Our system architecture is like an admin can assign permissions on the user level. we are using JWT token for authorization, previously we use roles, and roles are added in payload on sever side we check that role and allow/disallow accordingly without hitting the database. But when we add permissions in the JWT token its payload is too heavy and affects the network traffic.
So my question is what is the best practice to deal with user base permissions in JWT token.
I don't think there is a "best practice" for this as it doesn't sound advisable to store a user's permissions in a JWT, because of the following:
Since a JWT must contain all the information necessary to execute a request, if at any given time a user has permissions removed, he will continue to have them for a period of time as long as his JWT has not expired. That is, using the approach you describe, adding or removing permissions from a user is not an effect that occurs immediately, so it is necessary to develop mechanisms so that the effect of those changes is immediate. Additionally, I consider that a user's permissions can be classified as sensitive information, and it is not recommended to store sensitive information in a JWT (since anyone can see it).
If you want to continue doing that, you can assign identifiers to permissions (such as small numbers) and store those identifiers and permissions in your server's RAM (for example, using a dictionary or hash table). Finally, in the JWT you only have to store the identifiers of the permissions, thus saving as much space as possible. This way there is no need to hit the database.
You really have two options if you are using JWTs and not some sort of session-based old framework.
You store permissions in the JWT. As pointed out there are 2 main issues with this. Firstly it becomes stale, possibly quickly. Secondly this potentially bloats the JWT depending on how many permissions you have in your application. Also, for multitenant applications you now make it significantly more awkward to switch between tenants on the fly. Because now you need to reissue a token (somehow force a logout/login) whenever the user changes tenants.
You handle permissions through a network call to a server (probably the login server) which remotely handles authorization. This adds overhead but keeps things responsive. The only downside is really network traffic. It may sound like there's ways around this but there really isn't and people have accepted the large amount of added traffic.
IMO do what is the least you need. There are bandaids for JWT staleness such as short refresh timers. There are also ways to work with bloated JWTs such as strings created from enum flags. If you do not need immediate refreshing of permissions or lots of them there is nothing wrong from a practicality standpoint of putting authorization data in the JWT.
If the above does not apply, then you need to setup a network call system to handle the authorization. Ideally this is faster/leaner than http network calls.
As an example I use gRPC calls. Example working repository you can see/run is at https://github.com/Perustaja/PermissionServerDemo
Related
I have a set of APIs purely for my own app, so I just have a simple API to create access token, when user provided the email and password
/api/access_token (return access_token when email and password matched)
The access_token was saved and matched against in the database sessions table with the expiry field, for now, the expiry is one week, so user need to re-login after one week.
So far it worked fine, but if I want to have the remember me functions as those Facebook / Twitter app, which mean user don't need to re-login so often, which I assume they are using something like the OAuth refresh access tokens approach.
Since I am not using those OAuth stuffs, given my current design and setup, what would be the simplest and secure way to achieve the same functionalities?
You have a few options to choose from, I'll try provide an overview. There is a significant difference depending on whether the client is a browser or a mobile app.
First, for browsers, plain old session tokens are generally more secure than JWT or other structured tokens. If your requirements don't force you to store stuff on or flow stuff through the client, then don't.
The most secure option for a browser client (single page javascript app or plain old rendered app) is the following:
When the user hits the login endpoint with their username and password, the endpoint creates a random session id, and stores it in a database.
The server sends back the session token as a httpOnly cookie, thus it protects it from potential XSS.
The client then automatically includes the session token in all subsequent requests.
Additional data can be stored server-side for the session.
This above is basically plain old stateful session management. The length of such a session should be limited, but if your requirements and threat model allows, you can make this a very long session, like months even if you want, but be aware of the associated risk. These tokens can be inspected in the browser and stolen from a user if not else then by physical access to the client, so a very long expiry has its risks.
Note that mobile apps can pretty much just do the same. The difference is that mobile apps do have a way to store secrets more securely on current mobile platforms. As the storage is protected by user login, and also segregated by app, a session id stored correctly in a mobile app has a lot less chance to be compromised, meaning a longer expiry presents lower risk than in case of a plain browser.
