I'm pretty newbie in iOS development but I'm trying to figure out how to organize the authentication. I need the authentication because of 2 reasons:
In-app purchases
User can add his or her own data into common database.
I supposed that as soon as user downloaded my app he or she will be easier to use the Apple id to authenticate but I have no idea if it's possible to use Apple id in this situation and how to organize this authentication on my server.
For information: I'm going to use Node.js as a backend with MongoDB, hosted on Windows Azure portal.
The workflow is:
User downloads and runs my app
User uses it (without any authentication so far)
If user wants to add his new data and share it the data should be
sent to the server and user must enter some credentials.
User enters Apple id credentials (and user name under he wants to
share data?) and sends his data to the server.
Further if he wants to do app-in purchase he uses the same
credentials.
If it's even possible? If I can't use Apple credentials to send data to my server, if it's possible to use other credentials (my email, or OAuth) to make app-in purchase? I don't like to idea to make user enter different credentials twice.
Thanks!
Related
At work we have developed an individual customer specific software application that is in use for a long time. We have a new requirement in this same program to implement an option for sending emails directly from the program.
The user is able to add his own email account with the credentials and login through our program. For Microsoft and Gmail accounts OAUTH is implemented and something here is not very clear.
For Gmail-API we have made an OAUTH Client and Consent screen on Google Cloud Console which we need to publish and verify and here is where the problems start. I am not very clear with the whole process of verifying the app.
In the steps for verifying is stated that we should verify a domain for the app, but this software is not hosted anywhere on internet and is not publicly available, it is available to a number of specific users (2000-3000).
Also Google requires a YouTube video of the software to be available publicly, which we are not able to upload because of customer requirements. Also here is required a Data Protection Policy page for the application which we as a developers don't have because we are only developing the software.
Other thing that is not clear to me, how is this type of software rated by Google, internal or public?
Have anyone experience with this or something similar?
Verifying an app for one of the Gmail scopes is a very complicated process. This process depends upon which scope of authorization you are requesting of the users.
In your case you are trying to send an email so you are using the users.messages.send method from the Gmail api. This uses a restricted scope. Which means you will need to go though the full process.
First of it doesn't matter if your application is hosted or not. It also doesn't matter that you give this app to a limited number of users. What matters is the scopes you are using.
You will need to ensure that your domain has been registered via google search console. So this app will need a domain
Once that is done you will be able to host your website, and the privacy policy on that domain.
You will need to create a YouTube video showing your application running, and how authorization is used.
You will also need to submit to a third party security checkup of your application which is not free and will need to be done once a year.
All of this is needed because of your consent screen it doesn't matter if its hosted any where, It also doesn't matter if this is only available to specific number of users.
If all of the users are part of a single google workspace account, that has created your client id and client secrete then you can set the app to internal and you wont need to be verified. This only works for google workspace domain accounts.
I am working on an enterprise iOS application. There will be multiple applications from the enterprise.
Wanted to check if Touch ID can be used as an SSO, so that the
user is authenticated for one of the enterprise app using Finger Print only once and other enterprise apps does not need to login again.
Is there any API for Touch ID that can be leveraged by other enterprise apps for this purpose.
Let me know if I need to share any other information.
Thanks in advance!
An app can use TouchID in one of two ways -
There is an API that returns a yes/no that indicates whether a valid finger print was presented when prompted. This could be used if you wanted the user to authenticate to the app locally. A "secret diary" app might use this for example
There is a second API that allows the use of TouchID to retrieve a value from the keychain. An app that requires authentication to some back-end might use this; The TouchID authentication is used to retrieve the username/password from the keychain which is then presented to the back-end. The user must log in manually the first time (and any time the password changes). If you have several apps that share a keychain via group entitlement then the credentials could be retrieved by any of those apps, but the user would need to use TouchID each time the credentials were retrieved. You could potentially achieve SSO across apps by using a federation protocol like OAuth/WS-* and sharing the session details so that the user only needed to TouchId the first time (and subsequently when the session expires)
In general, what's the best practice to authenticate a user via 3rd party (say Twitter) using iOS's ACAccountStore and then tie it to an existing user in my own service assuming that they were logged in already? Can I access and store the account credentials remotely over ssl, or is there a better way?
And if they had to re-login via Twitter, I could just search for the user with that twitter handle to know what backend user is tied to this account, yes?
And lastly if I wanted to be able to login via a browser later on, I would get new oauth credentials for the webapp as well, but could search for a user with the same Twitter account info and store these credentials as well, and know that they all refer to the same person, correct?
What you're asking involves many levels of a system "stack" that are custom to a particular environment. What is "correct" vs "incorrect" is dependent upon the environment you've set up and are connecting to from your iOS app.
So from what it sounds like you're leveraging iOS's Twitter functionality to create a Single Sign On (SSO) experience. There are several guides on Twitter's site for doing what you want to accomplish:
Integrating with Twitter on iOS: Single Sign On
Using Reverse Auth to Get OAuth Tokens on iOS - you can then store these server-side
Migrating tokens to system accounts - how you get OAuth tokens from your webapp to iOS.
I'm new to Facebook development and I'm running into trouble with what seems like it should be an easy task. I am building an iOS app for a client, and that client wants to display a number of their most recent status updates in the app, along with a link to their Facebook page. These statuses should be displayed to the user of the app even if they are not logged into Facebook or do not have a Facebook account saved on their device.
My research so far seems to indicate that I'll need to make a request to the Graph API using a user access token (which I can do successfully in the app using a token copied and pasted from the Graph API Explorer), but it seems that the only way to get a user access token from within the app is to log the user of the app into Facebook using their account credentials. This is not a good solution because I need to be able to display the client's statuses to the user whether they have are logged into a Facebook account or not. Is such a thing possible, and if so, how? I've been all over the docs and can't find a conclusive answer either way.
I know that we would approach it quite differently. We would have our own web service periodically pull what we needed off of google and store it on our own server, then we would use AFHTTPClient to pull this information down to our app. That way we wouldn't have to spoof anything with FaceBook or put any requirments on our users, such as logging into facebook. It would require that you have a service that your client maintains (or you could easily contract that for a cost).
I am building a backend for ios apps, that support login in different networks.
Once the user login in to the network the client tells the news to the backend, and this could offer a list of worlds that the user might play, or even delete old worlds.
One way to steal another person's world is by saying that you are his social network id.
To solve that with facebook, we force the client to send us the fb_token, a token provided from facebook to the client, that we use in the backend to ask facebook if that specific user is the one that he told us to be.
If apple doesn't provide a way to validate this I understand that if an iOS app wants to use game center, it is directly forcing the app developer to also use iCloud because apple can validate the user credentials.
Did apple provide any way to validate user credentials?
The client on iOS can retrieve info about the currently logged in player in GameCenter, which has nothing to do with iCloud.
If you want to use iCloud to authenticate, you might have a different player than the one you wanted.
I think the solution is for the client to retrieve the player info in GameCenter, and send it to your server in an encrypted fashion (say HTTPS), including a timestamp and possibly other dynamic information. This way you'll know that the user info is being sent from the client app itself and there is no man-in-the-middle. That's really the issue that you are struggling with: how to ensure that client-server communication is secure.