We are creating a service (backend + iOS-app for now) where a user can log in. We have completed our own custom token-based login system with registration. We are now trying to implement the function where they can select to "Log in via Facebook" or "Twitter" etc. (I.E not using our custom registration with username and password)
We have successfully implemented the client-function, but all we receive from the 3rd party service (Facebook) is a token, and the user's basic information.
To use our service, it is (of course) required to have a proper CustomUser-object (our own) registered on our server, which generally would be created on our custom registration. When logging in through 3rd party service, how should we create a CustomUser-object for that externally authenticated user?
When the user is authenticated by a 3rd-party service through our application, how and what do we send to our own server to register (or authenticate)?
We receive an auth-token (which will eventually expire), and the app (client) has access to the user's basic information on the 3rd party. We were thinking of sending the basic information, such as the user's user_id and email along with the token, up to our own server and create a new user-object for it if it didn't exist before. However, we realized that this wouldn't be very secure at all. When the user logs in to our service the next time, using the same 3rd party authentication, we only have the users user_id and email to match. The token might be a new token. Which means that anyone intercepting any 3rd-party login-calls to our server will see that the only information needed to log in to an existing customUser based on a 3rd-party authentication is the user_id and an email. Which are very public on most such 3rd-party services, such as Facebook.
We've been trying to read up on OAuth and authorization/authentication using these 3rd-party services, but every single documentation we've seen is painfully focused on the 3rd-party authentication and doesn't touch the subject of our own authentication of the 3rd-party authentication..
Are we going about this all wrong?
Actually, the assertion you made about email and user_id is not totally true, at least for Facebook.
... Which are very public on most such 3rd-party services, such as
Facebook.
When somebody logs in through Facebook Oauth service, you'll get back an "app_scoped_user_id" which is a unique ID that Facebook creates for the user and your App. Each user will have a different "app scope user id" for each App he uses and nobody except you (the App) will know that "app scope user id".
App scope user id docs
So I'd say using the "app scope user id" as identifier of your users is secure and the best way to do it.
Not sure how it works with other services like Twitter but I'm pretty sure you can do something similar. Even if the user_id is public, it should be always unique and you can use it to identify your own users.
I hope it helps.
Related
We create users with their email address. We send email to each user with a link to change password api with changePasswordId. When user clicks the link, he will be redirected to change password screen where he can set the password and access the application. This works.
But, now we want to allow users to register with their social Idps upon receiving invitation/verification email. Can't see any fusionauth documentation on this part.
Questions are as follows
How to let user select their social Idp while verifying their email?
Can a user have multiple logins with different Idps for one application in FusionAuth?
Is there any linking api which links all external user accounts with their fusionauth user account?
The flow we are expecting is :
Invite User -> User clicks link -> User will be presented with set
password and social logins-> User chooses google -> Google
authenticates user and returns token back to fusion auth -> fusion
auth links user's google account with already created (invited) user
account. -> Next time user logs in with google account -> Fusion auth
identifies the user and allows him to access the application.
Updated :
Let me try to explain our situation and need, with less focus on the password setup task:
We need to set up new users that are associated with google based education accounts on custom school domains. Teachers and students that might have addresses like first.last#middle.school.com We need to take the class roster from Google Classroom, initialize accounts for each student in our backend via our API which also creates FusionAuth user and app registrations for each.
Schools don't often want kids setting passwords on vendor sites. When we send the account confirmation / verification email to the new cohort of students they would ideally be directed to the approved and configured method for that domain (perhaps Google, Microsoft, other SAML or password). If we can't get selective about the confirmation method shown after the student provides her invited email address then we could present multiple confirmation options on the same screen and let the teacher direct the students to the correct choice.
But in summary we need to avoid requiring password setup and support confirmation with the invited social account when required by the school.
If I understand your use case correctly, what you want is to add the "Login with Google buttons" to the Setup Password workflow. This is different than the Email Verification workflow, so if you are looking for a way to log users in with their social profiles during Email Verification, that's something completely different. In fact, I don't think that is a use case because after the user verifies their email, they need to log in again and they can do that using their social profile.
Unfortunately, FusionAuth doesn't fully support the ability to allow someone to use the Setup Password workflow using a social login. It might be possible though using the Email Templates and Theme editor in FusionAuth. I haven't tested this, but you could try it and see if it works.
What you would do is to pass in a URL parameter to show the social login buttons during the Setup Password workflow. This would be something you could do in the email template for Setup Password like this:
Click this link to setup your password:
<a href="https://example.com/password/change/${changePasswordId}?showSocial=true">
Setup Password
</a>
Then, using the Theme editor in FusionAuth, you would add some code in to show the buttons like this (the ?? part is to handle when the parameter is missing):
[#if showSocial?? && showSocial]
show social buttons here
[/#if]
You could give that a try and see if it works for your use case. If it doesn't work, you can always open a feature request for this on our GitHub issue tracker and we can see if it receives enough upvotes to get on the roadmap. You can also engage FusionAuth professional services to build this feature for you as well.