You can also implement a refresh token. However, the point in refresh tokens is that you want to store them in a different way than the other token. If they are stored the same way, a refresh token provides very little benefit (sure, it won't be sent with every request, but that's not where it will get compromised anyway, TLS / HTTPS is secure for transport). In case of OAuth / OpenID, the authentication server can for example set the refresh token on its own origin (like login.example.com), and then forward the user to the app with an authorization code for example, which can be exchanged by the application (service provider) for an access token, that is set for the application domain (like app.example.com). This way, the two tokens have different access models, a compromised app will not leak the refresh token, even if the current access token is leaked, and the access token can be refreshed relatively seamlessly.
If you don't have a separate login endpoint, all this doesn't make a lot of sense, except in one very specific case. Thinking about browser clients, you can set a refresh token in a httpOnly cookie, so it's protected from XSS, and you can store an access token in something like localStorage. However, why would you do this? Pretty much the only reason you would do this is if you need to send the access token to some other origin, which is the whole point in OAuth and OpenID.
You could also argue that statelessness is a benefit of such tokens. In reality, the vast majority of services don't actually benefit from statelessness, but it makes some features technically impossible (like for example forcing logout, as in terminating existing user sessions - for that, you would have to store and check revoked tokens, which is not stateless at all).
Ok so to provide "remember me" as in auto-login, you basically have two options. You can either just make your sessions very long (like months, years, forever), which is more ok for mobile apps as they can store the token more securely than a browser, or you can implement some kind of a refresh mechanism. As discussed above, this only makes sense if the refresh token is stored and accessed differently than the session token.
In case of a browser app with a single origin (no auth/login service), this is not really possible, there is no real separation, and a refresh token doesn't make a lot of sense. If you want an auth service, you should be looking into OpenID Connect (OIDC).
For a mobile app, what you could do is store a refresh token in secure storage, and use access tokens from the localStorage of something like a webview, but unless there are very specific requirements, this would likely not be worth the complexity, as you could just store a longer lived session token in the secure storage.
As for remember me, you can just implement it in a way that users that choose to be remembered will have a sessino token with a longer expiry - as you already store expiry for each token in your database, everything is already set up for that, and in many usecases this is fine. There is some additional risk for users that choose this, but there is also some additional benefit in terms of convenience - it's always a compromise.
What you can consider doing to make such very long sessions more secure is check and store some kind of a device fingerprint (there are Javascript libs for this). If you have a very long lived session, but only valid for a specific fingerprint (ie. it only works from the same device), that mitigates the risk somewhat. However, almost everything that is used for a device fingerprint can be spoofed by an attacker, but it still makes it significantly harder for an attacker to steal a session, and you can have approrpiate monitoring in place for attempts. There will be UX considerations too, like the fingerprint might change with browser/app updates and so on, but it's still worth it sometimes.
Another new-ish feature you could consider is WebAuthn and Passkey, for passwordless authentication. These basically provide device authentication, a key will be seamlessly generated for the user on the specific device, and that will be used for logging in. UX is now getting better, but there are still challenges. The way device authentication translates into user authentication is that the key is associated with the user session (the user "unlocks" the keystore, ie. decrypts the stored keys upon login, with their login credentials). This can also provide "remember me" (seamless auto-login), but in my experience the technology is not fully ready yet, though it's getting there.
While I fully agree with the comments above, I would like to create a clear solution in the minds of other readers by giving a clear and directly understandable concrete answer to your problem.
Let's take an example for JWT;
RefreshToken is the structure that will be activated when the AccessToken expires and will complete the Authentication phase without the need for login. The logic is as follows: AccessToken has a very short lifespan compared to RefreshToken. This time is up to you. The purpose is this: AccessToken is destroyed in short time intervals so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone. However, for this reason, the need to login to the system again arises. To make it easier to login again; When you take the previous AccessToken, you will take another token (RefreshToken) that can be used for a longer period of time and keep it in your pocket. The part I call your pocket depends on the technology you use. For example, you can also keep it in the browser. Keeping it in a browser is not an ideal method (It would be DB, file, cache what you use), because it can create a security vulnerability when someone has access for browsers. So where to keep it depends on the situation and you decide, but; RefreshToken will be activated when AccessToken expires on your client Login functionality.
It has become customary to set a default period of 100 days for RefreshToken. however, this time is up to you, depending on your application business preference.
I found a very clear example when I googled, you can check it below.
