I'm kind of surprised that, after searching for this for a while, I didn't find as many answers as I thought would be out there (well I found none), so maybe by asking it here we can help improve search results.
I'm building a REST api which has JWT-based authentication. There is an /auth/login route which returns the token after login/password verification, and the token is subsequently sent in every route in a Authorization http header.
Not, suppose that someone queries another route (say, /cars), without sending the token (that is, before logging in). If I return a 401 unauthorized, I can make the frontend query /auth/login to get the token.
But, strictly speaking, this does not conform to the REST specification, because every resource should be discoverable from the initial one, and a client accessing /cars and receiving a 401 will not know about /auth/login.
So another option would be a redirection like 302. But this semantics means that the resource was temporarily moved, and this is not the case (the resource is still /cars, you just need to authenticate first).
So, what is the correct way to do this procedure in a "true" rest api?
I 100% agree, and that's why I proposed this standard:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-pot-authentication-link-01
The idea is that for cases like this, you should be able to return a Link header with an authentication rel, so the client can discover how to proceed.
Related
I have read about the relayState parameter in SAML SSO, and how the SP can redirect the user back to the original incoming URL by making use of relayState, but to my knowledge HTTP redirect only works for GET requests.
I am wondering if the same can be done for POST, PUT and DELETE requests, considering these requests usually come with data in the request body as well. I thought of returning a self-submitting form for POST requests, but this won't work for any other HTTP verb, and the original request must be a form based request too, unless the framework supports treating all types of parameters (query string, form field, json element) similarly. I also thought of making the frontend reconstruct the original request and sending it back to SP with AJAX, but I'm not sure if AJAX can actually update the browser's current page address.
My compromise solution in the end was to only relay URLs that result in a whole new page rendering with a GET verb only, and for any other requests, use the referrer URL for relaying instead. This means for the latter, the user will have to perform the task manually again after landing on the page he last saw before the SSO flow.
Not sure what the common practice in the industry is.
Thank you!
you would to maintain / save the POST data on the SP end and re-use them after SAML flow succeed. SAML as such does not provide any mean to achieve this.
This is a theoretical question. For some APIs, user need to authenticate themselves and we have authentication token for a user. I feel using GET api is not good idea due to this token.
/get_data/?user_token=hshhlj8979kjhk&dataid=87979
Indeed it's not a good idea, but not due to GET in itself. The real problem is the token as part of the URL and the security problems it creates.
The URL portion of a request is very often cached and logged for auditing or debugging purposes, and having the token there causes it to leak unintentionally.
For example, browsers save your browsing history, and the main portion they record is the URL, so there goes your password to your history, a place it doesn't belongs and is easily exposed accidentally.
Most web servers by default also log the URLs they receive, so again there goes your token. It's quite common for it to end up in logs on web servers, load balancers, intermediate routers and so on, again leaking all over the place.
The solution to this is to strip the token from the URL portion, leaving there only data that's not security-critical. The most common place to put it is in the request's headers. Those are well respected by the HTTP standard and almost never logged or accidentally dumped like the URL.
Of course, all other methods suffer the same. POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS for example, none of them should be ever called with secret data in the URL. Headers provide a "safer" place for that available across all methods. The request body is another common place, but you can't have one in GET, making a header the best alternative.
I don't believe I need OAuth
Then again, what do I know
All I want to do is take someone's credit card information and charge them. I am not accessing other people's QuickBooks accounts (only my own) and I am not trying to access any other personal information other than what they input into my form. For this reason it seems absolutely asinine to think that I'd have to redirect them to intuit.com and force them through an OAuth prompt (what account would they even be authorizing? They probably don't have a QuickBooks account)
I've spent the last hour reading through QuickBook's API documentation and I've run in circles and found the whole thing utterly confusing. Every page which references a particular API endpoint makes no mention of authentication -- only the headers, query parameters, and request body that are expected. The API explorer does not show any form of authentication in their examples:
No basic auth header, nothing in the request body with an API token,.. nothing
Checking the console while hitting submit isn't any more helpful. The request gets sent to their back-end server where it does the real request:
It even includes "apikey", "apisecret", and "oauth" attributes in the body which are all empty -- it acts like the endpoint doesn't even NEED authentication.
