node js Oauth2 token management - oauth-2.0

I develop expressjs app with Oauth2 authorization. For a while I used my own library for token management, but I realized that it has a lot of the vices I want to fix. Search in npmjs.org gave me the token-manager package, but I don't see the functional I expected to see. I would like to have something like this:
Limitation of tokens number for the same user on a single IP.
Refresh token limit.
Tokens per second limit for the same user.
Ideally I would like to use well tested package that solves common problems of token management, since I am not aware of all ones.
What is the common practice?
P.S. I have not found any common practice and published my own npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/oauth2-token-manager

Related

Doesn't OAuth 2.0 PKCE Flow open the door to masquerading/phishing attacks?

With OAuth 2.0 PKCE Flow for Installed App (e.g. a desktop app/cli/client library), it seems that nothing is preventing an attacker to:
obtain client_id by using the original app (client_id is public and can be easily copied from browser bar/source code)
make a fake app to mimic original app
use the fake app to seduce the user to grant access and thus obtain a refresh token which essentially means full access within requested scopes
Without PKCE, it's hard to fake an app and obtain a refresh token because that would require an attacker to obtain client_secret. It seems to me that, although PKCE offers security improvements over implicit flow, it makes it so much easier to masquerade authentic apps that use OAuth 2.0?
I'm using googlecloudsdk (gcloud), it seems that it has client_id (and even many client_id/client_secret pairs) hard coded into the source code, which is distributed to the client. I doubt there's anything to stop attackers to fake gcloud and thus gain access to user's GCP environment (for proof, run gcloud auth login and it will show you the url in the console that an attacker needs.) Could anyone clarify/help me to understand what's going on?
Private URI schemes are probably the best you can do on desktop but are not perfect as you say. It is what I use for my Desktop Code Sample, but ideally I'd also like to resolve the above concern.
For mobile you can use Claimed HTTPS Schemes to solve the problem - see the answer I added to the post sllopis sent.
I would be aware of Updated OAuth 2.1 Guidance for Native Apps - see section 10 - but I don't think you can fully solve this problem.
It is expected that end users are careful about desktop apps they install, to reduce risks for this scenario. Hopefully operating system support will enable better cryptographic options in future.
Just wanted to follow up on this because I had the same question myself, but also answered it myself and I wanted to add something that wasn't said here:
When you set up the application on the oauth2 server, you have to set up a number of redirect_uris, allowed places to return to after authorization is complete. This means that someone who creates a phishing attack like the one you described cannot return to their own app after login, and will never receive the code.
There is a separate attack where you try and return to a legitimate app from an illegitimate app, however this is solved by the inclusion of the state variable.

Communication between two microservices in JHipster using JWT

I'm building a small microservice-based webapp using JHipster with JWT authorization. The Architecture is simple, one gateway and two services with repositories. The problem that I had for the last few hours is the communication between the two backend-services.
At first, I tried to find a token on the services themself, but couldn't find it. If I just missed it in all the docs (quite overwhelming when beginning with the full stack :P), I would be happy to revert my changes and use the predefined token.
My second approach was that each service will authorize itself with the gateway at PostConstruct and save the token in memory to use it each API call. It works without a problem, but I find it hard to believe that this functionality is not already programmed in JHipster.
So my question is whether my approach is usual? If neither is true and there are some best-practices for it, I'm also interested in them.
It depends on the use case.
For user requests, a common approach is: the calling service forwards the token it received to the other service without going through the gateway suing #AuthorizedFeignClient.
For background tasks like scheduled jobs, your approach can be applied or you could also issue long life tokens as long as they have limited permissions through roles. This way you don't have to go through gateway.
Keycloak's offline tokens approach could also inspire you.

