I wanted to build a simple WP7 app to learn how to use Silverlight, so I thought I'd create a very simple yammer app. As a starter it would have two screens - Login (Username & Password) and Feed.
Yammer user OAuth for its authentication but I just dont get it! i appreciate you need to request a token to use the REST interfaces, but I dont want my users (even if its just me) to need anything other than their login credentials, as they would use on the website. In my head the token can be used in a similar manner as a forms auth token in asp.net
Am I missing something? But I cant see anything in the yammer documentation about logging in.
The process for OAuth is as follows
You do a token request to Yammer. If needed they will ask for yammer credentials and send a token back to a URL of your application
You must use that token to sign all your petitions.
You can't stop Yammer asking for credentials because that's the idea of OAuth. Yammer does not trust you and it's impossible for you to keep any user Yammer's credentials. That way they can't be stolen from your site. The more you can store is a temporal token.
There is a very good guide to using OAuth on hueniverse, which features an example workflow. It's not completely up to date with the latest version of the spec, although this probably doesn't matter too much for your purposes.
Related
I'm trying to get my head around OAuth from the context of having an API that I want to secure and a javascript based single page app made in Vue.js that will consume this API. I've been told that OAuth is the industry standard for this type of thing.
I want to let other clients like a mobile app also use the same API.
From what I can gather the right flow is Authorization Code Flow with Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE) https://oauth.net/2/pkce/
The bit I am confused over is how I seem to need to get users to approve access. For example you don't have Twitter saying "Would you like Twitter to use Twitter". If I was in the position of people using the account to create another account I wouldn't have any confusion but when the client is your own website what is supposed to happen?
I can sort of imagine that I could automatically approve the website or just bypass the part where the user approves but then I feel like I'm going off script. Then I think to myself, have I completely got the wrong end of the stick- is OAuth not designed for this?
If anyone can see where my ignorance is I'd be more than happy to be corrected!
Thanks!
OAuth and OpenID Connect enable you to authenticate users in many ways, for web and mobile clients. Each app implements a code flow and redirects to an authorization server (AS).
Each client is configured with an entry in the AS, and consent can be disabled when required. It is typically only enabled when personal assets are involved. Eg to grant a security code scanning service access to my GitHub repositories.
From asking around a bit and reading a bunch more found searching for "first party" providers: it is okay to just have the main website bypass the bit where they approve access and just send over the token.
I have really hard time trying to understand mostly how should I implement my authorization flow. I think I have the authentication flow mostly correctly implemented using the technologies I've listed in the title. Here's what I want to achieve:
Basically I have a mobile app built using React-Native and I have made a restful API for this mobile app to use. I am currently at the point that I have implemented authentication using ADFS 4.0. My mobile app directly uses the ADFS endpoints to authenticate the user and I am able to receive the id_token and access token correctly from there. But here comes the part that I have no clue what to do next. Before I used openID, I had my own authentication and just an OAuth2 flow in my Spring REST Api and everytime I made a request from the mobile app to the API, I provided the access token in the headers, and used it to verify from the authorization server that the user is indeed authenticated and also received some crucial information about the user to use in my API. But now since I use OpenID-Connect and ADFS 4.0 for the authentication, I have the cruicial information I need in my API in the id_token. The question is, what exactly should i send to my API now from the mobile app, the id_token, access token or both? Given the access token to the userinfo endpoint at the ADFS returns the subject of the owner of the token. Like is there any way I could receive the users info using the subject or what exactly should I do. I've tried to research this subject a lot, but I am still very confused..
Send the access token to the API in the Bearer header. In the API, validate the token and, if required, do user info lookup. A Spring example of mine here if it helps.
Happy to answer any follow on questions ..
OK. So i need some guidance as I am a total iOS authentication noob.
I have a simple app. Users can login to the app, and send messages to friends. There is a web server and a MySql Database that holds the users and login information.
Question: How do I authenticate a user when he logs in safely and securely?
I have spent the last several hours hurting my brain on the following authentication stuff i found from google:
OAuth 1.0 - is said to be good. But it is a protocol and not a library. Do i have to implement this from scratch? Is this even needed in my case for authentication?
OAuth 2.0 - it seems that some sites are using this. I have the same questions for this as version 1.0. I also saw this this message from the library's lead creator literally saying f*** version 2.0 because it was bad for security. But yet so many still use it. Is it dangerous?
The creator of 2.0 has now gone on to make a completely other library because of how bad 2.0 was and because of how unscalable 1.0 was. His library is called OZ. Should I be using this for my server?
I see AlamoFire/ AFNetworking have basic authentication shown in their documentation. Should i just screw the oAuth stuff and just use theirs?
Being new to the authentication thing, all this is very confusing to me. Can anyone knowledgeable in this provide some guidance?
I am currently in the process of creating a cross-platform application and have spent quite some time researching this!
My approach to the project is using a ASP.NET Web API using OWIN middleware.