Out of dumb curiosity I tried making the request with no authentication to see what would happen:
401 Not Authorized. So some authentication is needed. I continued to scour the docs and turned up nothing but page after page linking me back to OAuth and saying that I need to set up OAuth. Why do I need to set up OAuth to take a credit card number that was given to me and hand it to QuickBooks?
I even tried looking at their sample app. The "take the code for a test drive" (https://developer.intuit.com/v2/ui#/emulator?workflow=ecommerce) was utterly worthless. It only gave me some pseudo-code with zero idea for how to handle authentication:
I even looked at the actual code and don't see anywhere that they provide an API key or secret key.
I'm pretty much ripping my hair out at this point, so I think I need someone with experience to point me in the right direction.
I don't believe I need OAuth
You do.
For this reason it seems absolutely asinine to think that I'd have to redirect them to intuit.com and force them through an OAuth prompt
You misunderstand what OAuth is, and how it's used.
OAuth is used to get YOUR auth tokens so that YOUR COMPANY can authenticate to Intuit and identify itself so you can charge customer credit cards. YOU are redirected to Intuit's website to authenticate ONCE, and ONCE ONLY, and then NEVER AGAIN.
You store the tokens you get back from the one-time OAuth pop-up window process, and use those for all future HTTPS requests.
The end-user (i.e. your customer) is NOT redirected.
If you're familiar/used to something like Authorize.net or other web services, where you open a web browser and go to a website and copy a secret key/API token into your code... this is the exact same process except instead of you logging in and manually copy/pasting an API token/key, you're logging in and the OAuth process automatically gives you the API token/key programatically.
I know this is not the first time the topic is treated in StackOverflow, however, I have some questions I couldn't find an answer to or other questions have opposed answers.
I am doing a rather simple REST API (Silex-PHP) to be consumed initially by just one SPA (backbone app). I don't want to comment all the several authentication methods in this question as that topic is already fully covered on SO. I'll basically create a token for each user, and this token will be attached in every request that requires authentication by the SPA. All the SPA-Server transactions will run under HTTPS. For now, my decision is that the token doesn't expire. Tokens that expire/tokens per session are not complying with the statelessness of REST, right? I understand there's a lot of room for security improvement but that's my scope for now.
I have a model for Tokens, and thus a table in the database for tokens with a FK to user_id. By this I mean the token is not part of my user model.
REGISTER
I have a POST /users (requires no authentication) that creates a user in the database and returns the new user. This complies with the one request one resource rule. However, this brings me certain doubts:
My idea is that at the time to create a new user, create a new token for the user, to immediately return it with the Response, and thus, improving the UX. The user will immediately be able to start using the web app. However, returning the token for such response would break the rule of returning just the resource. Should I instead make two requests together? One to create the user and one to retrieve the token without the user needing to reenter credentials?
If I decided to return the token together with the user, then I believe POST /users would be confusing for the API consumer, and then something like POST /auth/register appears. Once more, I dislike this idea because involves a verb. I really like the simplicity offered in this answer. But then again, I'd need to do two requests together, a POST /users and a POST /tokens. How wrong is it to do two requests together and also, how would I exactly send the relevant information for the token to be attached to a certain user if both requests are sent together?
For now my flow works like follows:
1. Register form makes a POST /users request
2. Server creates a new user and a new token, returns both in the response (break REST rule)
3. Client now attaches token to every Request that needs Authorization
The token never expires, preserving REST statelessness.
EMAIL VALIDATION
Most of the current webapps require email validation without breaking the UX for the users, i.e the users can immediately use the webapp after registering. On the other side, if I return the token with the register request as suggested above, users will immediately have access to every resource without validating emails.
