I have a website that users can log into to see their account info.
I would like to build functionality into my iOS app that allows them to log in and see their info in the app. The usernames and passwords are stored in a SQL database.
How can I authenticate the username and password the user types into the app with the database?
If you have better atuthentication system in your web..
then i would prefer you to use the WEBVIEW for your login page. and continues the other using the normal app flow.
there are lot of tutorials for creating username and password login Function in IOS. i dont know whther you are basic or new progrmmer. But try this you may get some idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrZR2SyeoSk.
You can go with JSON serialisation, if you experienced to load data from server.
There are multiple ways you can go about this but at the end of the day you need an endpoint for your iOS application to talk to your web server. This can be done with a TCP connection (little more complicated) or with a RESTful HTTP API endpoint which is generally the way most developers will go.
To get you running up and quickly on the client side have a look at AFNetworking to do the heavy lifting on your HTTP requests. You will then need a URL on your website that the iOS application can query. Abstract things to keep your API on a different subdomain, say for instance by creating a subdomain to handle your API requests. A login example could look like this
http://api.mysite.com/login
For a PHP based REST API here is a tutorial for you, PHP API or you could use a Node.js framework such as Restify
The general practise is to use JSON encoded data when sending requests back and forth from the server, iOS 7 has built in JSON encoding/decoding, node and PHP also have pretty good support.
Once you are able to send and receive HTTP request from your iOS device to your web server it is just a matter of checking the username and password match up on the server side (seems you already know how to do this?) to the ones in your database and sending back a authentication BOOL and option error message if failed.
Related
I'm curious if there is a way to safely pass content between apps on iOS. The ultimate goal is to implement oauth between two ios apps.
Since apps are not guaranteed to have unique url schemes, this option is out.
I have considered using keychain groups, but do not have experience with this. It looks like an app needs to specify exactly which apps can access the keychain items.
Are there any other options? Is there some sort of identifier (such as android bundle ID) that can be used to verify the apps during a request?
You can use URL schemes for this.
The basic process
You'll have a ServerApp and many ClientApps. The ServerApp listens to an URL-scheme like serverapp://. The client then can make a call to the server to ask it for authentication. The client has to implement an URL-scheme too. E.g. ClientAppOne implements the URL scheme clientapp1://. The server takes as parameter a backlink to the client app. E.g. the client calls the URL serverapp://auth?back=clientapp1%3A%2F%2Fserverapp-auth (here the backlink is clientapp1://serverapp-auth and has been urlencoded).
The server then checks the users identity, asks him for permission, password, etc. and then uses the backlink to provide the data. How the backlink works exactly is application specific, but you usually need at least 2 parts: an access token and a username. E.g. a backlink will then be clientapp1://serverapp-auth?success=1&token=fi83ia8wfzi3s8fi8s3f8si8sf&user=robert or maybe in case of error clientapp1://serverapp-auth?success=0&errno=421. The client then needs to verify the accesstoken through some public (or private) API, e.g. https://serverapp.example.com/userdetails?apikey=fai83jw93fj93389j&token=fi83ia8wfzi3s8fi8s3f8si8sf. The server will return some structured response.
Necessary components
an URL scheme on the server App
an URL scheme on each client App
an SDK that is to be included into each client app and that handels the details of authentication, and a standard UI component (e.g. facebook has a standard button that says "login with facebook", so the ServerApp needs some re-recognizable button that says something like "login with ServerApp")
a server that provides services that can be accessed through the access token.
a defined API that explains how the client has to communicate with the server
an SDK to be included into the client that handels such client-server-communication (should be part of the SDK mentioned in component 3.)
maybe a wiki that documents all of the steps above, so that you and other developers dont lose track
a way to invalidate access tokens, and a way for the client to detect if an access token has been invalidated. furthermore, if the user changes his password, all access tokens should be invalidated.
Random notes
in your client app you can check if the serverapp is installed by calling [[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"serverapp://auth"]].
the URL schemes should be sufficently collission-free. These URLs are never seen by users, only by developers, so they don't have to be beautiful. You can e.g. append the iTunes-Connect-App-ID to your URL-scheme, like serverapp1234567://. This will greatly reduce the possibility that someday some other app will use the same URL scheme.
I am currently facing problem with secure server communication. I am a mobile developer and I try to design REST (JSON output). To understand the problem let me show you a flow in my application:
First user login to the application
Then may download some personal information
When user moves in application i want to communicate with a server all the time.
So i figure that login & password will be send throught SSL (right? wrong? this is Question number one, maybe i should choose OAuth?), but then what? I receive login & password, store it into my Keychain, and any other services should be open for all users? I think this SSL in first request gime only semblance of security, not a real security.