For your other questions, you can have as many logins with external IdPs as you want for a single user. The user is unique by their email address.
I'm not sure what you mean by "linking api", but if a user logs in with an external IdP, their tokens from those external providers are stored on the user object. You can look up those values and then call third-party APIs with their access_tokens.
UPDATE 8/27/2019
Ah yes. The social login buttons do require all of the OAuth parameters, so this solution won't work because those parameters aren't part of the Setup Password workflow.
I guess I'm confused on how this actually works and whether or not this is a workflow FusionAuth should be handling. Social logins aren't generally used for account verification. They are normally used for account creation. For example, you could just send the student to FusionAuth before their account is created, they login with their Google classroom account, and then they have a FusionAuth account. Is there any reason the student can just login in after their account is created? Is that not essentially the same thing?
Could you do something where students that have accounts in Google Classroom are created in FusionAuth with a randomly generated 32 character password (for security) since they will be logging in with Google regardless. You can then just send them an email with a standard login link.
For students that login in with a username and password to FusionAuth directly, send them a Setup Password email. This will let them pick their own password.
In terms of account Linking, FusionAuth links accounts automatically based on email address (the unique login identifier actually). Therefore, you don't need to call any extra API to associate the social login with a user.
I might still not be clearly understanding the use case, so feel free to contact us directly using the form on our website. We might need to setup a web conference to discuss your needs in detail.
I'm integrating my web application into gsuite (fka google apps marketplace) and I'm not sure how to handle the user creation flow.
At first the admin of a domain adds my app and goes through the initial authorization steps (scopes, TOS,notify users). As far as I understand there is no communication with my site at this point.
At the end of there is a link urging the admin to complete the setup on my site.
When the admin opens this link I can run him through oauth and get his tokens.
But this is where I'm stuck now:
How do I identify the domain/company the admin and company users belong to?
Not 100% happy, but this is what I ended up doing:
After receiving the tokens, I fire of a request to plus/people api and explicitly require the domain field.
var fields = 'id,name,language,domain,image,emails';
plus.people.get({ userId: 'me', auth: client, fields:fields }, ..
The domain is then what I use to identify the company with.
The customerId would be better, but I have not found a way to retrieve it without being a google admin.
This is probably a repeat. However, the other answers haven't helped me out. So, here goes.
I'm working on an application and we with need to add 'users' to it. We'll be giving the option for people to sign in with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I've worked with these APIs before, however never combined them globally.
How can I maintain and manage these users that will use different services to log in. I'm confused as to how they would be stored in a database, would I need to have a different table for each different social service or is there a way to implement a table that will house all users in one place.
From what I understand, you're asking how to manage, store, verify users that will be logging in your application through different social services.
This is how we've implemented it through the various projects we've worked with. From the list of services you've provided we've worked only with twitter and facebook, so I can only speak about that.
Setup:
We have a web service that our iOS app communicates with such as when the iOS app needs to make a request call for user login the server would take the user details trying to login and gives back a response where the app would then do whats necessary.
We have a database stored on the server with a users table which is used to verify a user.
That being said, you need to understand whats common between most social services, or to at least know what the property is that is used by these social services to uniquely identify its users. In this case they all use email to identify users.
You'll find that when interfacing your app with these different APIs, they like to use a login session key used for unique logged in sessions.
So on your database you would store whatever details you want to save of the user, but know that you need to store atleast the username, password (encrypted), email (for identification, unique column), and login_session_key.
Just double check that linkedIn does have something like a session key that it creates when a user logs in with that method. Facebook and twitter do. Send at least the 4 main data properties needed (username, password, email, session) to the server You then follow this sort of approach:
New user
If the user that is new tries to login, the server first checks the email provided even exists in the database, if it does not then you sent a response back alerting the user that the user does not exist; your app would then take them to the register screen for example.
If the user is in the registry page, save all the details you want to store of theirs including username, password and email.
Members
If the user logs in the email will exist on the server side, its an existing user so just update the session key that was sent from the app on log in if the password matches, (in some apps these session keys are used through the life cycle of the application being used, with each request sending the same session key and if at any point the session key does not match during app interaction, it can be concluded that the user has logged elsewhere on another device perhaps.
if the password does not matches return the appropriate message.
That's about it really. We're able to store all facebook and twitter users in one table.
I've been looking into OAuth for a while, but haven't implemented it in any of my applications yet. I'm having trouble really understanding the full concept, so I still have a few questions that I haven't found an answer to, so I hope that anyone can help me.