Normally I'd go for the following workflow:
1. Register form sends POST /users request.
2. Server creates a new user with validated_email set to false and stores an email_validation_token. Additionally, the server sends an email generating an URL that contains the email_validation_token.
3. The user clicks on the URL that makes a request: For example POST /users/email_validation/{email_validation_token}
4. Server validates email, sets validated_email to true, generates a token and returns it in the response, redirecting the user to his home page at the same time.
This looks overcomplicated and totally ruins the UX. How'd you go about it?
LOGIN
This is quite simple, for now I am doing it this way so please correct me if wrong:
1. User fills a log in form which makes a request to POST /login sending Basic Auth credentials.
2. Server checks Basic Auth credentials and returns token for the given user.
3. Web app attached the given token to every future request.
login is a verb and thus breaks a REST rule, everyone seems to agree on doing it this way though.
LOGOUT
Why does everyone seem to need a /auth/logout endpoint? From my point of view clicking on "logout" in the web app should basically remove the token from the application and not send it in further requests. The server plays no role in this.
As it is possible that the token is kept in localStorage to prevent losing the token on a possible page refresh, logout would also imply removing the token from the localStorage. But still, this doesn't affect the server. I understand people who need to have a POST /logout are basically working with session tokens, which again break the statelessness of REST.
REMEMBER ME
I understand the remember me basically refers to saving the returned token to the localStorage or not in my case. Is this right?
If you'd recommend any further reading on this topic I'd very much appreciate it. Thanks!
REGISTER
Tokens that expire/tokens per session are not complying with the statelessness of REST, right?
No, there's nothing wrong with that. Many HTTP authentication schemes do have expiring tokens. OAuth2 is super popular for REST services, and many OAuth2 implementations force the client to refresh the access token from time to time.
My idea is that at the time to create a new user, create a new token for the user, to immediately return it with the Response, and thus, improving the UX. The user will immediately be able to start using the web app. However, returning the token for such response would break the rule of returning just the resource. Should I instead make two requests together? One to create the user and one to retrieve the token without the user needing to reenter credentials?
Typically, if you create a new resource following REST best practices, you don't return something in response to a POST like this. Doing this would make the call more RPC-like, so I would agree with you here... it's not perfectly RESTful. I'll offer two solutions to this:
Ignore this, break the best practices. Maybe it's for the best in this case, and making exceptions if they make a lot more sense is sometimes the best thing to do (after careful consideration).
If you want be more RESTful, I'll offer an alternative.
Lets assume you want to use OAuth2 (not a bad idea!). The OAuth2 API is not really RESTful for a number of reasons. I'm my mind it is still better to use a well-defined authentication API, over rolling your own for the sake of being RESTful.
That still leaves you with the problem of creating a user on your API, and in response to this (POST) call, returning a secret which can be used as an access/refresh token.
My alternative is as follows:
You don't need to have a user in order to start a session.
What you can do instead is start the session before you create the user. This guarantees that for any future call, you know you are talking to the same client.
If you start your OAuth2 process and receive your access/refresh token, you can simply do an authenticated POST request on /users. What this means is that your system needs to be aware of 2 types of authenticated users:
Users that logged in with a username/password (`grant_type = passsword1).
Users that logged in 'anonymously' and intend to create a user after the fact. (grant_type = client_credentials).
Once the user is created, you can assign your previously anonymous session with the newly created user entity, thus you don't need to do any access/refresh token exchanges after creation.
EMAIL VALIDATION
Both your suggestions to either:
Prevent the user from using the application until email validation is completed.
Allow the user to use the application immediately
Are done by applications. Which one is more appropriate really depends on your application and what's best for you. Is there any risk associated with a user starting to use an account with an email they don't own? If no, then maybe it's fine to allow the user in right away.
Here's an example where you don't want to do this: Say if the email address is used by other members of your system to add a user as a friend, the email address is a type of identity. If you don't force users to validate their emails, it means I can act on behalf of someone with a different email address. This is similar to being able to receive invitations, etc. Is this an attack vector? Then you might want to consider blocking the user from using the application until the email is validated.
