I'm starting to work with Box a bit... https://developers.box.com/docs/#oauth-2
I'm thinking I'm going to use Box for image (and file) hosting. I've used S3 for this task in the past, but my cohorts seem to want to use Box for some reason. So in order to use their API, you authenticate with oauth2... which involves a redirect uri... then you get a token, and you're in, right? I know how to use this to let people log in to your site, and whatnot, but I'm not sure I get how I could use it for the task at hand.
I don't want to have to log into box manually (or have any users, obviously), and I don't want to attach anything to a session to capture the auth token (one of the ways I was thinking of doing it). Is there a way to authenticate silently, with your client_id, secret, options, and authorization credentials?
Maybe I'm confused... if anyone would like to shed some knowledge on me, that'd be amazing.
This is a Rails app... tinkering with the ruby-box gem (but that's not super relevant)
If your application is trying to manipulate a user's data, authorization from the user to your client application is definitely needed. So, you cannot do the authentication/authorization silently.
On the other hand, if your application has no intention to touch any user data and just calls Box APIs which are not associated with any user, it is possible IF Box supports "Client Credentials Flow". Check Box API document to see whether it supports the flow or not.
Related
I have an app, client side, that uses auth0 for accessing the different API's on the server. But now I want to add another app, a single page app, I'm going to use VueJs, and this app would be open "ideally" w/o a user having to sign in, it's like a demo with reduced functionality, I just want to check that the user is not a robot basically, so I don't expose my API in those cases.
My ideas so far:
- Somehow use recaptcha and auth0 altogether.
- Then have a new server that would validate that the calls are made only to allowed endpoints (this is not of my interest in the question), so that even if somehow the auth is vulnerated it doesn't leave the real server open to all type of calls.
- Pass the call to the server along with the bearer token, just as if I was doing it with my other old client app.
Is this viable? Now I'm forcing the user to validate, this is more a thing about UX (User-experience), but I'd like a way to avoid that. I'm aware that just with auth0 I can't do this see this post from Auth0, so I was expecting a mix between what I mentioned.
EDIT:
I'm sticking to validating in both cases, but I'm still interested to get opinions over this as future references.
At the end, with the very concept of how auth0 works that idea is not possible, so my approach was the following:
Give a temporary authenticated (auth 0) visitor a token which has restricted access level, then pass the request to a new middle server, the idea is to encrypt the real ids so the frontend thinks it's requesting project A123456etc, when indeed it's going to get decrypted in the middle server to project 456y-etc and given a whitelist it will decide to pass the request along with the token to the final server, the final server has measures to reduce xss and Ddos threats.
Anyway, if there's a better resolve to it I will change the accepted answer.
You could do a mix of using recaptcha for the open public, then on the server side analyse the incoming user request (you can already try to get a human made digital fingerprint just to differentiate with a robot-generated one) and the server (more a middle server) makes the call to you API (and this server has limited surface access)
What we normally do in these situations (if I got your issue correctly) is to create two different endpoints, one working with the token and another one receiving the Recaptcha token and validating it with Google servers.
Both endpoints end up calling the same code but this way you can add extra functionality in a layer in the 'public' endpoint to ensure that you are asking only for public features (if that cannot be granted just modifying the interface).
If I have a single server with multiple domains, what is the preferred method for implementing a single-sign-on solution on the same domain. I am currently using devise, have a few million cookies in place on separate domains, and am stuck. On top of just implementing SSO, I also need to migrate the various cookies to a central domain. Regarding the various servers, they only have one single page that requires me to show different states depending on whether or not the user is logged in.
I have tried the following:
CORS: pick one domain as the central auth hub. From all other domains make cross domain checks to see if the user is logged in. For migrating cookies, detect if there's a "current_user" object, send it to the client, make a CORS request, sign the user in and kill the token. Works Great! BUT... After building it for 2-3 weeks, it TOTALLY FAILS in IE. Even IE11, I'm noticing the default setting is disabling this behavior.
tried tinkering with the session store at
Rails.application.config.session_store
with no luck.
I am currently experimenting with the following:
JSONP: I have someone right now trying to convert the above to JSONP instead while I try some other options:
Set up a custom OAUTH provider. Like before, it will be the "central domain" if the person is signed in, return to the requested domain with a token from which the users can make requests. https://github.com/songkick/oauth2-provider
Looking at this but it looks outdated? https://github.com/rubycas/rubycas-client. I also get the feeling this could have been a solution if I rolled this out from the get-go, but given how far we are into the project, it's unclear to me how I'd transfer the existing cookies. Also it's unclear if this requires two applications for me to get up and running ( one for client(s), one for auth server)
As I go through each of these possibilities, if anyone has had any experience doing what I'm doing, please do inform me and save me a whole lot of work :)
The best way unless this is a toy app is probably to set up an oauth provider.
We use Doorkeeper with Devise for this and it works great. It will be worth your time to set a little time aside to read through the documentation and watch a talk or two on youtube if you're not already familiar with the strategy but once you understand the core concepts its actually pretty simple to set up with the help of this gem.
There is a quick video run down on http://railscasts.com/episodes/353-oauth-with-doorkeeper
I have two questions about Box's Oauth2 API in a testing environment.
Is it possible to have multiple redirect_URI addresses? I'd like to use one address for production (e.g., https://my_site.com/box_redirects_here), one for ongoing development (http://localhost:8000/box_redirects_here) and one for automatic UI tests (http://localhost:8001/box_redirects_here). As far as I could see, the only way to do that would be to create three different Box applications - is there an easier way? BTW, both Dropbox and Google Drive do support multiple redirect URIs.
