I have this argument with a co-worker while trying to authenticate a user with login API, what status code is best returned, 404 or 401, in a scenario the user doesn't exist, which still means the user is not authorized.
Are you doing a GET request on resource with a uri that identifies the user? 404 makes sense for this.
Are you doing a POST request on some /login endpoint, and the user doesn't exist? 401 might make more sense for this, 409 or 400 too, but I don't think 404 makes sense to me.
If it's a POST request to something called /login, and I do get a 404, this suggests to me that I have the endpoint wrong, it doesn't suggest to me that the information in the request body was wrong.
Related
When I googled NotBeforeError JWT Error, it says that it is an error that occurs when you try to use the issued token while it has not yet been activated.
When you have an inactive token, you do not have permission to access a specific resource, so I thought it might be 403.
If the issued token has not been activated yet, it will not pass authentication, so I think that 400 or other codes may be more suitable than 403.
I would say it is a 401 error. I use 401 for situations where the request does not have a valid credential. In your case, there is no valid token. I reserve 403 for situations where there is a valid token in the request, but it doesn't have the required permissions.
The difference is in how the client should react to these errors:
When you get a 401 it is information to the client that the user needs to authenticate. The reason why is not relevant — maybe the token has expired, maybe there's no token, or maybe it violates nbf.
When you get a 403 it is information that the user needs to present stronger credentials. Usually in this case, reauthenticating won't help and the user needs other ways of fixing the problem.
I have some code that looks at "Basic Authorization" requests from many different sites.
I want to know if I can make the following assumptions:
A successful response (credentials are correct) will always have response code 200 OK
A failed response (incorrect credentials) will always have response code 401 Unauthorized
Are the above fair assumptions, or is the success/fail conditions configurable per site?
No, there are other possible response codes.
According to the official spec, there can also be the error code 407.
Also, on MDN:
If a (proxy) server receives invalid credentials, it should respond with a 401 Unauthorized or with a 407 Proxy Authentication Required, and the user may send a new request or replace the Authorization header field.
If a (proxy) server receives valid credentials that are inadequate to access a given resource, the server should respond with the 403 Forbidden status code. Unlike 401 Unauthorized or 407 Proxy Authentication Required, authentication is impossible for this user and browsers will not propose a new attempt.
In all cases, the server may prefer returning a 404 Not Found status code, to hide the existence of the page to a user without adequate privileges or not correctly authenticated.
Besides that, I'm quite sure that an actual successful attempt will result in status code 200.
I'm working with an API and recently something went wrong with the authentication.
The API uses jwt authentication, and when POSTing the client jwt request, instead of getting back an auth jwt, I'm getting a 401 (final) status code (or 404, depending on the library I use to handle requests...), but I'm also getting 407 and 200 when setting a verbose traceback?
I'm pretty new to handling HTTP requests so I'm curious how exactly that might be happening, where are those additional two status codes coming from?
Should be to the request to resource in REST API that belongs to another account returned HTTP 404 status code or HTTP 200 with an empty string?
You may be looking for 403 Forbidden. This is for a case when the resource is present, but the (possibly) logged in user does not have permission to get.
The 404 Not Found should only be used if the resource is not present, meaning other permissions would not help.
200 OK should only be given if the request completed successfully, the client got a valid representation of the resource.
Agree with #Robert Bräutigam that HTTP 403 seems most appropriate.
However, consider a URL like:
/api/some-user-user-id/profile
If you return 403 for existing users and 404 for non-existent users - you could be enabling outsiders to discover user ids.
This may or may not be a problem.
I'm writing a REST-ish API service the provides the ability to interact with the end user's data in other 3rd party services (themselves REST APIs) via OAuth. A common example might be publishing data from my service to a third-party service such as Facebook or Twitter.
Suppose, for example, I perform an OAuth dance with the end user and Facebook, resulting in some short-term access token that my service can use to interact with the user's Facebook account. If that access token expires and the user attempts to use my service to publish to Facebook, what sort of error do I return to the user?
401 doesn't seem quite right to me; it seems that 401 would apply to the user's auth state with MY service. 403 seems much more appropriate, but also quite generic.
401 is the way to go. Two excerpts from the RFC2616 which defines the HTTP protocol:
Section 10.4.2 (about 401):
If the request already included Authorization credentials, then the 401
response indicates that authorization has been refused for those
credentials.
This seems to be appropriate for expired tokens. There are authentication credentials, but they're refused, so the user agent must re-authenticate.
Section 10.4.4 (about 403):
The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.
Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.
This should be used when the resource can't be accessed despite the user credentials. Could be a website/API that works only on US being hit by a asian IP or a webpage that has been declared harmful and was deactivated (so the content WAS found, but the server is denying serving it).
On OAuth2, the recommended workflow depends on how the token is being passed. If passed by the Authorization header, the server may return a 401. When passed via query string parameter, the most appropriate response is a 400 Bad Request (unfortunately, the most generic one HTTP has). This is defined by section 5.2 of the OAuth2 spec https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-26
There's nothing wrong with being generic, and it sounds like a 403 status would be relevant - there is nothing stopping you from providing a more human readable version that elaborates in a bit more detail why.
I think the following is a comprehensive list if you have some level of ambition when it comes to error responses.
400 Bad Request
For requests that are malformed, for example if a parameter requires an int between 0-9 and 11 has been sent. You can return this, and in the response body specify parameter x requires a value between 0 and 9
401 Unauthorized
Used only for authorization issues. The signature may be wrong, the nonce may have been used before, the timestamp that was sent is not within an acceptable time window, again, use the response body to specify more exactly why you respond with this. For the sake of clarify use this only for OAuth related errors.
403 Forbidden
Expressly to signify that an operation that is well formed, and authorized, is not possible at all (either right now, or ever). Take for example if a resource has been locked for editing by another user: use the response body to say something along the lines of Another person is editing this right now, you'll have to wait mmkay?.
403 Forbidden can also have to do with trying to reach resources. Say for example that a user has access to a resource /resource/101212/properties.json but not to /resource/999/properties.json, then you can simply state: Forbidden due to access rights in the response body.
404 Not Found
The requested resource does not exist. Or the URL simply does not successfully map to an API in your service. Specify in response body.
405 Method Not Allowed
This is to represent that the API can not be called with for example GET but another method must be used. When this is returned also you MUST return the extra response header Allow: POST, PUT, etc.