Currently, I'm working on a REST API which will be available for public clients but also I wanted to use it in my mobile application.
For the public clients, I considered to use the Clients Credentials grant, in this case, they would have to registered their app in my Web application which will give them the client key and client secret, then, they could request the access token with them and also I could know the user related to the credentials
But with my mobile application, I'll need to have a sign in section where I would need to use Authorization Code grant in order to secure my data, but I'm not sure if it's necessary.
Based on this, I have a couple of questions:
1. The Authorization Code grant it's the best way to do it?
2. It's a bad practice to have two authorization flows in the same endpoint?
3. Dropbox, Twitter, etc...all of them have REST API, how do they manage authorization in their own apps?
Thanks beforehand and sorry for all questions
I managed to solve this with two alternatives and for the moment, I'm going with the first one.
Create an Authorization server with a parameter that indicates what kind of Authorization Grant it's asking to use and in this way I can decide which kind of flow will follow based on this. I follow the OAuth 2.0 Spec for this using the correct names and parameters to pass in order to have a good way to authenticate our clients and applications.
Create an API gateway where I can send all the authentication requests for my API's using Node.js and in there it will be decided which API it's asking for authentication and with kind of Authorization Grant it's using. You can have more information about this in here:
https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-using-an-api-gateway/
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I am building a restful API that allows users to access and manage their own resources programmatically (via CURL/HTTP) instead of using the dashboard we provide.
I have my own authorization server and resource servers so there is no 3rd party involved. I am torn between using OAuth 2.0 and simple API Keys. OAuth 2.0 seems like an overkill, yet I don't want to release a public API then change the authorization method in the future.
Is it possible to build a hybrid solution where users can log-in to the dashboard, generate a "refresh-token", specify the scope, then copy this refresh-token and use it in their own code to call the /token endpoint and get an access token?
This would be similar to OAuth 2.0 except that the authorization step is done directly by the authenticated user on the 1st party dashboard. Is this a legitimate solution? Do you have any other recommendations?
OAuth2 is to outsource user/password/MFA management, integration with social logins. You seem to manage users in your dashboard already. On that basis, issuing a manual access token as you described works, provided you sign it and the verify signature in the api/resource servers.
I have a background task that runs periodically which needs to connect to a customer's Apigee OAuth2 protected API. From my understanding of OAuth2, a user must go to a sign in page on Apigee, and it will redirect to a return Url with a token. This is the way I have used previously on website projects. But in this scenario, there are no users, no website, and no return Url, it is just some code making a http request.
Is the above possible to do? Every google search I make is all about users logging in manually and getting a token to a return url.
I found some mention of 'Flows' and maybe there is some other 'Flow'? but its really hard to get a clear understanding of how it works because guides are focused on user interactive websites.
OAUTH 2.0 is an industry-standard for authorization. OAUTH 2.0 supports many authorization grant types, namely they are;
Authorization Code
Implicit
Resource Owner Password Credentials
Client Credentials
[Note that you may come up with your own custom grants as well if you are building or extending your authorization server - however it is beyond the scope of this question]
In the example you have provided, you are using the Authorization code grant type where you redirect to APIGEE and getting an authorization code. The APIGE server acts as the "intermediary between the client and resource owner" in OAUTH 2.0 terms.
For your new requirement, you should consider using the client-credentials grant type where the client is provided a client key and a secret. The client has the responsibility of calling the authorization server (like APIGEE in your previous example or anything else) and getting a token and then using that token in the subsequent requests.
I recommend you to read the ietf standard for oauth 2.0 to get a better understanding - Refer https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6749.
Make sure to read on "Roles" in this link well before diving onto the content of this document.
Good luck!
I've implemented the oauth2-server which is awesome (but sometimes unclear) library. The problem is however, separate from oauth clients I also have users who just need to login. Do they do this with another grant then the authorization_code? If so which one?
Currently I'm doing this via my one-page application via a http POST request with username and password. Should i use the password grant for this? If so do I need to create an oauth client for my front-end application? (this just seems weird)
Basically, the oAuth authorization server supports 2 endpoints according to the spec: /authorize and /token. But if you need another capability, which is totally not related to the oAuth flow, you can add another API for that.
All other grants that you mentioned are related to different flows. The login support is not one of them.
