one question, maybe it's a bit longer, but i really hope someone can help me 🙏
I've been reading the docs but simply can't figure it out.
Is there a way i can create a signup feature where user creates an account (only simple one, email and pw) , and that account data is saved somewhere in a json file
And then the user can login via post method by typing his credntials.
And if credentials are correct (out of any other credentials there are in that particular json file) he gets a random jwt.
I mean i know i need to set up the rules if email and pw match any user and pw from the json file
Thanks!
Mockoon offers mostly stateless and independant endpoints mocking. Which means, there is currently no easy way to "code" it for such advanced use cases.
You can simulate a POST /signup and POST /login call, make sure the request looks OK by using Mockoon's rules, but they will not be linked and the credentials will not be persisted.
A system of CRUD endpoints is currently under development but it will allow for JSON manipulation only, not the kind of behavior you describe which is also very close to a production application.
Related
I am currently learning to make DRF APIs for something I am working on. I was wondering how exactly I would secure the API POST requests I send via the client side?
For example, let's say I have a log in form where the user can enter their information, this information needs to be send to (or POST-ed to) my API for verification. I do not want just anyone sending requests to the server and so, I would want to use an API key but since this is being done on a website, anyone could see the API key if they wanted to, and then exploit the server by sending a ton of requests.
My current idea is to use serializes in DRF to check if the API POST request has everything it needs but I am fairly certain this can be easily found by checking what sort of JSON my code sends to the server, so how exactly do I go about securing this such that I can send the information to the bare domain (like http://127.0.0.1:8000) and then have code which can accept that information?
I apologize for any confusion, if it is confusing. Let me know if you need any clarification.
If you are creating API any one can send request to server. same goes for website and webpage. Their is no way you can avoid this. But their are ways to handle possible misuse.
like using CAPTCHA for login form which can be filled by one on the web. though wrong CAPTCHA text can be send by anyone you must check it on server for their correctness. or use google reCAPTCHA like services for outsourcing this task.
API key should be given after login NOT before login. and if it is given after successful login then the key is obtained by legitimate user which can obviously do whatever he is allowed to do on website. their should not be problem in that.
further explanation to the question will lead to details of denial-of-service i.e DOS attack. you should consult expert on that field if your application requires to handle DOS attack.
I know this is not the first time the topic is treated in StackOverflow, however, I have some questions I couldn't find an answer to or other questions have opposed answers.
I am doing a rather simple REST API (Silex-PHP) to be consumed initially by just one SPA (backbone app). I don't want to comment all the several authentication methods in this question as that topic is already fully covered on SO. I'll basically create a token for each user, and this token will be attached in every request that requires authentication by the SPA. All the SPA-Server transactions will run under HTTPS. For now, my decision is that the token doesn't expire. Tokens that expire/tokens per session are not complying with the statelessness of REST, right? I understand there's a lot of room for security improvement but that's my scope for now.
I have a model for Tokens, and thus a table in the database for tokens with a FK to user_id. By this I mean the token is not part of my user model.
REGISTER
I have a POST /users (requires no authentication) that creates a user in the database and returns the new user. This complies with the one request one resource rule. However, this brings me certain doubts:
My idea is that at the time to create a new user, create a new token for the user, to immediately return it with the Response, and thus, improving the UX. The user will immediately be able to start using the web app. However, returning the token for such response would break the rule of returning just the resource. Should I instead make two requests together? One to create the user and one to retrieve the token without the user needing to reenter credentials?
If I decided to return the token together with the user, then I believe POST /users would be confusing for the API consumer, and then something like POST /auth/register appears. Once more, I dislike this idea because involves a verb. I really like the simplicity offered in this answer. But then again, I'd need to do two requests together, a POST /users and a POST /tokens. How wrong is it to do two requests together and also, how would I exactly send the relevant information for the token to be attached to a certain user if both requests are sent together?
For now my flow works like follows:
1. Register form makes a POST /users request
2. Server creates a new user and a new token, returns both in the response (break REST rule)
3. Client now attaches token to every Request that needs Authorization
The token never expires, preserving REST statelessness.