You might also consider only blocking certain features in your application for which the email address might be sensitive. In the previous example, you could prevent people from seeing invitations from other users until the email is validated.
There's no right answer here, it just depends on how you intend to use the email address.
LOGIN
Please just use OAuth2. The flow you describe is already fairly close to how OAuth2 works. Take it one step further an actually use OAuth2. It's pretty great and once you get over the initial hurdle of understanding the protocol, you'll find that it's easier than you thought and fairly straightforward to just implement the bits you specifically need for your API.
Most of the PHP OAuth2 server implementations are not great. They do too much and are somewhat hard to integrate with. Rolling your own is not that hard and you're already fairly close to building something similar.
LOGOUT
The two reasons you might want a logout endpoint are:
If you use cookie/session based authentication and want to tell the server to forget the session. It sounds like this is not an issue for you.
If you want to tell the server to expire the access/refresh token earlier. Yes, you can just remove them from localstorage, and that might be good enough. Forcing to expire them server-side might give you that little extra confidence. What if someone was able to MITM your browser and now has access to your tokens? I might want to quickly logout and expire all existing tokens. It's an edge case, and I personally have never done this, but that could be a reason why you would want it.
REMEMBER ME
Yea, implementing "remember me" with local storage sounds like a good idea.
I originally took the /LOGON and /LOGOUT approach. I'm starting to explore /PRESENCE. It seems it would help me combine both knowing someone's status and authentication.
0 = Offline
1 = Available
2 = Busy
Going from Offline to anything else should include initial validation (aka require username/password). You could use PATCH or PUT for this (depending how you see it).
You are right, SESSION is not allowed in REST, hence there is no need to login or logout in REST service and /login, /logout are not nouns.
For authentication you could use
Basic authentication over SSL
Digest authentication
OAuth 2
HMAC, etc.
I prefer to use PUBLIC KEY and PRIVATE KEY [HMAC]
Private key will never be transmitted over web and I don't care about public key. The public key will be used to make the user specific actions [Who is holding the api key]
Private key will be know by client app and the server. The private key will be used to create signature. You generate a signature token using private key and add the key into the header. The server will also generate the signature and validate the request for handshake.
Authorization: Token 9944b09199c62bcf9418ad846dd0e4bbdfc6ee4b
Now how you will get private key? you have to do it manually like you put facebook, twitter or google api key on you app.
However, in some case you can also return [not recommended] the key only for once like Amazon S3 does. They provide "AWS secret access key" at the registration response.
An intelligent coworker friend of mine brought up a question to me that I was uncertain how to answer and I'd like to pose it to the world.
If a RESTful endpoint uses token-based authentication, aka a time-based token is required to access a resource and that token expires after a certain amount of time, would this violate the RESTful principle? In other words, if the same URL expires after a certain amount of time, so the resource returns a different response depending when it was requested, is that breaking REST?
No, your scenario is not breaking any restful principle that I can think of. You seem to be confusing a request returning a different resource and a request getting a different response.
In your scenario I would expect after the token has expired that the server would return a 401 and the client would initiate some kind of authentication exchange to re-validate the user.
Once revalidated, the server should then return the intended resource.
There are many cases when a request could have completely different responses. 403 Forbidden, 410 Gone are examples.
The user/application access right to the URL may expire but that does not mean the URL expires. In large real world systems the auth part of the API may be handles by a different product, shielding the real API from attacks, unauthorized users, etc. So the RESTful API still follows the restful principles.
Your design is not violating REST constraints, but you must be careful that you use HTTP correctly. If your resources are only intended to be seen by a certain user, that user should be authenticated using HTTP authentication. This will tell public caches not to cache the representations of the resource (which they otherwise usually would).
So, even if you intend the URL to be only known by a certain user, make sure you also have that user authenticate itself using the correct HTTP headers.
Jan
Resources will frequently give a different response depending on when they are requested. That's what happens when the actual resources change over time. Requesting the resource of this page (for instance) in a week will likely give different responses than doing so when you read this the first time.