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/jwt-authentication-with-refresh-tokens-in-net-6-0/
You can use the same functionality on your serverside code for all your clients (mobile or web not important)
What is the advantage of using JWTs over sessions in situations like authentication?
Is it used as a standalone approach or is it used in the session?
JWT doesn't have a benefit over using "sessions" per se. JWTs provide a means of maintaining session state on the client instead of doing it on the server.
What people often mean when asking this is "What are the benefits of using JWTs over using Server-side sessions".
With server-side sessions, you will either have to store the session identifier in a database, or else keep it in memory and make sure that the client always hits the same server. Both of these have drawbacks. In the case of the database (or other centralised storage), this becomes a bottleneck and a thing to maintain - essentially an extra query to be done with every request.
With an in-memory solution, you limit your horizontal scaling, and sessions will be affected by network issues (clients roaming between Wifi and mobile data, servers rebooting, etc).
Moving the session to the client means that you remove the dependency on a server-side session, but it imposes its own set of challenges.
Storing the token securely.
Transporting it securely.
JWT sessions can sometimes be hard to invalidate.
Trusting the client's claim.
These issues are shared by JWTs and other client-side session mechanisms alike.
JWT, in particular, addresses the last of these. It may help to understand what a JWT is:
It is a bit of information. For user sessions, you could include the username and the time when the token expires. But it could conceivably be anything, even the session ID or the user's entire profile (please don't do that though).
It has got a secure signature that prevents malicious parties from generating fake tokens (you need access to the server's private key to sign them and you can verify that they were not modified after they were signed).
You send them with every request, just like a cookie or Authorization Header would be sent. In fact, they are commonly sent in the HTTP Authorization header but using a cookie is fine too.
The token is signed and so the server can verify its origin. We will assume that the server trusts its own ability to sign securely (you should use a standard library: don't try to do it yourself, and secure the server properly).
On the issue with securely transporting the token, the answer is commonly to send it via an encrypted channel, usually httpS.
Regarding securely storing the token in the client, you need to ensure that the bad guys can't get to it. This (mostly) means preventing JS from bad web sites from reading the token to send it back to them. This is mitigated using the same strategies used to mitigate other kinds of XSS attacks.
If you have a need to invalidate JWTs, there are definitely ways this can be achieved. Storing a per-user epoch for only users who have requested to have their "other sessions terminated" is a very efficient method that will probably be good enough. If an application needs per-session invalidation, then a session ID can be maintained in the same way and the "killed tokens" table can still be maintained to be much smaller than the full user table (you only need to retain records newer than the longest allowed token lifetime). So the ability to invalidate the token partially negates the benefit of client-side sessions in that you would have to maintain this session killed state. This will more than likely be a much smaller table than the original session state table, so the lookups are still more efficient though.
One other benefit of using JWT tokens is that it is reasonably easy to implement using libraries available in probably every language you can expect to have it. It is also completely divorced from your initial user authentication scheme - if you move to a fingerprint-based system, you do not need to make any changes to the session management scheme.
A more subtle benefit: Because the JWT can carry "information" and this can be accessed by the client, you can now start doing some smart things. For example, remind the user that their session will be expiring a few days before they are logged out, giving them the option to re-authenticate, based on the expiry date in the token. Whatever you can imagine.
So in short: JWTs answers some of the questions and shortcomings of other session techniques.
"Cheaper" authentication because you can eliminate a DB round trip (or at least have a much smaller table to query!), which in turns enable horizontal scalability.
Tamper-proof client-side claims.
While JWTs does not answer the other issues like secure storage or transport, it does not introduce any new security issues.
A lot of negativity exists around JWTs, but if you implement the same security that you would for other types of authentication, you will be fine.
One final note: It is also not Cookies vs Tokens. Cookies is a mechanism for storing and transporting bits of information and can be used to store and transport JWT tokens too.
The short answer is: None.
A longer version is:
I implemented JWTs for session management after reading this recommendation in the GraphQL docs:
If you aren't familiar with any of these authentication mechanisms, we
recommend using express-jwt because it's simple without sacrificing
any future flexibility.
Implementation was indeed simple as it only added a little bit of complexity. After a while however, I (like you) started wondering what the benefits were. It turns out there are very few (or possibly none) for JWT as far as session management goes, as this blog post explains in detail:
Stop using JWT for sessions
I had a similar question choosing between JWT and token + cache for user authentication.