EMAIL VALIDATION
Most of the current webapps require email validation without breaking the UX for the users, i.e the users can immediately use the webapp after registering. On the other side, if I return the token with the register request as suggested above, users will immediately have access to every resource without validating emails.
Normally I'd go for the following workflow:
1. Register form sends POST /users request.
2. Server creates a new user with validated_email set to false and stores an email_validation_token. Additionally, the server sends an email generating an URL that contains the email_validation_token.
3. The user clicks on the URL that makes a request: For example POST /users/email_validation/{email_validation_token}
4. Server validates email, sets validated_email to true, generates a token and returns it in the response, redirecting the user to his home page at the same time.
This looks overcomplicated and totally ruins the UX. How'd you go about it?
LOGIN
This is quite simple, for now I am doing it this way so please correct me if wrong:
1. User fills a log in form which makes a request to POST /login sending Basic Auth credentials.
2. Server checks Basic Auth credentials and returns token for the given user.
3. Web app attached the given token to every future request.
login is a verb and thus breaks a REST rule, everyone seems to agree on doing it this way though.
LOGOUT
Why does everyone seem to need a /auth/logout endpoint? From my point of view clicking on "logout" in the web app should basically remove the token from the application and not send it in further requests. The server plays no role in this.
As it is possible that the token is kept in localStorage to prevent losing the token on a possible page refresh, logout would also imply removing the token from the localStorage. But still, this doesn't affect the server. I understand people who need to have a POST /logout are basically working with session tokens, which again break the statelessness of REST.
REMEMBER ME
I understand the remember me basically refers to saving the returned token to the localStorage or not in my case. Is this right?
If you'd recommend any further reading on this topic I'd very much appreciate it. Thanks!
REGISTER
Tokens that expire/tokens per session are not complying with the statelessness of REST, right?
No, there's nothing wrong with that. Many HTTP authentication schemes do have expiring tokens. OAuth2 is super popular for REST services, and many OAuth2 implementations force the client to refresh the access token from time to time.
My idea is that at the time to create a new user, create a new token for the user, to immediately return it with the Response, and thus, improving the UX. The user will immediately be able to start using the web app. However, returning the token for such response would break the rule of returning just the resource. Should I instead make two requests together? One to create the user and one to retrieve the token without the user needing to reenter credentials?
Typically, if you create a new resource following REST best practices, you don't return something in response to a POST like this. Doing this would make the call more RPC-like, so I would agree with you here... it's not perfectly RESTful. I'll offer two solutions to this:
Ignore this, break the best practices. Maybe it's for the best in this case, and making exceptions if they make a lot more sense is sometimes the best thing to do (after careful consideration).
If you want be more RESTful, I'll offer an alternative.
Lets assume you want to use OAuth2 (not a bad idea!). The OAuth2 API is not really RESTful for a number of reasons. I'm my mind it is still better to use a well-defined authentication API, over rolling your own for the sake of being RESTful.
That still leaves you with the problem of creating a user on your API, and in response to this (POST) call, returning a secret which can be used as an access/refresh token.
My alternative is as follows:
You don't need to have a user in order to start a session.
What you can do instead is start the session before you create the user. This guarantees that for any future call, you know you are talking to the same client.
If you start your OAuth2 process and receive your access/refresh token, you can simply do an authenticated POST request on /users. What this means is that your system needs to be aware of 2 types of authenticated users:
Users that logged in with a username/password (`grant_type = passsword1).
Users that logged in 'anonymously' and intend to create a user after the fact. (grant_type = client_credentials).
Once the user is created, you can assign your previously anonymous session with the newly created user entity, thus you don't need to do any access/refresh token exchanges after creation.
EMAIL VALIDATION
Both your suggestions to either:
Prevent the user from using the application until email validation is completed.
Allow the user to use the application immediately
Are done by applications. Which one is more appropriate really depends on your application and what's best for you. Is there any risk associated with a user starting to use an account with an email they don't own? If no, then maybe it's fine to allow the user in right away.
Here's an example where you don't want to do this: Say if the email address is used by other members of your system to add a user as a friend, the email address is a type of identity. If you don't force users to validate their emails, it means I can act on behalf of someone with a different email address. This is similar to being able to receive invitations, etc. Is this an attack vector? Then you might want to consider blocking the user from using the application until the email is validated.
