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.
Related
This question is has a lot in common to the previous question Google OAuth: can't get refresh token with authorization code (and I won't be offended if it's considered a duplicate) but there are some differences: that question uses the Javascript and PHP libraries, and I'm using neither of those. That question wants to know how to get a refresh token, and I want to know if I should want a refresh token, or how the mode with no refresh tokens is intended to work.
I'm following this guide:
https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2WebServer
The goal is to allow users to upload files from Google Drive to my web application.
I'm not using one of Google's favored programming languages, so I don't have a library abstracting away all the interaction with Google. I need to know what the HTTP requests should actually should look like.
One of the parameters in the authorization request is access_type. The description says
Set the value to offline if your application needs to refresh access tokens when the user is not present at the browser.
I won't need to do that (I'll only want to retrieve a file on my server immediately after the user selects it) so in the spirit of not asking for more privileges than you really need, I used access_type=online. This gives me an access token and no refresh token. I've successfully used the access token to make some requests to Google Drive.
The user comes back the next day and tries to upload another file. While processing this request from the user, I make a request to Google Drive. The access token is expired, so I get a 401. What's supposed to happen next?
My guess is I should pretend this is a completely new user and send them through the full authorization process again. That would mean I have to abort whatever the user was trying to do, redirect them to https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth with all the parameters (scope, client_id, etc.) and embed enough information in the state parameter that I can resume the original request when the user gets back from their detour.
This seems rather difficult (in particular the part about saving and resuming the state of my application at some arbitrary point). It's a big enough obstacle that it should be explained somewhere. But the description of the access_type parameter didn't say anything about needing to insert authorization redirects everywhere. It just said the user must be "present".
You are using the right implementation. You don't need offline access if you aren't going to make requests when the user is not using the application. The thing is that access tokens expire in 1 hour. So you need to generate new access tokens if a user leaves the application and come back later.
If users have authorized your application, calling this URL with your configuration should return a new valid access token:
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth?
scope=scopes&
include_granted_scopes=true&
state=state_parameter_passthrough_value&
redirect_uri=http://oauth2.example.com/callback&
response_type=token&
client_id=client_id
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.
I'm working on an internal website for the company I work for. The website will be only available to company staff. We use Google Apps for Business, so we would like authentication to be done using our google accounts.
I've gone through 'google sign in' samples from here: https://developers.google.com/+/
It works, but the problem we run into is that it requires the user to sign up to Google+. This is a speed bump we would prefer not to have.
Are there any ways around this? Thanks.
It shouldn't be too hard to roll your own sign in using the lower levels of Oauth, eg 'email' scope. It's hard to give a more specific answer because it depends on your architecture (eg. are you predominantly server-side or client-side) and what kind of session do you want to create by the sign in process. For example, if you are client/REST based, you probably don't want any session at all as REST encourages statelessness. On the other hand, if you are more web based, serving static pages, you will want a session.
In simple terms, you will be doing something that generates an access token, and then processing that access token to determine the email address (or Google ID) of the person who created it. You will then establish some sort of session (eg. using session cookies) that identifies future requests from that user.
Feel free to add some more detail to your architecture and I'll try to finesse the answer.
For simple http servlet sessions, it will be something like.
User requests a protected page
servlet detects that there is no session and/or session has no authenticated user
servlet redirects to an Oauth page to request an access code. something like
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?redirect_uri=xxx&response_type=code&client_id=zz&approval_prompt=auto&scope=email
NB research the exact URL, don't rely on this to be exact
If the user isn't logged on, he'll be prompted; if he has multiple logins, he'll be prompted; if he hasn't yet granted email access, he'll be prompted. If none of these conditions are met (the normal case) he won't see anything.
Browser will redirect to the redirect_uri, carrying an access token (or an auth code if this is the first time the user has used the app)
Post the token to the Google userinfo endpoint, and you will receive a decode containing the email address
Store the email into a session object (or retrieve your own user object and store that)
redirect back to the originally requested page. You can use the OAuth state parameter to pass that around
et voila. all future page requests from that user will be within a session containing some user identification.
NB This is just an outline and I may even have missed a step. You will still need to do your own OAuth research.
Apparently not:
(..) if a Google user who has not upgraded to a Google+ account clicks
on the Sign in with Google+ button, the same consent dialog that opens
will take the user into an account upgrade flow.
Weirdly the docs for OAuth2 states:
Google+ Sign-In works for all users with a Google account, whether or
not they have upgraded to Google+.
I was reading through the windows live developers doc here. In that I saw they are having an authentication method something like this.