After reading these articles, it's clear to me the benefits JWT promises do not outpace the problems it brings. So token + cache(Redis/Memcached) is the way to go for me.
Auth Headers vs JWT vs Sessions — How to Choose the Right Auth Technique for APIs
Authentication Techniques for APIs
Stop using jwt for sessions
My two cents, which on the way add some contrast to joepie91's famous blog post.
Considering that today's (and tomorrow's) applications are (mostly) cloud native
There's an economic benefit to Stateless JWT Authentication,
which scales as the application scales:
Cloud applications incur cost with every passing second.
This cost is reduced when users no longer have to authenticate "against" a session store.
Detailed below are some factors which add to the cost of an application when not using JWT:
Database Server
Running a session store 24/7 costs money.
You can not get away with local storage / memory based solutions in the world of K8S, as pods are ephemeral.
Sticky sessions will not fare well for the exact same reason.
Storage
Storing data costs money. storing data in a SSD costs even more.
Session related operations need to be resolved quickly, so an optical drive is not an option.
I/O
Some cloud providers charge money for Disc related I/O.
Download
Circa 2022, it is safe to assume that the API and session store are separate server instances.
Some cloud providers charge for downloading information from one instance to another.
Scaling the session store
This affects all aforementioned factors.
Yet another slightly different perspective that may be useful if you are on AWS.
We had implemented PHP5.x session storage on AWS ElastiCache to centralise session storage across multiple servers.
It worked perfected until we moved to PHP7. It was difficult to configure for PHP7 and we were plagued with intermittent issues where it seemed that the session "failed/mismatched/got a bit confused" for a particular user and then they could not log in on that device until the old session expired.
We moved to using DynamoDb to store the session and no more issues. It is marginally slower but only noticeable at login (session storage) stage.
While this was going on, we implemented AWS cognito to replace our authentication and started to use the API-Gateway to deliver content via lambda python functions.
We use the PHP SDK to authenticate with Cognito and then we store the JWT in a cookie but still also use the PHP session to keep our legacy code working.
Now we have two stacks and the best of both worlds: PHP7 does it's bit and gets the main content to the user (very quickly). Then JS takes over and provides additional content using the JWT.
What I think is great about JWT is the fact that it can be passed around between these two stacks and used to authenticate the user in both cases.
Now we are wondering if it is worthwhile taking the plunge and switching over to the new JWT system entirely?
In PHP, we still use our legacy session but we also pass the token to cognito to authenticate it. It's a bit of extra security that is probably not necessary but it gives a warm cozy feeling. Then again, there are costs and maintenance with dynamoDb that could be saved.
In session authentication (or stateful authentication) you can store more data than token. But you have to store the session object somewhere and this makes the authentication centralized. Also, you need to have extra memory to store the sessions and this will give extra work to manage this memory. If your application grows, now you have to implement different designs based on your needs, implementing a session cache service, and storing the session on web application or database.
In Jwt or in general Stateless authentication, you do not store anything. You send the token with the request header. This makes it decentralized authentication. The drawback of this authentication is token revocation. Each token has an expiry time and if your token is stolen, it will be valid till it expires. You have to implement logic to minimize the risk.
A server provides a JWT to the client during authentication. That JWT contains information which is then later used by the server. For example, JWT may contain permissions array with the list of all permissions granted to a specific user.
Is it considered bad practice, if client parses the JWT and uses the permissions information contained within it? Is it better for client to make additional call to server (GET /permissions, for example) and behave according to that response?
This will strongly depend on a lot of small details; I'll try not to forget anything, but in theory it should be fine to do so and if certain conditions are met I would not consider it a bad practice.
OAuth2 states that access tokens should be opaque to clients, but JWT is just a token format (Learn JSON Web Tokens) and it's usage in other circumstances does not imply the same rules as OAuth2.
Also note that getting the information from an additional request has the same end result with the additional overhead of one more call. There would be a slight benefit if permissions are very volatile given you could repeat the calls.
However, the important part is more focused on what you mean by the client and how would the client use that information so I'll elaborate on this.
