Planning on creating a Google Assistant Application that allows our customers to access business data. The problem I am having is understanding how a given user would link his account to his "instance" of our multi-tenant solution. I think the deeper problem is know which Tenant URL to associate with a particular account. I know I can implement the Accounting linking using Oauth, I have just yet to see how this could work with a single Assistant App accessing multiple tenants depending upon account.
You can get additional info from the user, by asking him, and save that in your context, and then you can request for a sign in. this way, during the sign in process, you can use the context to sign in the user into the proper tenant
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i am making a set of applications that share a common oidc provider (in my control), where the users will be created.
One of my applications is a stateless SPA "meeting" app where you can schedule meetings with other users, and you login purely by an OIDC token.
I am having a hard time thinking a strategy about the following
Should the "user" details be stored in the meeting app after a login? So let's say user A exists in the provider, then enters the meeting app. Should i save user A in the meeting app DB?
How to handle change of user details? Let's say user A changes name to User B in the provider. Until he logs in again, all the other users see him as User A still in the "contacts" list. What is the usual practice for solving this?
How to handle deletions in the provider. I need someway to signal that "deleted in provider -> deleted in app". Should i constantly poll the provider and get any missing users, create a push system, or is this just unneeded?
Thanks a lot in advance
That's actually a very good question and rarely explained well in online articles. Hopefully the below detailed notes help you with your solution. I have answered your questions at the end.
OAUTH USER DATA
Typically the core user data such as name, email etc belongs in the Authorization Server. It contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and changes are audited there. This is explored in further detail in the Privacy and GDPR article.
DOMAIN SPECIFIC USER DATA
This might include fields like a user's application preferences, and you may end up with data similar to this in your APIs:
Field
Description
id
A database surrogate key for the user
subject
The subject claim from an OAuth access token, which is typically a GUID or something similar
archived
A boolean flag set to true when a user is active in the app
field 1
A domain specific value
field 2
A domain specific value
To get OAuth user data within your applications your APIs can call the Authorization Server's SCIM 2.0 endpoint as described in this User Management article.
AUTHORIZATION AND ROLES
Interestingly, roles and application specific rights could be stored in either of the above data sources. You may want to start by putting roles in the OAuth data, but for cases where they are very domain specific and change often, I have found that storing them in my own API data works best.
DOMAIN SPECIFIC USER DATA AND ACCESS TOKENS
Sometimes you need to include domain specific user data (which might include roles) in access tokens. This Claims Article explains how claims can be looked up from external APIs during token issuance. This typically involves a REST call from the Authorization Server to one or more APIs, providing the subject value for which tokens will be issued.
CONSISTENT USER IDENTITY IN YOUR APPS
A user can potentially authenticate in multiple ways, such as default password / corporate login / social login. You may need to use some custom Account Linking logic to ensure that the subject field in the access token gets the same value in all cases. This prevents you ever creating duplicate users within your application.
USER INFO CHANGES
These are typically made by end users within an application screen, and your APIs then call SCIM endpoints to update the core OAuth data. A common case is when a user changes their name and / or email, eg if the user gets married. Note that the subject value remains the same after this edit.
USER ADMINISTRATION
In scenarios where corporate assets are used, an administrator typically provisions users, either individually or in bulk. This can be done via the SCIM endpoint. In some cases administrator actions may need to save data to both data sources - eg to create a user and set roles + application preferences.
USER INFO EVENTS
Sometimes your application needs to know about a user info event, such as new, deleted or changed users. This can be managed via Event Listeners, where an extension to the Authorization Server calls back your domain specific APIs when a user edit occurs. When a user is deleted in the OAuth user data you might then update the user's application state to archived.
DATA MIGRATIONS
Finally it is worth mentioning that the above also supports migrating to an OAuth architecture or between providers:
Get a combined view of the user data before migration
Insert all existing users into the new OAuth system via SCIM
Update the combined view of the user data with new subject values
Update your domain specific data with new subject values
SUMMARY
So to answer your questions:
Aim to avoid this because it adds complexity, though in some cases you may need to denormalise for performance reasons. The OAuth user data should remain the source of truth and the only place where edits occur to PII data.
Your meeting app would need to join on the OAuth user data and domain specific user data and present a list. This would probably involve caching a combined view of the user data.
See Administrator Events above. Your API should be informed of OAuth user data changes via an event, then your SPA would get current data on the next refresh.
When implemented like this you end up with simple code and a well defined architecture. Some providers may not provide all of these features though, in which case you may need an alternative approach to some areas.
I have an interesting use case for you today.
