I am developing an hybrid app with Ionic (AngularJS) for a client. The app is quite simple and it pulls data from our API Endpoint. The API endpoint itself is not protected yet (nor through .htaccess or anything else).
However I need to include some authentication for it. First I thought that oAuth would be the way to go, however I recon that either or that I have to include a password in plain text in my app, so basically it can be hacked quite easy, even it gets "compiled" for IOS or anything else. Am I wrong or am I am misleading?
Related
I'm not sure there is a "proper" way, but before I just bodge together my own incompatible implementation, perhaps there's something in all the standards that can fit my need?
Here's the situation: Apple has declared that apps on their phones MUST include all standard functionality inside themselves. No more iframes with web content! If you need to show stuff from web, open the system browser (Safari)! Unfortunately we need to display stuff from web, so here we go...
Now, the app requires authentication which the user has done previously. We store whatever tokens we need. When the time comes to open the browser, we don't want to force the user to re-authenticate. We need to somehow pass the access credentials to the browser, and preferably do this securely. Furthermore, the webpage in the browser will need a token obtained from our OpenID Connect server.
Unfortunately, the only point of communication between the app and the browser is the URL, so everything that we give will be there, in plain sight. I know that OAuth was pretty worried about this, so much so that they made it impossible to intercept authentication with just the stuff visible on the screen and instead using things like single-use intermediary codes, backchannels and PKCE.
Unfortunately I cannot see any way to use the default flows "out of the box" to achieve what I need. I can think of modifications to those flows that would do it, but I'm not a security expert so I'd rather go with something standard which is vetted by experts.
SCENARIO
It's a good question since many companies want to show existing web content in a secured manner within a mobile app, and to avoid an extra login.
WEB + MOBILE INTEGRATED SOLUTION VIA DISCONNECTED BROWSER?
Ideally what you want to do is pass the mobile app's JWT to the external web content in an HTTP header. iOS APIs such as openURL may not support this however.
You may have to pass a JWT in a query string, in which case I would try to follow a signed request model, though it is not trivial. I have used SalesForce signed requests though not implemented a full solution myself.
Mobile app calls an API method at POST /api/encrypt-token
API returns an encrypted payload that includes the JWT
Mobile app opens a web page at https://mywebapp?token=0a78904cwdu
Web UI calls POST /api/decrypt-token to get the JWT
Web UI stores the token in memory and uses it to call the API
You will want to prevent raw tokens being written to web server logs.
I believe the recommendation for this type pf solution is to use a one time key, as described in the above link. And of course the web session will have some limitations such as silent token renewal not working.
WEB + MOBILE INTEGRATED SOLUTION VIA WKWEBVIEW
In the past I've managed secured web content in a mobile app by making the Web UI get access tokens from the mobile app. This enables an integrated UX and you can use a 'standard as possible' OAuth solution.
When the Web UI runs within a mobile app's web views it no longer does its own OAuth handling and instead calls the mobile app to get tokens and trigger logins
This means there is a single login across web and mobile views, and the Web View gets all the benefits of mobile user experience, such as secure storage of tokens
The Web UI is no longer impacted by things like the web view aggressively dropping cookies
VALID USE OF WEB VIEWS?
Web views are probably not a good long term solution in most cases. I know that Apple are likely to reject apps in 2020 if they use any of these behaviours:
Use of UIWebView - the Cordova default - you need to update to WKWebView
Delivering an app that is solely a repackaged web site with no mobile views
Displaying web content of a dubious nature (ads etc)
I suspect that use of WKWebView used responsibly and justifiably would be accepted. I could be wrong though, so please don't take my word for it.
ONLINE SAMPLES
I will be documenting some stuff about mobile / web integration on my OAuth blog, including code samples.
I am trying to create an ios App that talks to a backend API written in nodejs. The backend also has an accompanying webapp also written in nodejs. The idea is that you can login (using facebook-js) on either the app or the webapp and post things to to.
My question is this, let's say that the user decided to login using the ios App, then call some backend API method to post an article, how do I make this work without essentially forcing the user to login twice?
Not sure if I'm making sense, any help would be greatly appreciated!
As Facebook uses OAuth for the client authentication, it's relatively easy to store the Access Token resulting from the login process somewhere on your server, and use them later.
Have a look at Design for Facebook authentication in an iOS app that also accesses a secured web service
Also, see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/manually-build-a-login-flow/v2.1 which outlines the login process and the storage of Access Tokens.
I have not seen this addressed on the web, and I think it is something of importance. Right now, I'm building a product that will have an Android app, iOS app and also a website. A user could be simultaneously logged into each of these apps. This is something one could do with Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.
There is an issue with the current paradigm though. The current paradigm for authentication for an Android app is passing an auth_token param between the front-end and back-end. When the user logs in, one gets generated. When the user logs out, the auth_token gets set to null in the database. If you were using this token to track sessions between an iOS app, Android app and website, you'd run into issues quickly.
