If I'm using JWT to authenticate users to get access to my API, would it be possible to create one "generic" account for many users to use? That way, users who don't have a "real" account, would be given this generic account credentials in order to access the API. Would that be possible? Because, I'm wondering, with JWT, if one users log in, would I invalidate the other user token?
If that approach would not work, what would you recommend?
The reason: I want my app to communicate with my server, even if the user doesn't have an account created. But I would not like to keep that "door" open, hence I would like to add some kind of authentication for those people who are using the app but don't have an account. Suggestions?
Create accounts connected with accountgroups. This way you are also able to create temporary accounts having less permissions for example. And multiple clients are able to access same data and same time.
So the Payload is owned by the accountgroup, the client authenticates with a (maybe temporary) account and gets authorization via accountgroup.
Related
Let's say a user makes a purchase. Is it somehow possible to detect that a user is the same person on a different device when using Cognito User pools with federated identities that allow guest access?
I don't want my users to have to provide an email address, but I want to know what is the most reliable way I can ensure they have the most access possible to any in app purchases they make.
Currently it seems not possible to do it.
The situation you described is like unauthenticated, so you will just get an identity id and that is always some random uuids to exchange for credentials.
Account Linking provides several ways of linking users to their own accounts such as their Google account or Twitter account.
I chose OAuth in Actions on Google website to do OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Grant for obtaining access token in exchange for data resources. When I linked a user to a Google account Google Sign-In enabled, the fetching of user information was easy because the data is stored under payload, but OAuth implementation does not seem like it produces user data under payload inside User object.
So should I make an API call to the third party to fetch the user data and store that personal data to a database in this case? I wondered if there is a way that Google prepares on behalf of developers. If not, then greeting a user who visits my app again by saying 'Hello, {person name}' gets tedious...
You have two options with Account Linking.
In the case you describe, you're providing an OAuth endpoint and getting an auth token from the Assistant, and you are responsible for taking this token and using it to determine who the user is so you can get whatever you know about him. The token is one that you issue and control, so presumably you have that info in your database already. If you are reusing a token from another service, that service should be able to tell you who they are.
It sounds like you're using using a Google Sign In, however, in which case it is easier to use Google Sign In for Assistant. Once the user has signed into your service (either through an app or webapp) and granted permission to your service, then they will also be able to gain access through the Assistant. You will get an id token which can be decoded to get profile information about the user including their Google ID and name.
I'm trying to work out how to structure a database schema that allows me to have multiple authentication sources for the same end-user.
For example, my web app would require users to sign in to utilize many of the functionality of features of the app. However, I do not want to be responsible for storing and authenticating user passwords.
I would like to outsource this responsibility to Google, Facebook, Twitter and similar identity providers.
So I would still need a database table of users, but no column for a password. However, these are authenticated would not be my concern. But I would still need to somehow associate my user with the identity providers user id. For example, if my user signs up with Google, I would store the users Google ID and associate this with my user. Meaning next time the user makes an attempt to login and is successfully authenticated at Google, I would make an attempt to find any user in my system that has this associated user id.
I've been trying to look for some common and recommended database structures, with no luck. Maybe I'm searching for the wrong terms for this because I cannot imagine that this is an uncommon way to do it. StackOverflow seems to do something similar.
The way I imagine it, it would allow me to associated multiple authentication sources for one app user. Meaning once I've signed up with Google, I can go to my settings and associate another account, for example, a Facebook account.
How should I go about achieving this in a flexible and clean way?
Thanks.
You need to know what data you have to save in your db to authenticate a user with a third party login.
For example, once I used Google to login users in my app, I save Google user id first time a user logs in and get data the next time.
You could have an entity with third party providers, so you will create a table with 2 values, user_id (your user data) and provider_id (Google, facebook, twitter...).
If you are going to use just one provider then you could add provider_id field to your users table.
I am trying to build a pure JavaScript rest-client application that must support anonymous retrieval of information from a REST server that already supports JWT for authentication/authorization for external applications. The server is already being used by other client applications supporting multi-tenancy. Actually embedding the tenant information in the JWT.
Besides that the application needs to support users(human beings) that will want to mark(or select) some resources as favorites so a mechanism is needed for users/role creation and further authentication/authorization for the users. But these users can't be isolated to a single tenant, they will want to use across tenant resources.
So, right now I found that I need to use a JWT value for the anonymous data retrieval that of course should be tenant-agnostic. This means that I have to create an user with a special role that just have permissions for read only resources, except for the permissions for user creation (when the clients do sign up) again this should be tenant-agnostic. And when the user log-in into the system the JWT should be replaced for the one that have the user credentials again tenant agnostic. I am not sure if this is entirely correct, so how should we handle a situation like this ?
My other concern is, that we have the same back-end supporting authentication and credentials storage for human clients (tenant-agnostic) and application clients (tenant-aware), so there is logic that is a little bit more complicated in order to handle the privileges and tenant restrictions here. This could be just my impression but I feel that there should be a separation between application users and human users in the logic and/or data store.
But I am not completely sure and I want to know if some of you have previous experience or could have some ideas about this topic ?
Can you try the following approach, Create the users, assign the users with a read-only role for the tenants to which they need access to.
The data would be like
User1 - tenant1 - administrative role
User1 - tenant2 - data reader role
User1 - tenant 3 - user role
In the jwt, we ensure that the user is authorized. Then we get the list of accessible tenants and see if he has access to the requested tenant data w.r.to the above data and then complete the authorization.
HTH
I plan to use IdentityServer 4 on ASP.NET Core with ASP.NET Identity as the data store. This is the first time I use a central authentication/authorization and I am wondering how to solve the following question:
Assume I have users with claims like name, role etc. and a Web API (scope) that allows these users access to measured values from hardware devices. IdentityServer will allow me to authenticate known users but now I need an access control that knows which users may access which device data.
Where do I store this information? Since it is specific to the scope I guess it should not be stored in the IdentityServers store. On the other hand, if I store it in the scopes own database I somehow need to connect it to the users defined in the IdentityServers store. Should I define user IDs that are unique to all scopes and IdentityServer?
You will need to correlate the User Ids that IdentiyServer returns with users defined in the scope's database.
I believe that there is a User table and a UserLogin table where you could track the different logins for each of your users.
Then, in the scope's database, you can then specify which users have access to what device data.
This is a bad idea and will probably lead you down a road that you should not.
This means that your client application requesting the scopes will need to know which user has access to which scopes even before requesting a token from your IDP (otherwise your token request will not work). Rather model these as user claims. Then on your WebApi you can do normal claim based authorization.