I have a set of automatic tests that I'd like to run a few times a day. The challenge I'm facing is that every time I run these tests, my refresh_token is invalidated, and I can't use it again - which means I can't run the same set of tests a few hours later without manually getting a new token. One solution would be to save the refresh token, for example in a file, so I could reuse it across testing sessions. But:
It's really cumbersome.
if different developers are running these tests from different machines with no common file system that doesn't really work.
Again, for whatever reason this doesn't seem to be an issue with Google Drive or with Dropbox.
This is not currently possible, and I agree that would be nice.
Your best option is to save the access/refresh token pair to a file or a database (in the event that there's no common filesystem.) The OAuth2 spec grants implementers wide latitude on how they issue refresh tokens, if they issue them at all (I don't think Dropbox does.) While Box's implementation makes integration testing a bit challenging, I think that it ultimately hews most closely to the spec's recommendations.
For your first question, you might be able to get close to what you want by using the redirect_uri query parameter. Although you won't be able to supply an arbitrary redirect URI, you can give one that has the same base URL as the redirect URI in your app console.
From the OAuth tutorial:
Wildcard redirect_uri values are also accepted in the request as long as the base url matches the URI registered in the application console. A registered redirect_uri of https://www.myboxapp.com can be dynamically redirected to https://www.myboxapp.com/user1234 if passed into the request redirect_uri parameter.
For your second question, John is right - Box invalidates a refresh token after it has been used. Although this can be annoying, it's also more secure.
I have to implement a web site (MVC4/Single Page Application + knockout + Web.API) and I've been reading tons of articles and forums but I still can't figure out about some points in security/authentication and the way to go forward when securing the login page and the Web.API.
The site will run totally under SSL. Once the user logs on the first time, he/she will get an email with a link to confirm the register process. Password and a “salt” value will be stored encrypted in database, with no possibility to get password decrypted back. The API will be used just for this application.
I have some questions that I need to answer before to go any further:
Which method will be the best for my application in terms of security: Basic/ SimpleMembership? Any other possibilities?
The object Principal/IPrincipal is to be used just with Basic Authentication?
As far as I know, if I use SimpleMembership, because of the use of cookies, is this not breaking the RESTful paradigm? So if I build a REST Web.API, shouldn't I avoid to use SimpleMembership?
I was checking ThinkTecture.IdentityModel, with tokens. Is this a type of authentication like Basic, or Forms, or Auth, or it's something that can be added to the other authentication types?
Thank you.
Most likely this question will be closed as too localized. Even then, I will put in a few pointers. This is not an answer, but the comments section would be too small for this.
What method and how you authenticate is totally up to your subsystem. There is no one way that will work the best for everyone. A SPA is no different that any other application. You still will be giving access to certain resources based on authentication. That could be APIs, with a custom Authorization attribute, could be a header value, token based, who knows! Whatever you think is best.
I suggest you read more on this to understand how this works.
Use of cookies in no way states that it breaks REST. You will find ton of articles on this specific item itself. Cookies will be passed with your request, just the way you pass any specific information that the server needs in order for it to give you data. If sending cookies breaks REST, then sending parameters to your API should break REST too!
Now, a very common approach (and by no means the ONE AND ALL approach), is the use of a token based system for SPA. The reason though many, the easiest to explain would be that, your services (Web API or whatever) could be hosted separately and your client is working as CORS client. In which case, you authenticate in whatever form you choose, create a secure token and send it back to the client and every resource that needs an authenticated user, is checked against the token. The token will be sent as part of your header with every request. No token would result in a simple 401 (Unauthorized) or a invalid token could result in a 403 (Forbidden).
No one says an SPA needs to be all static HTML, with data binding, it could as well be your MVC site returning partials being loaded (something I have done in the past). As far as working with just HTML and JS (Durandal specifically), there are ways to secure even the client app. Ultimately, lock down the data from the server and route the client to the login screen the moment you receive a 401/403.
If your concern is more in the terms of XSS or request forging, there are ways to prevent that even with just HTML and JS (though not as easy as dropping anti-forgery token with MVC).
My two cents.
If you do "direct" authentication - meaning you can validate the passwords directly - you can use Basic Authentication.
I wrote about it here:
http://leastprivilege.com/2013/04/22/web-api-security-basic-authentication-with-thinktecture-identitymodel-authenticationhandler/
In addition you can consider using session tokens to get rid of the password on the client:
http://leastprivilege.com/2012/06/19/session-token-support-for-asp-net-web-api/
Scenario:
Upon starting a session on my site, I generate a rand token that is shown to the user that once. Say they “store” it away for later use.
I then, INSERT the md5(token) into SQL with timestamp.
When the user visits other pages like login, they would have to pass the token via URL as part of the validation process. I would check to see if the token exist and maybe UPDATE userid to this token.
So. Even if someone steals a user’s PHPSESSID cookie, wouldn’t it do ANY good to the hacker since they can’t access any of these pages without knowing the token?
You are right that they won't be able to access the pages without the token, but as an added point, sometimes I'd like to use IP tracking or browser tracking used concurrently as well.
The rationale being that even if someone gets a PHPSESSID cookie and the token, he would have to be coming from the same IP source as well as use the same browser. Then again these are just means of security by obscurity.
I recommend if you are really concerned about security, you can try looking at using a HTTPS connection. Hope it helped. Cheers!