Nest API Corrupts OAuth 2.0 State Parameter - oauth

I'm using Nest as an Authentication Provider for Salesforce, with the intention of calling the Nest API from Force.com. The problem I have is that Nest corrupts the state parameter during the OAuth 2.0 flow.
This is the redirect from Salesforce to Nest. I've inserted line breaks for clarity:
https://home.nest.com/login/oauth2?
response_type=code&
client_id=16188153-52f1-4ac9-93ee-83ccab5cbd2f&
redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Flogin.salesforce.com%2Fservices%2Fauthcallback%2F00DE0000000cjOBMAY%2FNest&
state=jMG%2F2bzDEPisWyKsH7yVPHCrHdHxRAzYhG3Aq7VBF%2FrBLmW49eGj3DEzCLg0aGIvbOadXUxf1pwiDIPupqOMTZ%2BQbuThvTf58y2zXHwDNcoAvg%3D%3D
Note the 'percent encoding' in the state parameter
This is the redirect back to Salesforce:
https://login.salesforce.com/services/authcallback/00DE0000000cjOBMAY/Nest?
state=jMG/2bzDEPisWyKsH7yVPHCrHdHxRAzYhG3Aq7VBF/rBLmW49eGj3DEzCLg0aGIvbOadXUxf1pwiDIPupqOMTZ+QbuThvTf58y2zXHwDNcoAvg==&
code=UCMG2TEF9S69CQX2
Notice, state is no longer URL encoded. And, in particular, since it contains a + character, when Salesforce decodes it, that + is interpreted as a space, and the state doesn't match what Salesforce sent, so authentication fails.
Nest - please fix this!

Related

Unwanted octothorpe character (#) added to request cycle

I'm using the omniauth-google-oauth2 gem to sign in users with Google.
After the oauth response is handled in controller, the user is redirected to another page: /dashboard. When landing on this page - a octothorpe (aka a hash/number/pound) character is added to the URL:
https://myapp.tld/dashboard#
From what it seems, that pound sign is somehow coming with the oauth response. But I cannot gather how and why it consequently gets passed on to the final page.
Any clues how this happens OR otherwise how to clear a redirect from passing that character?
Make sure your response type is set to code in the URL you are providing the user.
response_type=code

Apigee doesn't seem to support the OAuth 2 specification, is there a reason why?

We're making requests for bearer tokens using client_credentials OAuth 2 grant flow with Apigee. According to the spec:
4.4.2. Access Token Request
The client makes a request to the token endpoint by adding the
following parameters using the "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
format per Appendix B with a character encoding of UTF-8 in the HTTP
request entity-body:
grant_type
REQUIRED. Value MUST be set to "client_credentials".
If we make a call however we get an error like this:
{"ErrorCode" : "invalid_request", "Error" :"Required param : grant_type"}
It seems that using Apigee we have to send grant_type as a query parameter.
Why is this? We have clients of Apigee that are unable to use OAuth libraries in their language of choice because of the way that Apigee deals with OAuth 2, and it would be good to know if there is by-design or not.
In addition it doesn't seem like it supports grant_type in the post body and sending id and key using basic auth.
Turns out you do not need to send in grant_type as a query parameter. There is a <GrantType> element in your GenerateAccessToken policy that takes in a variable. For instance, I can use the following:
<OAuthV2 name="GenerateAccessToken">
<DisplayName>GenerateAccessToken</DisplayName>
<FaultRules/>
<Properties/>
<!-- This policy generates an OAuth 2.0 access token using the password grant type -->
<Operation>GenerateAccessToken</Operation>
<!-- This is in millseconds -->
<ExpiresIn>1800000</ExpiresIn>
<Attributes/>
<SupportedGrantTypes>
<GrantType>password</GrantType>
</SupportedGrantTypes>
<GenerateResponse enabled="false">
<Format>FORM_PARAM</Format>
</GenerateResponse>
<GrantType>user.grant_type</GrantType>
<UserName>request.header.username</UserName>
<PassWord>request.header.password</PassWord>
</OAuthV2>
In this example, the grant_type is passed in as user.grant_type. But user.grant_type can be anything-- header, query param, form param, or even a hard-coded value. This way, you (the developer) are provided maximum flexibility on how you want to send in the grant_type.
Can you paste the exact API call that you are making (obviously you should obfuscate the key and secret)?
I'd like to understand what you say when you say "Apigee" -- it could mean API BAAS (https://api.usergrid.com) or a proxy that you defined using API services and attached an OAuth 2 policy to, or something else?

tornado oauth queries (twitter)

I am using tornado framework to use the Twitter API. I am not understanding why I am getting a callback url with the value of next in it
auth/login?next=%2F%3Foauth_token%3D
I understand that /auth/login is setup by me during AuthLoginHandler. But I am not understanding what is setting next token inside the url. This makes my other argument
self.get_argument('oauth_token', None)
return None.
I know that we can still parse the url the get the oauth_token, but any insights into how TwitterMixin or default Oauth class of tornado is doing this. I am a newbie to Tornado
Firstly, You can ignore the 'next' argument until you get your core code working.
'next' is an extra parameter so you can forward the user to to the original page you asked for like this:
self.redirect(self.get_argument('next', '/'))
The 'next' param is added in the request handler here after a call to get_current_user has returned None. [ie user is not logged in]
The Tornado docs describe how to write a handler for Twitter.

Twitter oauth_callback parameter being ignored!

