trial and error, we found that
If we make request using CURL, it takes 1 sec on server
If we make request using Net::HTTP, it takes 20sec to complete same as we were observed for RestClient.
If we make request using WebRequest in small .net app, that request complete within 1 secs.
Its difficult for me to get difference between above observations.
Please let me know why it is so? and what changes I have to do to make it work in my Rails App?
Are you using a Google API key? Your example does not show use of an API key. if not, I'd guess you are getting rate-limited by Google. On your server, you've probably already deployed a version of this app, which made lots of requests to Google without an API key in the fairly recent past, and Google noticed and it's rate-limiting software may be slowing down your requests made from that server. While your local machine hasn't in the past made an enormous amount of requests to the google api, so is not being rate-limited by google's servers.
It's possible Google's rate-limiting is paying some attention (for now!) to User-Agent, and the different user-agent sent by Curl somehow evades Google's rate-limiting that was triggered by the requests sent by RestClient with it's User-Agent (and RestClient may use net-http under the hood, and have the same User-Agent as it).
While one would hope that if you were rate-limited you'd get a "429 Too Many Requests" error response instead of just a slow response, it's possible RestClient hides this from you (I haven't used RestClient), and I've also seen some unpredictable behavior from Google rate-limiting defenses, especially when not using an API key on a service that requires one for all but a few sample requests. I have seen things similar to what you report in that case.
My guess is you're being rate limited because you are not using an API key. Get and use an API key from Google. Google still has rate limits when you are using an API key, but they are clearly advertised (for free? 2500 per-day, and no more than 10 per second. more if you pay) and should give more clear and predictable error messages when exceeded. That's part of why Google requires the api key, so they can reliably rate-limit you in clear ways.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/usage-limits
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/intro#BYB
I know that there are a ton of threads about this. But I'm still confused.
I've got an app that making request to my server(nodeJS) to get JSON-data.
For the moment everyone can get everything at: http://myserver/allUpdates/ with no password. They just have to know the URL.
So I thought I would do it little more secure.
I been looking at Basic Auth, that seems to work by sending username and password in the header for every request.
Is that enough?
Some guys say that it doesn't do much if youre not using SSL. But it must be better than nothing, right?
I've never used SSL and it seems there is a lot to learn.
So my question is, should I bother with auth when I'm not using SSL?
Or are there other alternatives?
Some guys say that it doesn't do much if youre not using SSL. But it must be better than nothing, right?
Unfortunately, those guys are right. Basic Auth is, when sent plaintext, probably worse than nothing as it gives you the vague feeling of some security without any actual security.
This is because it is trivial to intercept network requests through a proxy or similar. If you're not used SSL then every parameter you're sending is easily and readily visible, including your basic authentication credentials.
In answer to your question "should I bother with auth when I'm not using SSL?" - that depends. If you want to ensure your data is only accessed by authenticated users, then it's really SSL or nothing. But if all you're trying to do is reduce the burden on your servers (i.e, rate limiting), then maybe not. I'm going to assume you're looking to do the former, in which case I'd recommend taking the time to get to grips with SSL. There are lots of resources out there about using Node with SSL, depending upon what additional frameworks you might be using (Express, etc).
SSL encrypts your requests, which means that anyone that sniffs your network traffic can't read the payload of the request.
You have two ways to auth the client to the server:
send credentials or an API key with every request OR
login in the client once with credentials or API key and reuse it's session
In both ways, you should use SSL and send the credentials with your POST data.
How do I play a track from a SoundCloud URL, which, for example, I got from the xml response from a query
<stream-url>https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31164607/stream</stream-url>
I should have thought that it would have been as easy as:
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31164607/stream&client_id=my_client_id
yet I get
<error>401 - Unauthorized</error>
All I want to do is consume it in a Silverlight MediaElement, so all I need is set some url to the MediaElement's Source property.
I've checked an application that I wrote about 2 years ago, and THEN, accessing the stream url was as easy as this for a public track:
http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18163056/stream&consumer_key=MY_CONSUMER_KEY
however this no longer seems to work.
For example, all I had to do then in C# was:
MediaElement me = new MediaElement();
me.Source= new Url("http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18163056/stream&consumer_key=MY_CONSUMER_KEY");
me.Play();
Any hints would be appreciated.
I had a reply on a Microsoft forum that seems to imply that SoundCloud might not be possible to stream to Windows 8 Metro devices without consuming the whole stream before playback starts - which is quite worrying and would seem to imply that to make authentication possible, it would have to be done entirely in the url querystring insterad of using the header:
(The following reply is the answer to the following question: 'I am able to access an audio stream by http using the MediaElement, however I need to access it via https in which I need to add the oAuth info to the header of the initial request.
How is this done when using a MediaElement, and if it cannot be done, what is the workaround for consuming an audio feed in Metro 8 that requires header authentication to stream?')
"Direct access to the underlying network stream is not currently permitted by the MediaElement. Because of this there is currently no way to modify the header of the HTTP request to include any additional authentication information. That said, you do have control over the URL. You could theoretically setup an HTTP proxy service that translated the HTTP GET request parameters into the necessary oAuth credentials. Keep in mind that this is just a theoretical workaround. You may find different behavior in practice. Another theoretical workaround would be to handle the oAuth yourself via a raw stream socket and pass the retuned media data to the MediaElement via "Set Source" and a "Random Access Stream". Please keep in mind that this method has major limitations. in order to use a "Random Access Stream" with the ME you need to make sure all of the data is available before passing it to the ME."
The proxy service is not scalable for an application that is merely distributed for free as every stream would need to come via the proxy. And the raw stream socket, although getting around this, would mean that playback could not start until the whole file had downloaded - and this goes against all current UX (User Experience) guidelines.
So once again, if anyone has any tips, or info about how the whole authentication thing can be achieved in a querystring instead of using headers, I'd appreciate it!
I'm a little confused about whether you're referring to a public or a private track? If it's a public track, then you shouldn't need to send any authentication information, just your client id.
When I request https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31164607/stream?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID then I get a 302 redirect to the proper mp3 stream.
Remember, adding parameters to a URL must start with a ? not &. This could (more than likely) be the reason why you are getting a 401 (SC is not picking up the client_id).
After authentication the link like this
http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/103229681/stream?consumer_key=d61f17a08f86bfb1dea28539908bc9bf
is working fine. I am using Action Script.
I'm following up on Tom's reply because he calls attention to url character specificity. My HTTP requests randomly started failing today, and I was prefacing my client_Id with a ?. As soon as I changed that single ? to &, it started working. So in my case, SC wasn't picking up my client_Id because I used the wrong character. I think depending on where in the request we're talking about specifically, it's worth noting that differences between ? and & do make a difference.