You might also consider only blocking certain features in your application for which the email address might be sensitive. In the previous example, you could prevent people from seeing invitations from other users until the email is validated.
There's no right answer here, it just depends on how you intend to use the email address.
LOGIN
Please just use OAuth2. The flow you describe is already fairly close to how OAuth2 works. Take it one step further an actually use OAuth2. It's pretty great and once you get over the initial hurdle of understanding the protocol, you'll find that it's easier than you thought and fairly straightforward to just implement the bits you specifically need for your API.
Most of the PHP OAuth2 server implementations are not great. They do too much and are somewhat hard to integrate with. Rolling your own is not that hard and you're already fairly close to building something similar.
LOGOUT
The two reasons you might want a logout endpoint are:
If you use cookie/session based authentication and want to tell the server to forget the session. It sounds like this is not an issue for you.
If you want to tell the server to expire the access/refresh token earlier. Yes, you can just remove them from localstorage, and that might be good enough. Forcing to expire them server-side might give you that little extra confidence. What if someone was able to MITM your browser and now has access to your tokens? I might want to quickly logout and expire all existing tokens. It's an edge case, and I personally have never done this, but that could be a reason why you would want it.
REMEMBER ME
Yea, implementing "remember me" with local storage sounds like a good idea.
I originally took the /LOGON and /LOGOUT approach. I'm starting to explore /PRESENCE. It seems it would help me combine both knowing someone's status and authentication.
0 = Offline
1 = Available
2 = Busy
Going from Offline to anything else should include initial validation (aka require username/password). You could use PATCH or PUT for this (depending how you see it).
You are right, SESSION is not allowed in REST, hence there is no need to login or logout in REST service and /login, /logout are not nouns.
For authentication you could use
Basic authentication over SSL
Digest authentication
OAuth 2
HMAC, etc.
I prefer to use PUBLIC KEY and PRIVATE KEY [HMAC]
Private key will never be transmitted over web and I don't care about public key. The public key will be used to make the user specific actions [Who is holding the api key]
Private key will be know by client app and the server. The private key will be used to create signature. You generate a signature token using private key and add the key into the header. The server will also generate the signature and validate the request for handshake.
Authorization: Token 9944b09199c62bcf9418ad846dd0e4bbdfc6ee4b
Now how you will get private key? you have to do it manually like you put facebook, twitter or google api key on you app.
However, in some case you can also return [not recommended] the key only for once like Amazon S3 does. They provide "AWS secret access key" at the registration response.
I've looked hard into this article about OAuth Authorization Server with OWIN/Katana: http://www.asp.net/aspnet/overview/owin-and-katana/owin-oauth-20-authorization-server
The article does tell us how to set up a basic Auth server but seems to omit a lot of information and code. I'm particularly interested in the implicit grant flow. They did provide the login page and the "permissions" page, but I'm confused:
Where is the code that decides whether the authenticated user has granted the client? This can't be done "behind the scenes" because we NEVER told any middleware "component" the path "/OAuth/Authorize".
Where is the code that actually redirects the user back to the client's website, along with the auto-generated access_token and other values?
I'm suspecting that there is a proper way to "construct" the ClaimsIdentity object (particularly the scope claims) before passing it to authentication.SignIn(claimsIdentity) in /OAuth/Authorize, so that it would automatically redirect the user back to the client with access and refresh tokens.
The MVC Actions of /OAuth/Authorize and /Accounts/Login seem to always return View() even after successful authentication and granting, thus never forwards the user back to the client's website. This seems like I would have to manually determine when to return Redirect(Request.QueryString["RedirectUrl"]);, and figure out the encrypted values to pass along with it. This doesn't seem like I should be generating the exact response.
What did I overlook?
As #(LittleBobby Tables) said your questions are very broad.
Based on how you asked the question you actual understand the topics but not the how?
I suggest you look at the full source code at
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/OWIN-OAuth-20-Authorization-ba2b8783/file/114932/1/AuthorizationServer.zip
Your answers are either present or will lead you in the right direction
I have this question in mind and I wanted to get other developer's opinion on this issue.