I'm trying to get Twitter authentication working on my ASP.NET site. When you create the app on the Twitter website, you have to specify a callback URL, which for sake of argument, I have set to http://mydomain.com
I've read the oAuth 1.0a spec, and to override this callback URL with your own custom one you have to send the oauth_callback parameter in the request_token phase (url-encoded of course).
So my request URL looks like this:
http://twitter.com/oauth/request_token?oauth_callback=http%3A%2F%2Fmydomain.com%2Ftwittercallback
Supposedly, if all goes to plan, in your response data, you are supposed to receive a new parameter of oauth_callback_confirmed=true in addition to your token and token secret parameters.
However, my response comes through as:
oauth_token=MYTOKEN&oauth_token_secret=MYTOKENSECRET
I know I haven't given you guys the greatest amount to go on, but I'm at my wits end as to why I am not receiving the oauth_callback_confirmed parameter. Without this, my application keeps defaulting back to the callback URL hard-coded on the Twitter website. Please if anyone could help me out, I will be eternally grateful!
Thanks,
A.
I've read the oAuth 1.0a spec, and to
override this callback URL with your
own custom one you have to send the
oauth_callback parameter in the
request_token phase (url-encoded of
course).
So my request URL looks like this:
http://twitter.com/oauth/request_token?oauth_callback=http%3A%2F%2Fmydomain.com%2Ftwittercallback
just because YOU read the spec doesn't mean that TWITTER read it. :P
kidding - this is essentially correct - but the way twitter likes to receive this data is a little different (and not well documented).
the way i've found to get the oauth_callback to confirm is as follows: specify the oauth_callback in the parameters of the request function, NOT within the URL.
python example (using oauth2):
''' Create our client.'''
client = oauth.Client(consumer)
''' do the request '''
resp, content = client.request(request_token_url,"POST",body=urllib.urlencode({'oauth_callback':callbackURL}))
''' note that it's called "body" in this particular OAuth function for Client but in OAuth Request object it's called "parameters." YMMV depending on programming language/ library of course. '''
this is ALSO the only way i've managed to get an oauth verifier back. supposedly one should not have to specify the callback URL every time, since we provide it in app settings...but experience seems to indicate otherwise.
finally, please be aware that at leg 3 you have to do the same thing AGAIN - this time including the oauth_verifier as well as the callback URL in the parameters.
hope this helps - can't begin to tell you how much effort i put into figuring this out.
good luck!
J
I've used this guide to set up my PC to be used as the callback location. Basically you set up your hosts file in a certain way, clear your cache and add a couple of Firefox registry values. At the end when you are debugging an oauth call the redirect comes back to your local PC.
As I said it worked for me.
<?php
// oauth-php example
$token = OAuthRequester::requestRequestToken(
$consumer_key,
$user_id,
array('oauth_callback'=> urlencode($callback_uri))
);
?>

What are the characteristics of an OAuth token?

How many characters long can an oauth access token and oauth access secret be and what are the allowed characters? I need to store them in a database.
I am not sure there are any explicit limits. The spec doesn't have any.
That said, OAuth tokens are often passed as url parameters and so have some of the same limitations. ie need to be properly encoded, etc.
OAuth doesn't specify the format or content of a token. We simply use encrypted name-value pairs as token. You can use any characters in token but it's much easier to handle if the token is URL-safe. We achieve this by encoding the ciphertext with an URL-safe Base64.
As most people already pointed out. The OAuth specification doesn't give you exact directions but they do say...
cited from: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-hammer-oauth-10#section-4.9
"Servers should be careful to assign
shared-secrets which are long enough,
and random enough, to resist such
attacks for at least the length of
time that the shared-secrets are
valid."
"Of course, servers are urged to err
on the side of caution, and use the
longest secrets reasonable."
on the other hand, you should consider the maximum URL length of browsers:
see: http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html
If you read the spec, it says,
The authorization server issues the registered client a client
identifier - a unique string representing the registration
information provided by the client. The client identifier is not a
secret; it is exposed to the resource owner, and MUST NOT be used
alone for client authentication. The client identifier is unique to
the authorization server.
The client identifier string size is left undefined by this
specification. The client should avoid making assumptions about the
identifier size. The authorization server SHOULD document the size
of any identifier it issues.
Second, Access Token should be sent as header, not as a URL param.
Authorization: Bearer < token>.
An OAuth token is conceptually an arbitrary-sized sequence of bytes, not characters. In URLs, it gets encoded using standard URL escaping mechanisms:
unreserved = ALPHA, DIGIT, '-', '.', '_', '~'
Everything not unreserved gets %-encoded.
I'm not sure whether you just talk about the oauth_token parameter that gets passed around. Usually, additional parameters need to be stored and transmitted as well, such as oauth_token_secret, oauth_signature, etc. Some of them have different data types, for example, oauth_timestamp is an integer representing seconds since 1970 (encoded in decimal ASCII digits).
Valid chars for OAuth token are limited by HTTP header value restrictions as OAuth token is frequently sent in HTTP header "Authorization".
Valid chars for HTTP headers are specified by https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.6. Alternatively you may check HTTP header validating code of some popular HTTP client libs, for example see Headers.checkNameAndValue() util of OkHttp framework: https://github.com/square/okhttp/blob/master/okhttp/src/main/java/okhttp3/Headers.java
And this is not all. I wouldn't include HTTP header separator (; and many others) and whitespace symbols (' ' and '\t') and double quote (") (see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.6) as it would require to escape OAuth token before using in HTTP header. Frequently tokens are used by humans in curl test requests, and so good token generators don't add such characters. But you should check what characters may produce Oauth token generator with which your service is working before making any assumptions.
To be specific, even if Oauth spec doesn't say anything, if you are using java and mysql then it will be 16 characters as we generally generate the tokens using UUID and store it as BINARY(16) in the database. I know these details as I have recently done the development using OAuth.

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