I have two questions, really. I'm learning authorization in ASP.NET Core using the OAuth scheme for my company's authority. The thing is, on the final (3rd) leg, requesting a token, I need to authenticate the client (client id/client secret) using basic authentication (as per RFC 6749/2.3.1) but from what I have seen from the traffic client credentials are sent in the body instead.
I have a very hard time finding good documentation on the AuthenticstionBuilder.AddOAuth extension method so my first question is for tips where I might find a proper walkthrough that explains how to use the options and the four events supported? What I have found is people explaining how to set it up for this or that authority (such as GitHub, Facebook etc.) but none explains how the scheme implementation is designed. As a last resort I will have to check out the source code but if anyone can provide some links to a good explanatory walkthrough I would really appreciate it.
My second question is if there is a way to use Basic Auth for obtaining the token, as I describe above? I assumed there would have been an event where I could do that but my experiments indicates the three available events aren't suited for this.
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I have a JSON REST API written in Symfony 2.7, and I want to authenticate & authorize users. This is my first time doing this, so I have some doubts/questions.
For that, I thought several methods:
User & password, and then save a session in the back end
Same as 1), but add an "apiToken" (randomly generate when user register) and then sending back & forth the apiToken in every single request to check user identity.
Use OAuth (which I'm currently reading about it).
I read that using OAuth for a simple API is like an "overkill", but on the safe side it sticks to standards and also allows me to use it when using my API with mobile devices and different platforms.
Also, I don't know too much about security flaws of using method 1) or 2).
I know this is maybe based on opinions, but I don't know any other site to post this question, as Symfony official mailing was shut down and migrate here it seems.
As you seems to know, your question is too opinion based.
If I can give you some advices (too long for a 600chars comment),
OAuth is powerful, but so much free.
I mean that you can easily implement it sort as everything works well while having a set of potential security issues without being aware of their existence.
Libraries and bundles providing OAuth are hard to maintain because of the new security issues regularly found.
On the other hand, if you need the benefits of OAuth (be a client and/or a server, compatible with the most part of social networks), go learn OAuth and do your experience with it.
Otherwise, use a simple credentials/request token two-step authentication.
See the JWT Authentication tutorial by KnpLabs,
Symfony Guard Authentication by Ryan Weaver,
and the great LexikJWTAuthenticationBundle, easy to implement and to use.
I am using asp.net web api 2 and developing an app which is to be hosted on intranet. So the authentication needs are very basic / minimal. I have some custom table where I store registered user's username/password. Using that I need to validate user.
As far as I understand OAuth is for using authentication from google/facebook/etc. Forms authentication is used with asp.net mvc. So what kind of authentication should I implement.
I have googled around but all I found are OAuth example. But how can I do very basic/minimal authentication implementation.
I know its a duplicate question, but it would be great, if someone can guide me to a link which can start from basics like how to read Authorize header, how to create/when to set IPrincipal, etc...
EDIT
there is no legal/regulatory requirement. also single sign on or windows login is not a choice. so just need to stick with a simple table with username/password fields.
just want to know the most basic way to include authentication/authrization in web-api app.
I recently answered a simliar question, see here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26757636/849507
Since you already have your own table with username and password, the first two parts are for you. You can ignore the angular parts.
for the future users, if you are looking at the most basic & simple implementation, please have a look at SimpleOAuthProvider as shown in here. Its the most basic and simplest one to implements and uses token auth, which is good enough of most of the use cases.
Please do replace the AccountsController and AuthRepository with your custom implementations.
I'm struggling with an issue here. I've searched repeatedly for answers, but have been unable to find the exact answer I'm looking for. I'm attempting to build a secure authentication method for a REST api. My question is, how do we handle a login for a REST api?
Since a REST api is meant to be stateless every time, does that mean we need to store the client's username/password on the client's end (perhaps hashed), and send it in with every request? I'd be much more comfortable using a system like authentication tokens that are created upon logging in the first time, but does that go against the basic rules of REST, since this technically creates a "state" on the server?
What is the best and most practical method to handle this? As I wrote earlier, I'm struggling to come up with an answer to this; maybe that is due to this problem not having a clear answer, but I honestly don't know.
Thanks in advance.
That's also my understanding of REST: clients send login/password to the server along with every request. The server has to authenticate the client based on this information only. With regard to the Hypermedia principle of REST, having a user logged in is not an application state, in my understanding.
Not sure if the title of the question expresses good my problem, so I'm going to do my best to explain it here:
I'm writing a RESTful api using php and Restler. Now here comes the problem:
There are some services that I'd like to protect, that is, know if the user requesting that service has enough privileges.
