I'm enjoying developing cross-browser web extensions, the main target being Chrome, so much that I started to think to develop one for my company. I find a chrome extension quite a cheap and efficient way to deploy internal apps. The main purpose is to host a couple of dynamic dashboards that fetch data from various APIs by using cross-domain ajax in background scripts. I finalized the app and I was also able to implement the authentication via chrome.identity and Azure AD.
However, I am struggling to find a safe way to customise the content.
I mean, when the extension is installed it requires to login to azure via the chrome.identity flow. Then I get a token that I use to query ms graph and get the user ID, name, email and basic info.
Until I get this information I want the browser action (popup) to be unavailable to the user as well as any other extension pages. After a successful login I would like to show the content on the pop up and to let the user access the pages, but here I want to customize the experience.
I know how to use the user id retrieved from the api call to customize the extension, but I think it is not safe because all the code is in the client.
If I code something like
if (user === logged) show something
it will be damn easy for a malicious user to look at the code and bypass it, or even to impersonate another user. And chrome extension cannot be obfuscated.
Any help?
Thanks
Related
I am in control of three twitter accounts: One is my main account, the other two are supposed to automatically post content via a bot. I created the bot logic and added it to Twitter's development tools and I can easily use it to post to my main account.
Now I need to add the access tokens for my two secondary accounts. My question is - what's the easiest way to do this.
As far as I can see, Twitter only enables one way to do this: 3-legged OAuth flow. It is not too complex, but it seems to me to require setting up a mock website with callback url, which seems like too much considering I only need to generate two api tokens. Am I missing something?
There are some alternative ways to generate access token and access token secret for OAuth 1.0A via command line tools which allow you to use the “PIN-based” OAuth flow.
One example would be Twitter’s own twurl tool for API testing, which requires you to also have Ruby installed. This will let you authenticate a user account (it still pops open a window onto twitter.com to have you do the authentication) and stores them into the ~/.twurlrc file in your home directory. There is also tw-oob-oauth-cli which is a standalone app for doing the same thing.
You're not missing something. The reason this is required is to force users have a browser they trust open and see that they are on https://twitter.com/, so they can trust that it's a safe place to put in their password.
I am trying to authenticate a user inside a desktop application using the web api. I am not using a browser, I am using straight up GET and PUSH calls to the endpoints of the Spotify servers. Immediately I ran into some problems. It appears that upon the initial GET command to "accounts.spotify.com", the returned response includes HTML with a javascript function that runs and is responsible for dynamically generating HTML that you see on the initial login page. If you look at the Javascript function, it is clear that this is what is going on, however, you can also see this code is obfuscated and not meant to be used by us, the developers! (Link to Javascript code here for reference: Javascript function)
So my question is, while I can probably reverse engineer the code to get this working, would this be against the Spotify developer TOS?
Thanks!
Spotify's authentication happens through oauth, and a big part of user authentication as per the oauth rfc is where the user delegates permissions to your app to carry out API calls that affect their account, or return information about them. That's the web page you're seeing - it must be presented to your users so that they can delegate permissions so that Spotify can give your app an access token. It doesn't necessarily need to happen in a browser - it can happen in a web view inside your desktop application - but it does need to be loaded over https, and your application must not alter or reverse engineer the Spotify permissions delegations page.
As you correctly guessed, reverse engineering any Spotify APIs is against terms of service.
For more information on authorization on the Spotify platform, I'd recommend having a look at this guide.
Hope that helps! Please ping me if you have any more questions.
Hugh
Spotify Developer Support
I have a strange request for a project - we have a text file containing a list of login credentials for Dropbox for around 10 users. I have to validate their credentials automatically and notify the users if login fails with their credentials.
I've looked at the dropbox API, but that uses OAuth, which requires the user to manually fill in credentials, but that doesn't do the trick for me.
Is there a way for me to check if a bunch of logins? I've looked at the DropboxUpload repository on github, but it works fine for single user logins, but fails to achieve what I want when it comes to checking the same thing for multiple users.
Any help/leads on how I should go about proceeding with this would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks,
John
You can use dropbox webpage to check user credentials doing normal login/logout but in an automated way.
To create a "bot" which will login and logout and check if credentials are correct you can use Selenium.
Selenium is a framework for testing web page ui but it can also be used to create automated checker/tester/bot for what you need.
It is also possible to setup selenium in a such way that it will use renderless browser engine so no browser will be visible during test/check. This also speeds up the process of testing.
I hope this will help you if you'll not find any better way and can be used as a final solution since it is not the best way to check credentials
I am trying to make a webpage that can display information about documents on my google drive. For example I would like to display the titles of all my google documents on a webpage. I don't want the user to have to be logged into a google account, and I don't want to have to authorize anything (or the user to authorize anything). I just want the user to be able to see what I display - in a read only format - when they navigate to the page. The user will have no chance to edit or upload or delete anything, they can just view the info I display.
Is there a way to get files from google drive (via the API or any other way) possibly without using oauth 2.0? I've looked through the api docs and even coded up the sample apps, but all of them have a step that says, "Go to this URL, click Allow, enter the code" then you get access. These steps shouldn't be necessary. I just want to download the file and be able to manipulate it (either in memory or as a stream) then display something about it.
Also, I may misunderstand how OAuth 2.0 works so if that seems like the case, any helpful information would be much appreciated. Thank you.
You don't need to authenticate your visitors into Google, but need to authenticate yourself, so your web app can retrieve data from your personal Drive.
Get an access token and refresh token for yourself, store them and autenticate your requests. If you're using one of our client libraries, most of them refresh the access tokens once they are expired. See Using OAuth 2.0 for Web Server Applications for more details and OAuth 2.0 Playground helps you to understand how to get these tokens.
I'm trying to use Instapaper's Simple API (http://www.instapaper.com/api/simple).
The API terms of use (http://www.instapaper.com/api/terms) says apps should not store user id and password, and I don't want to store them either. However, it seems that the only way to add a link to a user's Instapaper via simple API is to store the username/password (if the user does have a password).
Am I missing something?
The API terms of use state that:
Apps must not store users’ passwords. Passwords may only be collected for the xAuth token acquisition and must be discarded afterward.
Only the full API uses xAuth tokens. The above sentence doesn't apply to the simple API, since it uses Basic HTTP Authentication.
You still "must make reasonable efforts to prevent passwords from being compromised, and must not disclose passwords to any other services or individuals".
If you are using a native Mac application (like Apple’s Mail client or a third-party mail client like Airmail) there isn’t an easy way to save a link to Instapaper without first opening the link in a browser and then using one of Instapaper’s browser extensions to actually save the article.
One workaround that I’ve found to expedite this task is to write a service for OS X which uses Instapaper’s API to save links.
In order to write your own service, first open Apple’s Automator application and create a new Service. Then, drag the Run Shell Script action into the application’s main workflow area.
Make sure the service receives no input, can be used by any application, and that the shell script is set to run python.