For creating a user (like in Facebook or creating an account in Gmail), some people suggested to have an public/private (means we don't tell developers how to use it) action in API for it. I, however, think it is a security risk as even if it is not documented, a hacker can simple see the calls and http requests when our front-end app is using that api action to create a new user (using a web debugger like fiddler) and can find the url to that action so simple ! like this POST ~/api/user/create
and then he/she can send thousands of requests to create user, users needs to be verified but still he/she is adding a lot of junk users in our database and puts a lot of pressure on our servers.
So the question is how do we handle this? Allow this only on our website or what?
Thanks
You can use CAPTCHA to verify that's a real user.
I want to write a google chrome extension, that should make a request to my website to send and get some data, so, actually I should do an ajax request like it is written here https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/xhr.html
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("GET", "http://api.example.com/data.json", true);
I wanted ask if there is a way to somehow secure the code or prevent others from using my api, because actually the other users can see the source code of the extension when they install it and so use my api without me being aware of it.
EDIT:
If I need to make some sort of authentication, than how can I authenticate the user before making the ajax call ? for authentication I will need to send a request to my server , but for that I should send , e.g. username and password, that should be saved somewhere in the extension's files, which, in fact, can be seen by the users, when they install the extension.
Thanks
Don't trust the browser, take steps to authenticate the user instead. So, in this case, you could require that YOU enter in a password that is used to communicate with your server.
Your Google extension would simple require you to enter in a password before it attempts to use AJAX to communicate with your server.
Be aware that you should build in means of protecting yourself from brute-force attacks. So, do things like lock everything down if there are more than some small number of wrong passwords, etc.
You could also consider using the password to simply decrypt the destination of the XHR, but if you go this route, you should store this very carefully, because this will be brute-forceable offline.
EDIT
Trying to lock down an API so that only a single application can use it is just not practical nor technically possible, so you're only hope of doing this is to authenticate the user using the API, regardless of the accessing software he is using. You could have the user sign an agreement that legally limits them to only your extension, but I suspect this will go largely unenforceable and will consume your time tracking abusers down.
If you don't want unauthorized people even knowing where the API is, you could perform authentication using an out-of-band mechanism: over the telephone, email, SMS, or simply, another API that will grant the user a password or token that requests to your API must be accompanied with.
During this out-of-band process, you could also grant the user, a unique URI (the API access point) that is only valid per authenticated session (https://api.totally-cool-extension.com/api/ijyeDvB5dYvSiWG97OLuTAoNWwbhuZ0/, for example). Any requests to your server on OTHER URIs simply won't work. However, this isn't theoretically much different than using the same API access point, and having a good password. It just changes the number of places in your architecture that will be performing authentication and/or authorization checks.
<aside>My vote would be to reduce the number of authorization/authentication points to as few as possible so that you can spend more time on getting that one place correct rather than having multiple places and possibly multiple logic flaws or other things that could lead to vulnerabilities.</aside>
You could also explore using Public Key Infrastructure and/or one-time passwords schemes or device-based token generators, etc., but in the end, you'll be allowing authenticated and authorized users to use your API. And, thanks to the Internet, this will not remain an undisclosed URI for long.
And, more importantly, it will not prevent someone from using the data on their own. Even with all these measures in place, it would be trivial for an authorized user to collect this data as it is being streamed to your extension. Or, if you employ point-to-point encryption, they could screen-scrap or use some form of JS introspection on your very code or even extract the data from their computer's memory.
I know you were looking for a silver bullet here, but it doesn't exist.
I think you are doing it wrong. You should never trust what's going on on internet users PC's. Never!
Move the line of trust one step inward, make your API public and then design the security where you have perfect control - server side.
I could not get correct aspect of your use case
Few Points:
Your extension code is always traceable( Any one who has installed extension can view the code)
If you are looking for security through complicated or obfuscated coding patterns you end up slow down of understanding process not the whole.
If your target is to ensure users who install your extension should be able to access and inert all other users( Who have gained illegal access or downloaded and edited code) have a session shared key per installation.
Please explain further use case so i can help you better.