I want a user to be able to start my application (WP8), login to facebook / twitter / microsoft / ... .
When he gets authenticated, I want to actually save this user to my own DB so I can add some user specific stuff like preferences, posts, ... .
What do I need to save in my own DB to specify a user?
Do I need to save the token itself or is this something that will be invalidated after a while? Or do I need to specify the user's name? With other words: What can I use as a unique identifier?
And what happens when a user would authenticate with for example facebook and he deletes his account?
And one more question, would you ever allow a user to connect to an application with 2 different service providers? If so, how would you make the coupling of these 2 providers to 1 user in your own DB?
I hope my questions are clear enough!
If not, don't hesitate to ask for more information!
Kind regards,
Gert
I assume that you have your own back-end where you authenticate your own users and your WP8 application is just a client.
First, let me distinguish between a user credential and a user profile. User credential is something that validates who the user is, e.g. username/password, facebook user id supplied with a valid auth token. User profile, is what you store in your own database about the user.
You also need to distinguish between a token you use to authenticate the user and the AccessToken Facebook needs to grant you access to user's data.
So... to answer your questions:
What do I need to save in my own DB to specify a user?
Create a record with user data (like preferences, and your unique user ID), and user's login method (e.g. Facebook) and credential (e.g. Facebook's user ID). This is your user's profile.
Do I need to save the token itself or is this something that will be invalidated after a while?
You can also store the Facebook AccessToken here if you've been granted "offline access" privileges by Facebook, but that is used for Facebook's access by you... not by the user's access to your app/back-end. For user's access you could just use a mechanism similar to cookie-based authentication - it's up to you. You could use the AccessToken as a kind of a "cookie", but you would need to always check against Facebook that it's valid.
With other words: What can I use as a unique identifier?
You could treat Facebook's ID as unique (so long as you never allow another account in your user profile DB to link with the same Facebook account)
And what happens when a user would authenticate with for example facebook and he deletes his account?
It's a good idea to have users still create a username/password combination that works with you site and only rely on Facebook login for convenience. In any case, Facebook provides a "Deauthorize Callback URL" when you create an app profile on Facebook. This is called when a user deactivates your app or deletes an account with Facebook. When you receive this call, you could send your user an email when an auth link to setup a different credential so as to not lose access.
would you ever allow a user to connect to an application with 2 different service providers? If so, how would you make the coupling of these 2 providers to 1 user in your own DB?
Sure, you could do that. Say you'd want to allow a Twitter account as well. You'd need to add a Twitter user ID field to your user profile database.
Here's another tip: create an ASP.NET MVC4 project in Visual Studio - the template includes an example of how to set up a user profile database with OAuth login.
Hope it gives you the high-level overview to investigate further.
I'm currently implementing an Oauth consumer service which is going to use Soundcloud as an Oauth service provider as well. But I'm having the following issue with it: Taking Facebook or Twitter example, you go there, you sign in, you fill up the permission form, and you are redirected back to your app. If you go there a second time, and given you are already sign in, you basically skip all steps and are redirected back instantly. That means, Facebook recognized that you already gave permission to that 3rd party service, so it doesn't ask your permission constantly.
And that's what's happening when I use Soundcloud. Basically everytime I redirected the user to the Soundcloud Oauth connect endpoint, the permission form always shows up, even though I already gave permission to that 3rd party service previously. I'm forced to press "connect" every single time, which is a drag from the user perspective (how many times can you give permission to the same entity). My question is: is there a parameter I can use to make soundcloud recognize/validate the previous permission from the user account to that specific 3rd party service? Or is this Soundcloud Oauth design implementation and we have to live with it?
Edit:
Maybe this wasn't clear, but each time I press "connect" in soundcloud, a new access token is being generated and delivered. Since my app uses this access token to identify its users, it doesn't work very well for me that the access token is getting updated everytime I want to log in, making me effectively "sign up" everytime. To sum it up, I want to get the previously attributed token to my account, so I can look up in my database, identify it and log him in.
I'm also looking for a solution which doesn't involve storing state in the client that might get cleaned up.
What you can do is store the user's oauth token in local storage and reuse it in future sessions. That's what happens on soundcloud.com.
A longer explanation:
When you use the Connect flow, the user is authenticated by SoundCloud (either by using username/password, Facebook Connect, or an already-existing session on soundcloud.com), and then when it is successful, your app is given an oauth token for that user. This is passed to the callback page which is registered for your app.
That token is the only piece of information needed to have the user be "logged in". Unless the token expires (by time, or by the user manually revoking it), then you can reuse that in future sessions.
I think I'm a bit confused about your application's design: where and how is the oauth token being used? I think that instead of using the token as an identifier, perhaps the user's permalink might be better? If you have the oauth token, you can find out the permalink by querying api.soundcloud.com/me.