I am managing performing a login and the login state using Vuex. It is a standard procedure of:
User submits their login details on a form
The form dispatches a Vuex action to make an axios API call to a Node/Express endpoint /api/login with the credentials
The response from the API if successful will send back the user's data which is stored in the state.user object through a setUser mutation. A flag of state.user.isLoggedIn is also set to true.
A JWT access token is sent to the user's browser and stored in a secure cookie to use over and over again until it expires. If it expires, a refresh token is used to generate a new JWT access token.
The site's header displays the user's login information .e.g name
The above all works as expected. However if the user refreshes their browser, then Vuex state gets emptied and the site header no longer shows the user information. To overcome this I stored state.user into localStorage in the browser as persisted data and repopulate the Vuex store using the data in localStorage on page refresh. If the user logs out, the localStorage is cleared.
There are many routes that require checking if the user is logged in. I cannot rely on localStorage because it can be manipulated by the user. If the user deletes their cookies which contains a JWT, then localStorage is not being emptied and the site header still displays their log-in information. Therefore I need to do an API call on almost every page to check if the user is logged in and if not then to delete the localStorage as well.
My question is:
Where do I perform a log-in check every time a page/view is accessed? Is it whenever the Vue app is mounted or within vue-router using the beforeEach navigation guard?
If I use beforeEach in vue-router, is it going to crash the site by making an API call to /api/login every time a user changes route? Is it normal practice to do this on every route?
Are there any other alternative patterns to keeping track of if the user is logged in or not?
Application decisions like this tend to be subjective because every application is different, with different requirements and different architectures. It sounds like this is a single page application, so I'll go from there.
First, the fact that your JWT is set up and working is great - that can be a lot of hard work, so be proud that you made it that far.
If your application has certain pages that are accessible without first being logged in (like a login page, or an access denied page, etc.), then you have to consider that in the design as well. In this case, a beforeEach route guard is the perfect solution to keep a route from loading or to catch those not-logged-in users before they attempt to request content that will likely just give them an error.
You probably shouldn't have to make an API call to the server each time the user navigates to a new page. That would probably be a little slow. Because your application uses JWT, complete with refresh tokens, you should be able to rely on them, so that if a user is logged in, they will continue to be logged in until they close their browser and walk away.
This is why you should not use localStorage. When a tab closes or even after a reboot, the user will still appear to be logged in. Instead of using localStorage, use sessionStorage - Helpful MDN link.
Now, the login event to retrieve the user object should only happen once per browser tab, but stay active during the visit.
I wonder why you don't just request a new user object from the server when the browser is refreshed. It's not strange to force a re-check to the server for a full page load. Doing that would mean you wouldn't have to use anything outside of Vuex to store the user's state
Next, is there a way to check the validity of their JWT during the navigation event? Depending on the way you handle the JWT, you may have access to it, and can possibly decode it (like through the oidc-client-js library), and that way determine for yourself if the token is expired. However, if the token is expired, your token refresh system may just refresh it and not tell you about it.
You can also watch your HTTP requests and look out for 401 or 403 responses (however your back-end handles logged-out users), and direct the user back to the login screen if you see one of those. You can use Axios' global interceptors to catch them, or do it yourself if you centralized the location from where Axios is called.
Overall, you're on your way, and clearly have a good grasp on this. Great progress so far, having done probably 90% of the heavy lifting already.
Related
Basically,
I have SPA app with JWT authentication. Now my question is, there is a page that has follow button, so on the first load of page, I need to know if user is logged in or not, so I can disable/enable button.
Approach 1: Before page load send access token and if it is successful render like user is logged in, if it fails render like user is logged out
Approach 2: When user is logged in, keep that state in LocalStorage and just check local storage and render page from that
Is it correct to just keep state of logged in user in LocalStorage? I think that is where you should store ID token (if you use them) that only has user profile information?
Of course I will check access token on each request and from response I can change state in LocalStorage. Problem is that on initial load of page, should I check access token server-side before rendering?
If I keep state in LocalStorage than that user will be logged in on that device basically indefinitely, until he clicks "log out" or tokens fail?
Can anybody see potential problems with keeping state in LocalStorage?
It's OK to keep this information in the local storage. I mean, you can keep a variable there, that will just tell you "this user is logged in as userX". You can then safely utilize this information to display information on your page (e.g. Hi userX!). Even if someone manages to steal that information, it doesn't give them much information.
