I am developing an IOS app which is going to make asynchronous calls to a Spring-MVC back end which is protected by Spring Security. I have been unable to figure out how this would work. I have a web client which makes calls to this service (using jQuery Ajax), and I'd like to implement the same calls in IOS (iPad).
Is there any framework that would take care of handling authentication, then passing the token back and forth, as required by Spring Security? How will the IOS application know to request userid/password from the user again after a timeout?
-- After doing some research, it looks like the IOS API already has functionality for authenticating (providing for Basic, Digest, Certificate and trust Authentication). It looks like it is possible to throw up a dialog box to get a userid/password, then save it in an NSURLCredential object, and it will be used when necessary.
Am I correct with this? Is there an easier way? Does anyone have a simple example which illustrates how this authentication might work with a Spring-security protected server?
Thanks!
I use AFNetwork to make my network API calls. The only problem that I have is the CookieTheftException that occurs when two connections with expired JSessionIds hit the server.
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I have 2 projects an mvc5 & webapi. I am wanting to call the api from a pure clientside manor even though im using mvc (I am slowing trying to migrate old code into a spa like application still being able to maintain the current codebase).
The url of the api sits under the main domain e.g. subdomain.mydomain.com/api so I dont have to worry about jsonp or crossdomain stuff.
How do I secure the api. Am I right in thinking when a user logs into the mvc5 application there is there some kind of key or token I can access. I store it somewhere on the site and add it in the request header?
If I follow this approach how do I validate the token at the api end. An actionfilter that reads the header? or is there a cleaner method.
The only information I can really find on using the api is to use basic auth which is something I dont really want to have to do.
I think a nice simple(ish) way to do it is to use a token based method. So the client authenticates once, you give them a token, then subsequent requests pass the token and the server checks it.
It does require some custom code, but I have seen a few good examples. Here is one that I loosely followed:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/630986/Cross-Platform-Authentication-With-ASP-NET-Web-API
It enforces HTTPS, then does the token generating and validation after that.
I am building a REST API using Grails. I want it to be protected using OAuth2.0 client_credentials flow(grant_type). My use-case is as follows:
a external agent will send a request to something like
http://server-url/oauth/token?client_id=clientId&client_secret=clientSecret&grant_type=client_credentials
and obtain a access_token. Then, my URL(protected resource) should be accesible with something like
http://server-url/resource?access_token={access-token obtained before}
I am looking for something that makes doing this on Grails easy and quick. What will be the best way/tool/plugin to use for this ? Scribe library is an option, if there are any tutorials for my specific use-case, it will be great.
P.S.: I have tried the spring-security and related plugins, no joy there. Any alternatives would be nice.
I have the same issue. I found a lot of grails plugins that helped you authenticate your app against other oauth providers, but nothing that would help me make my app the oauth provider. After a lot of digging, I came across this grails plugin that will do exactly what you want.
https://github.com/adaptivecomputing/grails-spring-security-oauth2-provider
I'm still configuring it for my application, and I think the docs might need a few edits (specifically the authorization_code flow) but I got the simple client_credentials flow to work with minimal configuration. Hope that helps!
Based on my experiences, Scribe was built for OAuth 1.0 and has only very limited support for OAuth 2.0. In fact, for testing our own OAuth 2 implementation, all we could use from it was an HTTP request wrapper, we had to do anything else manually. Fortunately, doing it manually is suprisingly easy.
Since I still haven't found a fine open OAuth 2.0 library for Java (frankly I'm not familiar with Groovy), I encourage you to write the client code for yourself. You don't even need a client callback endpoint to use the client credentials grant flow. So you simply create an HTTP request (as you've written above already, take care to escape the GET parameters though) and get the response content. Your flow does not use redirects, so simply parse the JSON object in the response content, e.g. with the org.json library. Finally, send an HTTP request using the extracted access token.
Note that your examples are not completely standard compliant. The standard requires using HTTPS, sending the token in an HTTP header instead of a GET parameter and suggests using a HTTP basic authorization header instead of GET parameters to specify client credentials.
I may have misunderstood your question, and you may want to implement the server side, too. The scribe library supports only client side, so you can find a commercial implementation or implement your own server. It is a complex task, but if you support only the client credentials flow, it almost becomes easy. ;-)
This isn't a plugin, it's just a sample Grails application that acts as an OAuth provider. It was really easy to get up and running with Grails 3.
https://github.com/bobbywarner/grails3-oauth2-api
I'm just starting reasearch about the best way to implement user authentication within my soon-to-be app.
