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.
Can someone point me in the right direction on how I could go about writing a piece of code for react native that takes an input from the user (username and password) and then logins into a website with in.
Also any react native web scraping libraries anyone could recommend (I was thinking about using Cheerio)
Thanks in Advance :)
For getting user inputtext check:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/textinput
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/react_native/react_native_text_input.htm
From now on what i'm saying works in restful APIs and you may need to change your approach based on your need.
In my case being logged in means having a valid token from server.
For sending requests use axios. Get your user input values and make a post request to login api. If credentials were valid response will contain a token. Save that token in your app using Asyncstorage.
For logging out delete that token from storage.
I have my own Login page where user enters username/password.
This username/password are used to login through Keycloak Rest API.
http://localhost:8080/auth/realms/Demo/protocol/openid-connect/token
input - {username,password,grant_type,client_secret,client_id}
And in response i get access token.
Now i wish to enable Authenticator (Google Authenticator). I have enabled it from backend. Now if user wishes to login thorugh my application, my login page i need to get below details.
1.) Somehow i need to include QR Code that appears on keycloak login page post username/password validation to show on my login screen for the first time login once user enter username/password. So do we have any API which return Keycloak QR code image in response.
2.) Subsequent login i will have OTP field, so need a REST api to pass OTP along with username/password.
Please help with REST API if keycloak has any. Integrating through Javascript.
Similar flow as described in use case 1 here
Just want to use keycloak as a database, doing all operation for me, input will be my screen. I do want redirection of URL's while login in and yet should be standalone deployed.
I've managed to implement this through the rest API of Keycloak. To realize this, you need to extend Keycloak yourself with a SPI. To do this create your own Java project and extend org.keycloak.services.resource.RealmResourceProvider and org.keycloak.services.resource.RealmResourceProviderFactory. You can find more information in the official docs (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_development/#_extensions), github examples and other stack overflow posts how to do this.
Once you got this up and running you can implement it like this:
#GET
#Path("your-end-point-to-fetch-the-qr")
#Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON})
public YourDtoWithSecretAndQr get2FASetup(#PathParam("username") final String username) {
final RealmModel realm = this.session.getContext().getRealm();
final UserModel user = this.session.users().getUserByUsername(username, realm);
final String totpSecret = HmacOTP.generateSecret(20);
final String totpSecretQrCode = TotpUtils.qrCode(totpSecret, realm, user);
return new YourDtoWithSecretAndQr(totpSecret, totpSecretQrCode);
}
#POST
#Path("your-end-point-to-setup-2fa")
#Consumes("application/json")
public void setup2FA(#PathParam("username") final String username, final YourDtoWithData dto) {
final RealmModel realm = this.session.getContext().getRealm();
final UserModel user = this.session.users().getUserByUsername(username, realm);
final OTPCredentialModel otpCredentialModel = OTPCredentialModel.createFromPolicy(realm, dto.getSecret(), dto.getDeviceName());
CredentialHelper.createOTPCredential(this.session, realm, user, dto.getInitialCode(), otpCredentialModel);
}
The secret received with the GET must be send back with the POST. The initial code is the one from your 2FA app (e.g. Google Authenticator). The QR code is a string which can be displayed in an img with src 'data:image/png;base64,' + qrCodeString;
I know this is an old question, but I've recently been looking at something similar, and so thought it would be potentially valuable to share what I have found for others who may be looking into this and wondered what the possibilities are.
TL;DR
You can only really use the existing Keycloak actions to do this or embed the user account management page found at https://{keycloak server URL}/auth/realms/{realm name}/account in an iframe. That's it, I'm afraid. In my opinion it is currently best to just assign actions directly to accounts or use the Credential Reset emails to assign actions; both of these can be done via the Admin API if desired:
Send Credential Reset email containing assigned actions:
https://www.keycloak.org/docs-api/11.0/rest-api/index.html#_executeactionsemail
Set actions directly on the account (include the actions in the requiredActions portion of the user JSON that you send in the body to the endpoint):
https://www.keycloak.org/docs-api/11.0/rest-api/index.html#_updateuser
Background is that as part of a project that I have been working on we wanted to see if we could have an integrated way for users to set up their initial password and OTP device when a new account has been created for them, since the default method of sending them an email from Keycloak using the "Credential Reset" functionality has the limitations that a) it doesn't provide a link to the application itself unless you override the theme, and if you have multiple instances of the application for different users you have no way of knowing which instance to provide the link for, so may have to end up including a list of them, and b) it often doesn't feel truly native to the application, even with changes to the theme. If you're sensible though, I'd suggest you stop and just use this functionality - please see the TL;DR section above for details.
So, in short there is NO API endpoint for receiving a QR code to set up an OTP device. There are two places, however, where the QR code can be retrieved from - the OTP device setup screen when you log in as a user who has had a "Configure OTP" action assigned to their account, and the user's own account management screen.
The first option of the Configure OTP action screen is a non-starter. It only shows up when you log in, and so by definition the user has to log in to Keycloak via the Keycloak login page in order to trigger the page to be displayed. At this point you're already on a Keycloak page instead of one of your app's pages, and so unless you can get very creative with changes to these Keycloak pages via a custom theme, tapping into this page isn't really an option.
The second option is more interesting, but far from ideal. Every user who has logged in has access to an account management page that can be found at https://{keycloak server URL}/auth/realms/{realm name}/account. This page allows you to do things like change your name, password, etc. and it also allows you to add an OTP device if you don't already have one, or delete any existing OTP devices associated with your account. This OTP device tab of the account management page can be reached directly via https://{keycloak server URL}/auth/realms/{realm name}/account/totp.