Let me show you my REST so far:
Login:
request:
https://mywebsiteforrest.com/getin
And there i put in header username=root&password=pass
response:
{
"status":100, /*This status tell me that everything is OK */
"userKey":"432fdsf732fds7fstsw87frd7s5fd",
"timestamp":1378651048,
"userId: 342
}
Later requests:
request:
https://mywebsiteforrest.com/getmydata
And there i put in header userId=342&key=432fdsf732fds7fstsw87frd7s5fd
Or maybe i should ask for it that way:
https://mywebsiteforrest.com/getmydata/342&key=432fdsf732fds7fstsw87frd7s5fd ?
I am looking for advice is that secure or it is (like i said before) semblance of security. I know you hate that question, but - what is right way for doing that?
I would advice using headers.
The headers are purely encrypted. The only information going over the network 'Plaintext' is related to the SSL setup and D/H (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange) key exchange. This exchange is designed in a way not to yield any useful information to any third person or an unauthorized person and once it has taken place, all data is encrypted.
To my understanding creating a smartphone apps based on a site is to simply create an API for the website and to output the data in XML, JSON. In my case JSON has Ruby on Rails has it built it in it. In theory all I have to is to read the event.json page and read the attribute and on phonegap to read it and build a logic from it.
However, in my phone app, I would like to allow user to log in before entering and in fact on the web-base I am using the devise gem to manage my user management. How am I supposed to allow user to log in from device using phonegap? Should I read an API JSON that showcase all users but then that may cause a lots of security issues, is there a device documentation on that specific issue, or should I scrap device and just make an authentication system from scratch?
Devise provides for an auth-token to be used for login. This works well with JSON APIs as you can set a header to include the auth-token to identify the user. Your login form would just be responsible for getting an auth-token from valid credentials. SSL can help to secure this information on the wire.
I created a Gem based on rack_iphone which store the session
in the localStorage and and upon opening a application from a home screen shortcut
the application take the cookie if present from the localStorage and the sent it to the server
Hope this work for you
My goal is to build a standalone RESTful Rails 3 service that communicates with a Rails 3 web application via ActiveResource JSON and an iPhone application via iOS 5 native JSON. I have each running so that a single table of data is being exposed in the service app and that can be called and rendered via both a Rails app and the iPhone app.
My question is around authentication and something that can be reusable for both the web application and the iPhone app or in the future an Android app.
From the research I have done on this site, it seems HTTP Basic would work for both, however I would be unable to properly logout a user on the web side like sessions or cookies could and I have the browser login form to deal with. If I use sessions, how would that translate to setting up authentication on the iOS side of things?
This project is a code learning exercise, so I am hoping for implementation or architectural guidance rather than simply implementing Devise or Authlogic, etc.
It sounds like you're conflating at least two problems.
The first issue is authentication: you need to determine if the user is who they say they are. For authentication, you can do basic auth. You could also use client certs, though that's probably not what you're looking for.
The second thing is session management: First, you can do basic auth on each page request and store the session state in the database, but you're right about not being able to log the user out, as the browser will cache the credentials.
You may want to consider a login page that requires basic auth and shoots back a cookie to do session management. All other pages don't require basic auth, but give a 401 unauthorized if the cookie isn're present. Or you could redirect. The iOS client code will have to know to call the login page first to get the cookie and then use it after that. Logging out is deleting the cookie.. hrmm, but the browser will still cache the basic auth credentials.
I'm thinking the only way you're going to get what you want is to have a form-based auth for your web users (to allow them to log out and log in as someone else), and a basic-auth based system for iOS users. As a result of both authentication mechanisms, return a cookie that has to be used for all other pages.
I'm looking for a solution similar to the iPhone Facebook Connect (https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk) for the BlackBerry platform. Basically, I need my users to authenticate against Facebook from within a native BlackBerry application (so, not a Web based mobile application). Is there a library I could use, and if not, what will be the correct approach to achieve this?
Thanks in advance!
Options for BlackBerry are:
Use Facebook Platform for Mobile
Use REST API approach provided by Eki Y. Baskoro
Try to port JavaFB from J2SE to J2ME
I managed to go through Facebook Connect authentication within my BB app. After cracking my head for three days I realised that it is the URL that is the culprit!
Basically these are what you need (assuming you are developing for 4.5 platform):
Using Browser Field, do a POST to http://m.facebook.com/login.php (the mobile version of Facebook) passing all the necessary arguments as per the Desktop application counterparts (one challenge is to get the signature generation correct).
Once the User successfully grants access, capture the URL of the success screen. You will obtain your auth_token.
Do a POST to the REST server to obtain the session key and secret given the auth_token you obtain.
Save the returned session key and secret, persist it, and wholla! your app is up and running.
I am developing a custom LoginScreen and FacebookFacade object to incorporate the first three steps above, if anyone is ever interested to reuse my code. It'll be GPLed, I suppose ;)
Afzal, I had a similar problem and I've found out that I actually had a problem with my connection string. You can look at the following link there is some explanation and code for creating the correct connection string
http://www.localytics.com/blog/post/how-to-reliably-establish-a-network-connection-on-any-blackberry-device/
and just add the connection string to the FetchThread where it opens the connection:
connection = (HttpConnection)Connector.open(absoluteUrl+getConnectionString());