The most common one: If a user is logged in via Android & website and logs out of the website, this will also have the side effect of logging them out of the Android app because the auth_token is now null in the DB, and there is nothing to match the auth_token being sent in by the request from the Android app.
I have thought of one solution, but I don't know if it is optimal or if it is the way this thing is handled in other large projects. If there is a better solution, do tell.
My solution:
Every request contains an Origin header. If it comes from the website, this header should hold the value Application. If it comes from the Android app, it should hold the value Android, and if it comes from the iOS app, it should hold the value iOS. This would require three separate DB columns. An auth_token for the web platform, Android platform and iOS platform.
If you decided to start supporting Windows phones, you'd need to rebuild your session handler for Windows as well.
That being said, this does keep the entire project and its constituents accountable and knowing of the fact that we're about to support a new front-end. However, it seems a tad problematic to me.
Is there a better way to do this? Is there a way most do this? Am I overthinking this? Am I wrong in my logic somewhere?
Is Devise an option for you? You can use it without Rememberable (http://rubydoc.info/github/plataformatec/devise/master/Devise/Models/Rememberable).
Hello me and friends are planning on taking on a big project. My two friends are going to be building iOS and Android apps and I will be making the server back end. I recently started developing with RoR and have fallen in love with Ruby. Now here are my questions:
Little more background:
I only want a private API for the android and iPhone app. I do NOT want a full fledged OAuth authentication process. Doing some research I think I will go with basic HTTP authentication.
1. My App uses cookie based authentication meaning a cookie has to be passed with each subsequent request. So will my friends need to have to store a cookie and on each subsequent request to the server send the cookie along with it?
2. How do I go about making the API private? I know in OAuth there are consumer secret and consumer key. I know if anyone could simply figure out the URL schema they will be able to have access to the API. How do I protect my back end from request from unknown users? (Hard coding strings in the Apps themselves?, Checking headers for device type?)
3. Should I only build the API now and worry about a web app later? Or would it be too horrific of an experience to go back and build a web app (Although I really do actually want the web app to be more significant than the mobile app
Here is a great article explaining exactly what you're looking for : securing an API without setting up a full OAUTH provider :
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/designing-a-secure-rest-api-without-oauth-authentication/
Works great (even if the solution is finally not so far from oauth ;)
we are developing an iOS App using Adobe Flex/Air. The app uses a web service that needs user authentication via facebook login. At the moment, we use server side authentication: There's a login URL displayed in a WebView where the facebook login is done. This way, we get an access_token that can be used on the server side.
This works perfectly but it would really be much better if we could use Single Sign-on with the facebook ios app. As far as I have read, this should work on the client side but I haven't found a way to authenticate the user on the server side.
facebook's access_tokens are valid either for use on the server-side or for the client side so an access_token from the client-side login won't work for the server side.
Thanks in advance for your ideas,
Henk
As far as I can see, you're making this far more complicated than it's really intended to be. Leverage the Facebook iOS SDK, and all of the heavy lifting involved with authenticating the user within your app is handled by the Facebook SDK. There's no need to independently provide sign-in sheets and manage access token exchange between the app's local storage and Facebook's servers without the convenience of the entire Facebook SDK.
This link shows you how to implement SSO natively within your iOS app. It's real simple.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/mobile/ios/build/#implementsso
Then, I understand that you're keeping authentication information or central user database information on an external server. The best way to synchronize the information between the FB client and your own servers is to simply check the login information returned by the FB SDK with your server after you receive it.
Here's a simple breakdown:
Log the user in using Facebook's standard SDK (see the link above).
In the -didLogin method (or whatever the equivalent is in your Adobe AIR environment), check the access token returned by FB with your server. Not sure what server architecture you're using, but it's safe to say that this will go on outside of the FB SDK. Also, save the access token in your app's user defaults so that the user won't have to login again next time. This whole process should (and inherently will) feel much quicker than it sounds.
If the check with the server returns successfully, notify the user of a successful login. If not, display an error view explaining the reason the user was rejected/not logged in.
Why do it this way? The reason is fairly simple. It's safe to assume that the reason you're having a user login to your app via Facebook is so that you can make requests for the user's Facebook information (i.e. feeds, photos, likes, comments, etc.). The easiest (and best) way to do this is through the FB SDK its self. The SDK takes care of a lot of stuff behind the scenes like access token validation over time, extension of token life, validity of token, and so on. This way, you won't have to worry nearly as much about syncronizing the server information and real-time client information when changes take place. Just authenticate via the FB iOS SDK, and do the rest of your own processing afterward.
Comment below if there's anything I should clarify or even if I missed the point of your question entirely--I tend to get on a roll and may stray from the point. :)
Cheers!
The Kraken