As I mentioned, there isn't an API that you can access to view the QR code that shows up on this page. The only way it is accessible is via the GET request to https://{keycloak server URL}/auth/realms/{realm name}/account/totp, which returns the HTML for the page I've already mentioned. Okay great, so can we scrape the QR code programmatically and then put it in our own page on our application? Err, no, not really. You see, whilst a lot of the Keycloak API endpoints rightly allow you to send a bearer token (e.g. access token) in the authorization header to access and endpoint, this page will not accept a bearer token as a means of authentication/authorization. Instead it uses a session cookie that is locked down to the Keycloak URL. This cookie is set when you log in to your application via the Keycloak login page, and so is available to this account management page when you navigate to it, having already logged in, and since the account management page uses the same server and domain name as the original Keycloak login page, it has access to the cookie and can let you in. This cookie cannot be sent by your application to e.g. your own REST API to then programmatically call the account management page and scrape the QR code, because your application doesn't have access to it for good security reasons. This might be something you can change in Keycloak somewhere, but if there is I would strongly recommend against changing it.
So if we can't scrape the page from our own server, can we do something on the front-end? Well, as mentioned, your application doesn't have access to the session cookie but if you make a request (e.g. using fetch or axios) in your front-end JavaScript to the account management page then that request will send the cookie along with it, so that could work right? Umm, well actually you will get hit with an error message in this scenario due to CORS. CORS is Cross-Origin-Resource-Sharing and in order to allow the Keycloak page to be accessed then you would have to open up the settings on the server to allow it to be accessed from your website's address. I've seen some articles that look at how you can open up your CORS settings on Keycloak if you wish but I'd be very nervous about doing this. I don't know enough about the internals of Keycloak and how it operates to comment on how much of a security risk this is, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it. There some information here (Keycloak angular No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present) on changing the "Web Origins" setting of your application's Keycloak client, but this opens up your application to some serious potential abuse. There is also the MAJOR issue that even if you scraped the QR code, the device isn't actually added to the user's account (even though it appears in the authenticator app) until you enter a code into the page that the QR code is on and click Save. Since there isn't an API endpoint that you can use to complete this operation, I therefore don't think that this option is viable either. I've tried out whether or not you can use the token retrieval endpoint at https://{keycloak server URL}/auth/realms/{realm name}/protocol/openid-connect/token to see if making a request with your username/password/otp code will somehow "register" your device and complete the process, but although you can get a token this way, and it doesn't complain about the otp code, it doesn't actually take any notice of the code because as far as it's concerned the user's account doesn't have a device registered with it. So we have to use the form on the account management page in order to complete this registration process.
So the final way of possibly doing this is.... an iframe. Sorry, yeah it's rubbish but that's all your left with. You can have the iframe point at your account management page, and because the user is logged in then they will be able to see the contents from your application's page. You can use relative positioning, fixed width and height and remove scroll bars to ensure that you ONLY show the QR code and the fields for the one time code, device name, and the Save/Cancel buttons. This, sadly, seems to be the only option at the moment, and due to how nasty and unreliable iframes can be in general - they certainly don't feel native to your application, and you'll need to override your Keycloak theme to get the page in question to look more like your app - I'd recommend steering clear of this and using the standard approach of using Keycloak actions and the Admin API instead.
If you've made it this far, congratulations, you win at Stack Overflow :-)
I'm in the process of implementing auth0 login in my project, and to be as fast as possible I'm using a hosted login page. Following the auth0 vue docs I've got up and running quickly and I can login and logout users.
Now, I'm trying to create a user profile page with a route of user/:id. For the :id part I want to use the user_id of the user profile, but I'm having issues understanding the optimal way to get it. I realize I can use the auth0 api users endpoint but I'm not sure that's the correct way. Do I actually need to make an API call to the users endpoint each time an user clicks their profile? Is there no better way to get the user_id, maybe from the id_token which is set in localStorage upon login?
Even better, is there a way to get actual user ids? I know that if I would setup my own login with my own db, I'd have an auto incrementing id which I'd use for user id. This does not seem possible with Auth0, or am I wrong about that?
Disclosure: I work for Auth0.
The idToken returned at the end of the authentication / authorization is a JSON Web Token. This token contains the Auth0 user_id as the sub (subject) claim (property).
If you are using Auth0.js or our AuthService tutorial, Auth0.js will decode this token and give it to you as idTokenPayload object in the authResult. This can be used to identify the user as idTokenPayload.sub.
You can store this object as a whole in localStorage or simply decode the token that you accquired from localStorage. However, please note that you should validate the token after accquiring it from localStorage aswell.
To avoid all the above, you can simply use the checkSession method each time your application bootstraps to get a new copy of the accessToken / idToken and rely on that directly :)
I am new to react-native and redux. I have successfully created a login function which calls a post-request api. The credentials insert by a user are matric no and password. I have another post-method api need to be called to display a list of data in another page after the user successfully logged on. However I dunno how to pass the matric no to another page since there is no event that ought to trigger the user to enter their matric no i order to call the post-method api. Can somebody help me how to solve this?
Use Redux Store or AsyncStorage to store important login information like token or your matrix no.
Retrieve on next page in componentWillMount() and send to Ajax to validate and get data.
ref : https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/asyncstorage.html
you might want to use react redux. Using this u can acess anything from anywhere fast and simple.
Its a little hard to setup but once u have setup its easy to manage and u get info anywhere in the app refer this link: Getting started with Redux.
It covers different aspects of using redux. Starting off with a simple example of counter. It also deals with how to manage an api call where the result can be accessed anywhere from the app.
Good luck!