As you said, you will have to check the credentials on every request anyway (access token, session cookie, etc.), so it's not an issue to have this non-sensitive data in the local storage.
You can of course go with approach 1, but in my opinion, it's just adding unnecessary traffic.
If it bugs you that it will seem that the user is logged in for ever, then you can also persist some TTL in the local storage, and after that TTL treat the user as logged out.
I've tried following the sample code on the passport-saml site, and the advanced tutorial on the react-admin site for OAuth, but haven't been able to figure out what I need to do with the authProvider to get an authenticated session available in react-admin using SAML.
I can currently log into my app through OneLogin (clicking on the app in the panel) and write out the user's information (inside the passport.serializeUser function), so I know that piece is working, but I'm not sure how to get that information over to the authProvider.
The login function on authProvider is hit when you submit the form, so if I could replicate what OneLogin is sending over when I click on the app, I could probably make that call in authProvider.login and make a custom login page that submits on load rather than waiting for a submit, but that doesn't seem intentional.
What am I missing here, and is there a better option that I'm not considering?
I ended up writing a getUser function on the server and using the authProvider.login function to hit that endpoint, parse the user data off of the response, and store it in localStorage. Then logout removes the user from localStorage, and checkAuth just gets the user from localStorage.
This is working for my purposes at the moment, although eventually I will want to expire the users. Hope this helps anyone else trying to hook up OneLogin with React-admin.
I would like to check the user is login or not.
At the first time to develope this function, I supposed to use django is_authenticated value but there were many problem with structure with vue and django.
So now I use with crsftoken, The crsftoken is saved in cookie.
So when I click logout button, I detroy crsftoken in document cookie.
And after login, the crsftoken is added to cookie.
Therefore I can check whether the user login or not
But I am considering is it really OK with removing just while logout user.
I've been using the localStorage to store the JWT token and do the authentication, it works fine because the backend is protected, what is not, are the front end pages in Vue.js and its components, anyone can create a false token in the browser and access the pages, the panel menu, but the data is not loaded because the token is invalidated by the backend. Did you realize that the user will be able to navigate the pages normally? How can I avoid this? Only allowing back-end validated users to navigate the site.
I'm using Vuex and I can not think of a solution. The isLogged state receives the localStorage token, so the user can easily circumvent the browser.
I thought of a solution, do not judge me. Before entering each route, send a request to the back end to check the token, if false, remove the localStorage, would this be a good one?
I'd say your solution is a pretty decent one to start with, but I think you can improve it a bit.
Because you're using VueX, what you could do is store the user (or some other variable) in the Vuex Store. Then before each route you can check if the Store has a user.
If the Store doesn't have a user, check if the localStorage has a token. If there is no token, then the user is not authorised to go to the route.
If the localStorage does have a token, call the back-end and check if the token is valid. If the token is valid, store the user in the Vuex Store and continue. If the token is not valid, than the user is not authorised to go to the route.
This will prevent you from creating unnecessary calls to the back-end whilst still having the validation.
Or you could for example in your store state have a user object that has something like 'userRole' this way you could check for Authentication/Token/Role.
I need to log in a user into Dropbox using Core API. Then remember his/her access token and allow logging in with another credentials (looks like a second Dropbox user). But when I make request to https://www.dropbox.com/1/oauth2/authorize it automatically ends up with redirect page with first user's access token giving no chance to enter another credentials. I know I can revoke first access token but then I will not be able to silently come back to first user.
Does anyone know is the possible to implement?
You can set the force_reapprove parameter for the /authorize page to true to prevent the automatic redirect:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#oa2-authorize
Note that the /authorize page is hosted on www.dropbox.com though, so the user will get their www.dropbox.com session, even if force_reapprove=true is set. With that parameter set though, the user has the opportunity to switch accounts, using the dropdown in the upper right of the page, before authorizing the app.
If that's not sufficient for whatever reason, you can try to end the user's www.dropbox.com. The simplest way is to direct them to www.dropbox.com/logout first. Be sure to make it clear to the user what is happening though.
Or, if you control the entire browser, e.g., if it's an embedded web view in your app, you can clear the browser's cookies, which will clear the session, forcing users to log in again.