Twitter account linking with an Alexa skill for API read-only access

I'm working on a fairly basic Alexa skill that, in essence, searches through a specific Twitter feed looking for a hashtag, parses that tweet, and reads it back. The simplest way to do this seems to be using the Twitter API, since scraping appears to be against the TOS.
... crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited.
I've been having some trouble understanding how account linking works, as I've never dealt with OAuth before. I've been trying to follow the one tutorial around, but neither the text or video version were clear me.
Why the need for an external webapp?
...we need an OAuth implementation of our own to make the integration work correctly
What's wrong with the one provided by Twitter? Why can't any issues be fixed within the Lambda method, since the account integration isn't being touched otherwise AFAIK? Isn't having the tokens passed around via the URL a bad idea too? Their example code seems to require that the Consumer Secret be hard coded too.
Enter: “https://alexa-twitter-airport-info.herokuapp.com/oauth/request_token?vendor_id=XXXXXX&consumer_key=YYYYYY&consumer_secret=ZZZZZZ”.
At the very least, their webapp seems to be down for the time being, and it'd be nice to have an option that doesn't require paying money to host another copy.
I've seen this post discussing a Node.js OAuth implementation, but the necessity for such an implementation still escapes me.

Best practices for the OAuth "application server" - Square

I have an application that uses personal access token to access to GET the list of items. I want to switch to using OAuth, the application will use ITEMS_READ only.
My application is a daemon running on an instance of secure Ubuntu server dedicated to this application(s). Regarding the "application server" is there anything that square recommends - what are typical best practices with the "application server"?
Thank you
The API documentation is fairly extensive, and includes a helpful section about OAuth. A few common pitfalls I've noticed with OAuth implementations in the past lead me to call these things out:
If you are only building a one-off integration for your own use, it is probably not worth using OAuth.
Make sure you understand how OAuth works. If you find yourself asking for users' client secrets or personal access tokens, or anything else that requires them to open the app management dashboard at connect.squareup.com, you need to rethink your implementation. Only you, the developer, should need to understand access tokens and other API credentials.
You can generally ask for more OAuth scopes than the bare minimum that you need. I'd recommend getting MERCHANT_PROFILE_READ as well. That can be useful to manage accounts, and so you can hit /v1/me to get various IDs you'll need.
The Square OAuth access tokens expire as described here. They last for thirty days, so this can tend to creep up on developers who aren't aware of it. You will need to use a scheduled task to renew access tokens that are about to expire and purge your old tokens after doing so. Something as simple as a cronjob should be fine.
In terms of the technology stack you use, that's entirely up to you. The Square Connect team is happy to help and provide recommendations when we can.

Authenticating Requests from iPhone with Framework API Token

So I'm creating an iOS framework that will be a static library that developers will add to their project, when they create an account on our site I'd like to give them a unique token that they put in their app to use my static library.
For iOS dev's, think TestFlight, you sign up, get an App ID and then run [TestFlight takeOff:<#some-key#>];
I'd like to authenticate the requests that the framework makes to my REST webservice (using https).
Is there anything I can do to prevent people from "breaking into the app code" and stealing the developers api token and using it to make requests? My api endpoints will not be public information, at least for now. and I can't authenticate the user because it's a framework and that would be an awful UX.
The question is, is there anything I can do to prevent this sort of behavior? Should I even care? I will charge the developer per X requests eventually so I was hoping to authenticate this so we don't have spammers racking up a bill for the developer.
How do other iOS frameworks handle this?
Any design ideas and criticism welcome.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do is ever possible. If the text is in the client code, it can be pulled out. SSL-pinning won't really help you here either because the cert is in the client binary as well.
One way you might be able to get close is to use the developer's authentication system. Say a user logs in into the developer's auth system, then server side you generate a short-lived key for that user. Then the client code can be passed (over SSL-pinning) that short-lived key and use that to make your API calls. However, this requires the developer to actually have a secure auth system, and without SSL-pinning, they're vulnerable to a simple man-in-the-middle attack which will reveal the short-lived key.
You can try to minimize the damage by throttling API calls on your end, or trying using per-app heuristics to approximate what normal API usage would look like. Anything out of the norm will get flagged as potentially hacker based. That might be enough to flush out most of the wanna-be-hackers. The true hackers will learn of the throttling and be clever about circumventing it...
Your safest bet is to make it a server-side library instead of a client-side library. However, that's certainly not a super-sexy solution either. Not all apps have a server side component... and even if they do, once the developer's server is compromised (ie. gets spammed or hacked, etc) it's game over once again. But, in the end, the nice thing about a server-side solution is that you're at least less vulnerable to an attack and you put the responsibility of securing the system on the developer.
What's really lacking here is some form of Apple-based verification for network calls originating from Apple devices.... but that probably won't ever happen. :)

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