How do you authenticate a websocket connection with Knox token authentication on django channels? - authentication

Question

I understand you can write custom authentication middleware to use in django channels 2.
This works fine with Django's built-in token authentication but using django-rest-knox tokens is a different story.
Knox stores its tokens in an encrypted form so it is not as easy as simply retrieving the user from the database by looking up the token.
Please help.

Answer 1

Figured it out!
from knox.auth import TokenAuthentication
...
knoxAuth = TokenAuthentication();
user, auth_token = knoxAuth.authenticate_credentials(tokenString.encode(HTTP_HEADER_ENCODING))
scope['user'] = user
Integrate the above code with: https://gist.github.com/rluts/22e05ed8f53f97bdd02eafdf38f3d60a

Answer 2

In order to be able to authenticate a user using token authentication, you must use cookies, The headers you can send using WS are limited, you must also implement your own "TokenAuthMiddleware" to handle the cookie. for channels 2, you also have to handle access to the database correctly, below is how to do that:
from channels.auth import AuthMiddlewareStack
from channels.db import database_sync_to_async
from knox.auth import TokenAuthentication
from django.contrib.auth.models import AnonymousUser
from django.db import close_old_connections
from rest_framework.exceptions import AuthenticationFailed
import re
class TokenAuthMiddlewareInstance :
def __init__ (
#
self ,
scope ,
middleware ,
):
self.middleware = middleware
self.scope = dict(scope)
self.inner = self.middleware.inner
async def __call__ (
#
self ,
receive ,
send ,
):
self.scope['user'] = AnonymousUser()
cookie = dict(self.scope.get('headers',{})).get(b'cookie')
if cookie :
token = re.findall(r'X-Authorization=(\w*)', cookie.decode('ascii'))
if len(token) :
self.scope['user'] = await self._g_user(token)
inner = self.inner(self.scope)
return await inner(receive, send)
#database_sync_to_async
def _g_user (
#
self ,
token ,
):
try :
token_key = token[0]
user, token = TokenAuthentication().authenticate_credentials(token_key.encode('ascii'))
close_old_connections()
return user
except AuthenticationFailed as e :
return AnonymousUser()
class TokenAuthMiddleware :
def __init__ (
#
self ,
inner ,
):
self.inner = inner
def __call__ (
#
self ,
scope ,
):
return TokenAuthMiddlewareInstance(scope, self)
TokenAuthMiddlewareStack = lambda inner: TokenAuthMiddleware(AuthMiddlewareStack(inner))