So what I would do is add another HTTP API to support a simple login. This API get user and password (depends how you implemented your DB access - I assume that the passwords are stored in your DB encrypted, to your API should get an encrypted API as well, etc...)
BTW i have this GitHub repo https://github.com/OhadR/RESTful-login with a sample code how to perform (and use) restful login
I am currently being tasked with writing an RESTful API that we are going to release to our clients. I plan to use Web API 2 with OWIN middleware. The applications that will be accessing this can range anywhere from a Console app with no additional user authentication to full blow web applications that will involve user login and authentication.
One other requirement is that we need not only provide user authentication to control what data we will return, we also need to authenticate that the application accessing our API is allowed by our organization. So this requires us to not only validate the application invoking our API's but also the many users logging in via that application.
The goal is to use a bearer token technology like OAuth 2. I am not very familiar with OAuth 2 but after looking it over I don't see a way to facilitate a two part authentication like this. Ideally we would like to issue a clientId and a clientPassword and they would pass this in along with the userid and userpassword and we would then pass a token back.
Is this something that anyone has tackled before using OAuth2 or is this a job for a custom auth solution?
What you describe sounds like fairly standard Oauth2.0 scenarios so you shouldn't need anything custom.
For the web apps you could use the Resource Owners Password Credentials Grant. Which is a standard flow.
This allows your Oauth client to pass in its client Id and client secret along with a user's Id and password to your Auth Server which can then validate both the user and the client before issuing a token in response.
But I would recommend using the Authorization Code Grant which is probably the best option for web applications and it involves both the client and the user being effectively authenticated.
For you console apps, or any apps which are not user specific, you can use the Client Credentials Grant. This allows the app to authenticate and to get a token without a user.
If you need your API to be aware of the client application, the only flow you can't really use is the Implicit Grant which doesn't authenticate the client.
I am working on an internal authentication system for users of a set of of RESTful web applications. Our intention is that a user should be able to sign-on once via a web form and have appropriate access to all these RESTful applications in our domain, which may be distributed in a private cloud across many servers. (I understand already that having a single authenticated session is not aligned with a pure RESTful approach, but this is a usability requirement.)
The applications themselves will be written in a variety of programming languages so a language-neutral approach is required. It was suggested to me that we might use OpenID or OAuth or a similar framework to handle the authentication but my understanding is that these are intended for third-party services and not the first-party services that would share data on our internal system. In this case, we might have a central provider service with all the other applications treated as third parties (or relying parties).
Questions:
Are OpenID/OAuth suitable for authentication among first-party services?
If so, how would one be advised to set up authentication for this use case?
Wouldn't a user have to grant individual permission to each first-party server that they wanted to use, just as they would need to grant individual permission to any third-party server? I think this would violate the requirement of having a single sign-on for accessing all the first-party services.
Are there good examples of sites supporting this first-party use case?
What would be a good alternative framework for this first-party use case?
You do not need OAuth for SSO services.
The primary use/advantage of OAuth is, as you know already, granting access to a 3rd party app to access/use your resource in a controlled manner.
Rather than having an authentication/authorization server that you would need for OAuth, why not use a single log in service across all your APIs. An OAuth access token is totally different from what you need.
As far as I understand, what you can have is something like OAuth in a way that your server vends out tokens to the app. (I'm assuming that it's a totally internal system, so tokens cannot be misused).
So basically what I'm proposing is:
When an app tries to access the first API it's redirected to a web-form.
The user enters credentials and is taken to the DB for verification. Let there be a service that generates a token for the user/app
Next API access request would be made with that token - the token uniquely identifies the app
Depending on the level of security you need you can sign some text using HMAC and send it as token, or if its totally internal just generate a unique identifier for the app/user and send it to other API
On receiving the token, each service first calls the main server with the token and internally fetches the corresponding customer/user ID and performs the required function.
In short separate the login + token generation + token verification into a different module. All APIs should use this module for login/token verification.
What I have proposed here works like OAuth but all security aspects have been stripped down since you want to use it in a private cloud.
Oauth supports multiple different kinds of flows. You can use the client crendentials flow from Oauth 2.0 to avoid asking the user to grant permission for every app (this is intended for the cases where you control both the server and the app or where you want to preauthorize certain apps). This post does a good job explaining everything: http://tatiyants.com/using-oauth-to-protect-internal-rest-api/