This is what I have so far:
A desktop (Windows) application on a remote server. That application is accessed locally with a browser (it has a web console and MS SQL Server to store everything).
The application is used with local credendials stored in the DB.
This is what I'd like to accompllish:
Provide access to some information on that SQL Server DB from my app. That access of course must be granted once a user has id himself with valid credentials.
This is what I know so far:
How to create my PHP web service and query info from a DB using JSON.
How to work with AFNetworking libraries to retrieve information.
How to display that info on the app.
What I don't know is which could be the best method to implement user authentication from iOS. Should I send username and password? Should I send some hash? Is there a way to secure the handshake?
I'd for sure appreciate any advise, tip, or recommendation you have from previous experience.
I don't want to just implement it but instead I want to do it as good as possible.
There have been books written on this, so any answer given here is necessary incomplete. So, I'll give you an outline of the simplest thing that actually works. The bare minimum for securing a service like this is to use HTTP Basic Authentication (supported natively by both AFNetworking and PHP) secured by SSL/TLS.
Basic Authentication is a way of hashing (not encrypting) credentials in a standard way and sending them as one of the headers in your request (Authorization: Basic <Base64-encoded concatenated credentials>). AFNetworking supports this as part of its AFHTTPClient class (see the -setAuthorizationHeaderWithUsername:password: method). PHP parses the authentication header into a pair of server variables ($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] and $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']). From here, you just check the username/password combination against your user database and allow or forbid access to the resource.
The reason it's crucial to pair this technique with HTTPS is that the credential hash is easily reversible; you're basically sending the password in the clear, so it can be grabbed by anyone listening to your traffic. Setting up a certificate and sending your requests over the secure channel prevents this type of vulnerability.
If you want to be a little more sophisticated, two-legged OAuth is also a viable choice for this scenario.
I am reading the Service Oriented Design with Ruby book by Paul Dix and many posts here but am left with many questions surrounding authenticating users and the application.
I want to have api.site.com as a RESTful Rails app serving up JSON. Secure.site.com will be a web app (maybe Rails or maybe PHP) that will consume the service. Also a mobile app such as iPad will also consume it.
So is the first step to build in a level of auth so that only my web app and mobile app can consume the service? Then once the calling app has been authenticated, both these apps will have users who want to CRUD their data so then authenticate them as well?
I've read about Http basic, digest, tokens, oauth and many plugins but am having a difficult time narrowing down the most flexible and reusable way. For now this is simply learning so I would like to stay away from plugins so I can learn the code better.
Can my web app use normal sessions like I'm familiar with and then the mobile use their equivalent to sessions. At that point I still have no authenticated the calling app though. Http basic seemed like I could use it from both, but I didn't see a way for my web app to use a normal login form and logging out seemed like an issue.
I would suggest two solutions for you.
Use a Gem like devise for login system and inherit the devise registration and sessions controller to make it respond to JSON requests.
Create your own simple authentication and use respond to HTML and respond to JSON for separating web and mobile login
Iam not totally sure whether a mobile device maintains a session (please look around) but u can always use a token authentication system if it doesnt.
I am building a RESTFul API and wondering what's the best way to do auth? Users will need to authenticate. I know of three ways:
1.) Pass API key in every RESTFul requests:
http://api.mydomain.com/api-key-here/get-users
This is nice because developers can immediately start using the API by simply copying URL string into the browser. Are there any potential security risks though?
2.) Every request passes the API key in the header of the request.
This seems to be more secure, but developers can't make requests via their browser. CURL is required.
3.) oAuth
I must admit I don't know much about it, but seems very popular. My concern is that its a barrier for developers to start using the API. They first must be familiar with oAuth, and have it setup.
Thoughts? Thanks greatly.
If your concern is burdening developers with a high cost to entry, I suggest basic auth, but running your API over https.
I do this with Diligent Street and it works really well. I use an API Key and couple it with a Secret as the username/password combination for basic auth.
I have employed the technique found here: Build a RESTful API. This solution uses an MD5 hash of your API ID, API secret and the UNIX Time stamp and passed in the HTTP header. This authentication method is the same used by Mashery’s Authentication.
This link references and contains a full blown starter kit for creating an API that has Auth, Membership and*API Usage Metering* along with a supporting EF database.
As for testing the service you can use RESTClient to execute HTTP calls with custom headers instead of using Curl.