GET https://oauth.live.com/authorize?client_id=CLIENT_ID&scope=SCOPES&
response_type=RESPONSE_TYPE&redirect_uri=REDIRECT_URL
I understood everything except for where do I give the username and password of the user?
I am planning to create an app(first one in my life) to learn the working.
I also have never used or coded something over REST.
When using OAuth, your application never receives the user's username or password. Rather, the user logs in to Windows Live on the Windows Live servers and authorizes your application for access to their information. After they have authorized your application, you receive an access token from Windows Live on behalf of the user. You then use that access token with the Live API to retrieve user information.
Coding something using REST protocols isn't anything too terribly complicated. It has been my experience that you're just specifying parameters to the API using GET or POST as your request method. Adding OAuth on to your requests is a matter of specifying additional parameters.
You're task is to learn two things here since you've never done REST or OAUTH before. Spend time looking at both.
Oauth is hard to get and hard to implement.
You should choose an off-the-shelf Oauth library they exists for most languages.
(Then you do not have to worry about the details. OTOH: You should know how it works to know how to set up and fix if something goes wrong.)
http://oauth.net/code/
Which are the steps must I follow to implement a token authentication in my web page?
Any summary or links will be appreciated.
I want to implement similar to Facebook or Google, first time client loggin and receive token and then use it in next actions.
I read also about OAuth but I don't want to give access to my application from 3rd party.
Thanks for the long response and it seems clear to me I need to read more about this.
What I want is to know the "steps" to implement a basic web application that uses token authentication. That is user logging once and then can make some actions: add content, edit, etc.
I know what I'm saying is similar to a session, where server adds a SESSION_ID on the HTML header and later request are identified and associated with that session. I read sessions way isn't good to scale so I want to implement a similar system like gmail or facebook before they go to OAuth. Probably I'm talking about something similar to oauth (i don't read in much depth) but witj two-legged instead three-legged.
You should think about your requirements, pick an appropriate protocol and some decent piece of software that implements it.
It's really hard to say more without more details:
are you talking about authentication for one or for multiple web applications? do you need single sign on between different web applications?
should all user data be stored on your server or should user be able to login e.g. with the google account?
should the token contain informations about the user?
on what platform are your applications developed?
what authentication method should be used?
do you want to realize a portal?
There is a really wide range of protocols and tools which might or might not fit to your requirements:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Authentication_methods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Identity_management_systems
I personally like CAS ( http://www.jasig.org/cas) for token-base SSO between multiple web applications. It's Java based but also has some support for PHP and .Net.
OpenID is fine, if you want to allow users to login with their Google, Yahoo, whatever account (configurable...) and don't want to store user information by yourself.
Kerberos/SPNEGO is the way to go if you want to haven integrated windows-sso for your corporate intranet applications.
For university applications SAML/Shibboleth probably is best. Outside universities it's somewhat less popular, probably cause it's a fairly complex protocol.
Oh and I almost forget: Most of the web frameworks/standards have there own version of plain-old "form based authentication". Where a user goes to a login form enters its username and password. Both are with or without SSL transported to the web/application server. The server validates it against some kind of database and gives a cookie to the user, which is transmitted and validated every time the user sends a request. But beside all this shiny protocols this seems to be pretty boring :-)
And before doing anything with web authentication, you might think for a moment about web security in general ( http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2010/04/11/internet-security-is-a-failure/ http://www.eff.org/files/DefconSSLiverse.pdf) and what you can do to not make it even worse on your site ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/protecting-your-cookies-httponly.html http://owasptop10.googlecode.com/files/OWASP%20Top%2010%20-%202010.pdf).
see your point.
On the protocol level a very simplistic token approach is HTTP Basic Authentication. But this often doesn't fit, as there is no logout function etc.
A custom, simple cookie based approach can for example look like this:
The server generates some kind of secret (a value that is hard to guess)
When a user tries to access a protected resource, he is redirected to a login form
after successful authentication he gets a cookie. This cookie contains three values: username, timestamp and a hash of {username server-secret timestamp}.
with every user request the server recalculates the hash values and compares it to the value which the client sends in its cookie
(needs more consideration of: httponly and secure flag, transport layer security, replay attacks etc)
Amazon S3 stores its authentication token in an HTTP Header and uses HMAC for calculating it. It's described here: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/index.html?S3_Authentication.html (Not necessarily recommended for using with a browser based web application)
If there is a book about REST anywhere near you, you may look if it has a chapter about authentication. Probably things are much nicer explained there than here :-)
There are some frameworks which are capable of doing this kind of authentication. For security reasons it would make sense to check them first before implementing your own stuff.