Assumptions:
the client you mention can be deployed as browser-based application (SPA's), native application or be some server-side component acting as a client.
both the server and client are controlled by the same entity.
the client and server components can be seen as a single application, that is, for an end-user the fact there's client and server components makes no difference; they use them as a whole.
Explanation
In this situation the token issued by the server is just a way for the client to later access protected resources without requiring explicit user authentication again; it's a mechanism to maintain a session between the two components.
Given the same entity controls both the client and server, it's acceptable to treat the received token as a whitebox instead of a blackbox. The client can then interpret the information in the token and take advantage of it to provide a better experience for the end-user. However, this implies that the server will need to continue to validate the token and it's permissions accordingly; any interpretation of the data by the client is purely to provide optional functionality.
Furthermore, for clients deployed to hostile environments like it would be the case for a SPA application the decisions taken by looking into the data must only result in purely aesthetic decisions, as the user could fake the permissions data. For example, you could use it to conditionally hide/disable some user interface just so that the user wouldn't have to click it to find out it wasn't allowed to do so.
A good analogy would be Javascript based input validation in web forms; you should do it for better user experience, but the server will need to do it again because the user can bypass the Javascript validation.
I'm looking at building a set of services that require an auth system but ideally I'd want them to be able validate these tokens without hitting a central auth service to check for every request.
Are there any known ways of doing this, better than something like a signed expiry-stamped permission enumeration?
JWT should suit you well, but it is actually a singed (or also encrypted if you need), expire-stamped list of data.
Keep in mind that there is no way to revoke (logout) such stateless tokens, what, depending on situation, might be a non-issue or a complicated problem to solve.
I have started to design a RESTful API and I'm thinking about how to handle authentication. I want to use some kind of authentication token but I can't use OAuth o similar infrastructures so I have to handle it myself.
One of the requirements for this API is that it must have good performance, enough to handle a high volume of requests before there is the need to scale; my concern is how to make on each request the time needed to verify the token (integrity, expiration, IP Address, etc...) as little as possibile.
I suppose the token should some kind of hash and not an encrypted string containing the user information because the decryption time would be to heavy.
I've read that I could store the tokens in an in-memory hashtable where the key is the token and the value is the user info needed to process the request, but how can I make this work in a clustered environment where there will be an hashtable on each "node"?
Should I put tokens on a DB table an hit the DB every time also Handling manually the retention of expired tickets?
Probably it's not that important for the question but I'm using Spring MVC for the RESTfull API.
Thanks in advance.
I solved my problem by using both an in-memory cache and a db cache. Here is a summary of my solution that may help anyone with the same task.
the user logs in and in that moment a unique key is generated and sent back to the user.
that login token (which is basically a GUID with some processing) is also store in a db table with additional info like exipiration and with the user's info and roles. the same pieces of information are also store in memory (google guava hashtable where the token is the key)
the token must be passed along with every api call in the authorization token as #ipa suggested
the server code checks if the token is in its memory cache the user info are already available otherwise (e.g. the api call is done on another node in the cluster) the token is search in the token db
once the token is found you can check expiration, roles, etc...
This grants a good level of performance and security, the token can be generated with any arbitrary algorithm even a relative slow one since you don't have to recalculate it on every api call. Also this works with a stateless service wich can be scaled up horizontally.
I assume you use https and therefore all the traffic is encrypted. I'd suggest one of the following principles.
Basic Authentication
You can add the credentials in the Authorization header of the request. This credentials are encoded with Base64 (see below). This credentials could be sent on every request and then checked with your DB. To get this faster and less IO intensive you can still use a cache. Once I implemented an API like this without a cache and was able to handle thousands of requests per second.
Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==
Authorization Token
There are different ways to implement your idea with a token. A common one is that every API user has his own token usually called api key which never expires. Another one is that you first have to authorize (Basic Authentication) and then get a token back which expires. This one is then used as api key for a certain time.
Either way you have to decide whether to use a cache or not. I would keep it simple and go for basic authentication and check the db every time. Almost every framework has very good support for this approach because it's simple http. If this causes performance issues (I'd recommend performance tests anyway) try to add the table with your credentials to the JPA cache. If you want to implement something with expiring tokens have a look at Infinispan.
You can store token in Redis. If you are going to store it in DB, make sure you optimise server (if you are managing it) for read operations. I have couple of implementation where folks have used key value store as well. Hashtable is also good idea.