All the services that I'm implementing have to be consumed using javascript, so the traditional method user/password won't work beacause everyone will see that!
I'd also like to limit the amount of requests an anonymous user can do, like twitter does with the search service.
What can I do to expose my api to everyone, but only let users with priveleges complete their requests?
I stumble with this post: REST authentication and exposing the API key but at the end, no solution was provided.
I'm very open to any alternative: like OAuth. I would like to use something that integrates well with restler though, but if that is not the possible, then its ok.
I've seen a lot of info, saying that an api key would do the work, but since I'm using javascript, how can I protect those keys from being used by other users?
Update: Restler 3 is released with hybrid access support using #access hybrid comment and is available here!
Just in time with the right question :)
Your question has two parts
1. How do I do hybrid access (both public and protected access) with Restler
Restler 2 does not support hybrid access, but Restler 3, which will be released in August 2012 (this week) will support hybrid access, exactly built for your use case
You can follow the development at twitter and/or facebook
2. How can I protect my API when the primary consumer is JavaScript
For simplicity you may use HTTPS with Basic Authentication or HTTP with Digest Authentication
Another alternative is described in this article. It is not written specifically for Restler but it is easy to adapt to Restler. Let us know if you need help on that
Background: I am trying to create an SMS API service. The developers have a Dev ID, and an API secret key assigned to their developer account. The developers will be creating apps which will issue calls to my API. But the application issuing the call must be verified first.
Issue: The main issue i have is with authentication. I read up on OAuth and pretty much uderstood it. I read through this presentation (Slide 71-82). All OAuth articles talk about the OAuth 'dance' or the 'love triangle'. My problem seems to be, that i dont see a proper triangle in my case. Or, a better way to put it would be, the triangle doesn't seem to be complete.
What i mean by that is, in the case of lets say, LinkedIn, trying to make some app which helps users associate their LinkedIn acc with twitter, OAuth makes complete sense. Because LinkedIn needs to get resources from twitter ON THE USERS BEHALF (Cuz the user HAS A TWITTER ACCOUNT). In my case, only the consumer has a developer account registered with my service. The end-user doesn't have any credentials for the consumer to ask on behalf of. So how can i implement Oauth? So what will the consumer ask the provider? Will it only state that "watch out, here i come?". Cuz that seems pretty pointless unless its asking for a request token in exchange for an access token. But in this case since the end user doesnt even have an account, the steps seem useless.
So, i cant figure out how to go about this authentication issue. Ive tried thinking about using php sessions so it can help me associate a token with the particular client who is using the API. But the REST/OAUTH purists seem to disagree on the usage of sessions in authentication. They claim that OAuth is a standard which has proven itself and that is what I should use instead of coming up with my own obscure schemes.
From your description it seem that you're in a two party scenario only (developers write code which accesses your API on their own behalf, not on behalf of an end-user), so that means indeed that doing the full 3-legged oAuth scenario isn't needed.
You could use pretty much any authentication scheme and that would work (API Keys, other oAuth grant types [see below] or even ID/Secret combinations. In the oAuth world:
Look at the other oAuth 2.0 Grant types: especially resource owner PW grants - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-26#section-4.3. It's slightly better than username-password because the PW isn't passed across the channel all the time (it passes once though) and it assumes the developer writing the code is the owner of the credentials.
Look at oAuth v1.0: this different in various ways to v2.0 but one feature it does have which some people like is the way tokens are used - which is rather than being passed across the wire they are used to generate a hash in the client and then the hash is verified on the server side. It's more expensive and complex than checking a key but it's less prone to attack.
In the non-oAuth world, if it's primarily a server resource used by developers directly, an ID/Secret or API-Key pattern is probably more than sufficient and it's much easier to implement for your developers.
Re: oAuth - if you're doing any type of user auth then definitely stick with the standard - the stuff is complex and having libraries out there really helps. If it's developer-api you likely don't need to go that far.
If you want the API to be secure in an ideal world anything which requires the security token to pass across the gaps should be secured using SSL, especially if that client code could be running on a mobile device or laptop which might communicate over wireless. If this isn't the case, someone could jump in an copy a token from one of the devs.
The only one of the protocols above that avoids this is the oAuth 1.0 variation since the secret never leaves the client but is used to hash instead. But it's complex. Last one to look at is the Amazon AWS pattern which does hashing similar to oAuth 1.0 http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/RESTAuthentication.html and people emulate quite a bit.