This uses bearer tokens to authenticate the user.
Using Microsoft.Identity you can limit endpoints down to roles or even individual users (Autherization)
Currently I create a user on the REST API, They log-in at the /token endpoint and then receive a token. This token is then saved to the Apple key chain and can be used to authenticate the user for further requests to the API.
As long as you use SSL this is a secure method and is used widely in many applications.
This approach uses OAuth2 also, so you'll be albe to easily integrate Facebook/Google/etc integration.
Here is a link to the Microsoft Documentation for some further reading on how I did it:
http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/security/authentication-and-authorization-in-aspnet-web-api
Currently this is working perfectly for me for an angular front-end but would work exactly the same in iOS except you may want to save the token to the KeyChain Storage.
We mostly use OAuth 2 creating custom system on iOS to handle the authentication.
Nothing is ever bullet-proof but the 2 token system decreases the chance for stealing credential quite nicely.
The AlamoFire, AFNetworking or any other libraries you amy find have nothing to do with this though. What type of credentials you use depends on your choice or rather the choice of the API. You may use these tools to ease your communication with the API though.
So what the idea behind this is you will try to send your user name and password only once when logging in and then you will receive the two tokens which are further used to communicate. This will decrease a chance for someone to intercept the request with the user name and password which are the ultimate key to get the access to the user data.
Next is "refresh token" which is used to receive a new "access token". This call should be made every few hours or so (controlled by the API). If someone was to steal this token he would be able to use it to get further access for an infinite duration or until the owner chooses to invalidate the refresh tokens (this is what happens when you click "log out from all devices"). So this is still quite bad if someone gets it.
Then there is the "access token" which is used for each and every further request to the server. These tokens have a limited time till they are invalidated so if someone was to intercept it somehow he would have the access to the data for the duration of the token.
So assuming this is the procedure that is done on the backend this is what you need to do:
If you have the access token and is valid simply use the service
If you receive the error that the access token is invalid you need to refresh the access token using your refresh token
If refresh token reports an error you need to navigate back to the login screen
If the app has no refresh token then simply go to the login screen
There are some other things that are nice to cover such as if the request reports an invalid token you should pend the request, refresh the token and then repeat the call to the pending request. A system around this may be quite large.
This is pretty much it about the tokens and authentication but there are other parts of the communication which increase the security such as using a https secure connection. When talking about security you must take a look into every part of the communication.
I built a web app that (among other things) provides access to your Spotify library. For that I am already obtaining a Spotify oAuth token which works fine with their Web API.
My app will also allow you to stream your music to another device while controlling it from the web (or phone). For that I am sending the (encrypted) oAuth token to that device which will then use libSpotify to play that song.
Unfortunately, from what I can see, libSpotify can't authenticate with the oAuth token and requires the plain text password instead? That would force me to additionally ask for the user's password (bad UX) and probably even store it myself (bad idea in general).
#Spotify is there a plan to change that and add support for login via oAuth token in libSpotify? Any other way to avoid asking for both, oAuth and plain text password from the user? The Android SDK accepts the oAuth token for playback.
P.S. I am aware of a similar question, but it is about the Facebook OAuth token and also quite old by now.
I reached out to Spotify and got the following answer:
There are no plans on implementing this.
They are not accepting feature requests or bug reports for libSpotify.
Sounds a bit like it will be discontinued at some point. Anyways, to answer my question above: Spotify seems to force us to ask the user to authenticate via OAuth, then ask the user again for the plain text password.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong (maybe there's a way to get an OAuth token via libSpotify and the password?) Can't find anything there though..
I'm a self taught back end engineer so I'm learning all of this stuff as I go along. For the longest time, I've been using basic authentication for my users. As long as you have the right username and password, you can access all the Tastypie API resources.
Many developers are advising against this approach since each request will contain the username & password. Anyone with the right skills can listen in on the connection between my iOS application and my Django Server and obtain their password.
I wouldn't want to put my user's credentials at risk so I would like to implement a more secure way of authentication. I've been doing a lot of reading and came across OAuth 2.0 which has the whole token approach. The only time when the username and the password is sent to the server is when they are requesting an access token.
After the access token is given (each user will have a unique access token), that token is used to authenticate instead of the username and password.
This way, anyone listening in will only see the token. If the token is exposed, I can easily remove the old token and generate a new token for the user.
Along side this, I would like to make it so that only requests coming from my iOS application are able to access the tastypie resources.(I'm thinking of generating a application key for my app and if third party services want to use the service, I will grant them a unique key as well)
How can go about implementing this into my Django setup? Can I use OAuth2.0 do to this? If I implement this setup, how can I make it so that attackers are unable to obtain the application token?
Take a look at the this project - https://github.com/omab/python-social-auth.
And It's Docs - http://psa.matiasaguirre.net/docs/
It is a great and live project that is up to date with the latest version of Django.
It has integrated social auth for Django with a variety of platforms.