My team and I are building a free, third party, calculator tool that enables users to calculate metrics using their store's data.
We are looking for ways to pull in the necessary data and perform the calculation to show users... so far the best we've come up with is asking the users to export a report from Shopify and upload it into our application.
Looking for a user experience similar to this:
User opens our tool, application is hosted on custom-domain.com
Somehow the user authenticates or logins in to Shopify, or approves our app temporary access to their data.
Our app performs the calculation for the user, ending data access
Any ideas as to how this authentication or access of data can be facilitated? Shopify doesn't seem to have a 'login with Google' kind of authentication button.
Thanks!
There are two modes for authenticated access, namely Online and Offline. What you need in this scenario is Online Access.
From Shopify Docs
Tokens with online access mode are linked to an individual user on a
store, where the access token's lifespan matches the lifespan of the
user's web session. This type of access mode is meant to be used when
a user is interacting with your app through the web, or when an app
must respect an individual user's permission level.This access mode
must be explicitly requested in the authorization phase.
It should also fulfill your needs related to ending data access.
An access token created with this access mode is temporary, and is guaranteed to expire after some amount of time.
When a user logs out of Shopify admin, all online mode access tokens created during the same web session are revoked.
Once you have the access token, you can use Shopify API to query data so that your users don't have to upload any files manually.
Suppose that I have a web application. Consider it like a Black-Box for now. I want to use a backend system to limit what a user can view/do on the app.
i.e. Sample users can only do three functions, Premium users can do 10 functions and see more pictures.
What is the best way to do it?
I'm trying to using WSO2 Identity Server, but it doesn't offer this functionality. So I've thought that maybe I can integrate it with the WSO2 API Manager and make an API that limits users' access to a certain resource. But really I cannot find if it's possible do it. Anyone know it?
Please refer to : https://docs.wso2.com/display/IS530/Access+Control+Concepts
1) WSO2IS can act as a coarse grained access manager. Your application will act as a fine grained access mnager.
It means that roles can be defined in WSO2IS, managed and assigned to user. From there Roles assigned to one user can be provided as clains with the identity token generated by WSO2IS and sent to the application.
The application, on the other side, will manage roles to permissions links.
Access control is then done at each request by the application, based on the roles presented in the Identity Token by the user and the Permissions grid based on roles in the application.
2) The access control at the application is a business logic you must implement (or at least configure if it a COTS). It is possible to outsource this logic to WSO2IS as policies on attribute (with Workflows).
Please look at : https://docs.wso2.com/display/IS530/XACML+Architecture
Jeff
I'm trying to create a website to authenticate users through the use of a throwaway password where the assumption is that the user might not use the website again (basically a one time access).
I have done my research on OTP and various solutions to authentication but these don't seem to fit my requirements, most of them seem to rely on users having login credentials to the website whereas my system would allow them access without the need for registering.
The implementation of passwordless authentication by Auth0 seems to fit what you're describing. Even if you were not considering a third-party provider it may be useful to go through the documentation.
Basically, a user can login to a site without any need for a sign-up process. They can do so just by requesting that a one time code is delivered to them, for example, either by email or SMS.
This way, they can get quick access without having to setup a user and in the event that they do come back your application can recognize this because they will most likely be using the same mechanism, that is, you can use the email or mobile phone as the unique identifier.
Disclosure: I'm an Auth0 engineer.
If you do not require your users to register, why do you need authentication at all?
Why not just set a cookie with an unique identifier on the first visit? You can store data at the server side associated with that identifier. Keep track of when you last saw the user, and if they do not return within a certain period, you can delete any data you stored for that user.
Suppose I have a working REST API for my product.
I want to give access only to developers who sign up to this product. Also, there will be several plans available so certain parts of the API are not accessible on the free plan.
From the grant types I've seen only the client-credentials one seems to be the closest solution. However that won't authenticate the developer account stored in my product db, it will only get an access token for that client. The user won't actually be 'logged in' per se. Add to that the fact that a single client can be reused by everyone, according to implementations I've seen.
The only way I see is creating a custom grant type, by adding an extra api_key to the client credentials type, which pertains to the developer account.
Is there a way to do this with the existing grant types? Introducing custom types will not work with many oAuth2 libraries out there out of the box and I don't want to give the developers the hassle of modifying them.
I don't think you have to invent a custom grant type.
A single client can be reused by everyone only if everyone knows the client secret.
So, it seems that what you have to do is (1) to authenticate a developer when you issue a pair of client ID and client secret to the developer and (2) to motivate the developer not to reveal the client secret to others.