External Web App Authentication from Salesforce - authentication

I am trying to build a Salesforce App Integration to a SAAS product we own. (say www.ABC.com). The app would have a simple Apex page to fetch files from Salesforce Objects and upload them on ABC.com.
For this to work, I want the users on salesforce to be registered users on ABC.com. They should be able to login into ABC.com from SFDC. However, I have a few concerns
OAuth - Although SFDC has this capability, I do not want to implement an Oauth Provider service on ABC.com.
Signed Request Authentication - Since, I want SFDC users to have an account on ABC.com, this strategy may not be helpful. Please correct me if you think I am wrong.
There would be a simple login apex page on SFDC which logs them in. ABC.com is then embedded into an iframe in the next view.
Any ideas on managing the session and cookies? Do I have to store the cookies in order to have a long lived connection to ABC.com so that users do not have to login every time they use the app. Thanks!

I had the same requirement and chose to use a signed request when calling my iframe.
When receiving the signed request, I validated that the request came from Salesforce and was signed by the shared secret.
You can then use a convention of mapping between SF users and abc.com users. For example, identical email account.
If so, you log in the user in abc.com.

Related

Vue.js + Django + Login with Microsoft

I have a SaaS application using Vue.JS as frontend and Django Rest Framework as backend. I use JWT tokens for authorizing between frontend and backend.
Now I want to add support for our customers to be able to sign in with their Microsoft accounts. So if the signed in user matches a user in our database, it is logged in to our application.
I've set up Azure B2C and can successfully log in and acquire a token in the Vue.JS application using msal library.
Then I send the token to backend server for verification. I use azure_ad_verify_token to verify the token, but I get an InvalidAuthorizationToken exception.
It seems to be working when the user is added to my organization's AD directory. But I would like to verify the token for any Microsoft user, then match it to users in our database. It would be too much work to manually add our customer's users to our AD directory. If it would be possible to add another organization/domain I guess that would be ok.
There's a lot of documentation regarding this but I always end up in examples for separate applications. Just to clearify flow I try to achieve.
The user clicks on login with microsoft
The user is redirected to Microsofts login page, approves my application for their organization
On requests sent to our backend, the token should be verified against Azure Active Directory using authorization class.
If the user's email exists in our database, the request is successful

What is the correct way to use OAuth for mobile and website consuming my own API?

I have a question more related to the way OAuth 2 is working but since using IdentityServer to implement OAuth I think it's relevant. I could not find an answer anywhere.
I'm building a website and a mobile app that consumes my own API. Each user of my app will have a username and password, that will give him access to the app/website and though the API to his information.
I'm not sure about the right way to handle the flow for user login:
On the website I have my own designed login form. I don't want to move the user to my auth server to login, and then have him approve the information he gives - he is the user on my system - I have access to all information - kida like facebook has a login and access to the informatio - they don't ask what you're willing to give them. So is implicit really the way for this?
On the mobile app I also have a login form and now I read here (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-native-apps-10) that the OAuth approach is to have the login in a WebView?? Doesn't look like facebook login is in a WebView on their mobile app.
The approach I was first lookin at is the Resource Owner. Users will login, get the token and the refresh token and can start working against my APIs. But storing my client_id and secret on the mobile app? on the website javascript files? doesn't feel right. I can of course make a call to an API that will mask those and be a proxy to the login process... but... (read #4).
In the future I would like to allow access for third-party developers. For them to allow login for users of my system I will use the implicit flow. Also, I plan for those developer accounts to have restricted API access (for example, the number of calls to the API will be limited by plan). What prevents those developers from asking for the username and password of their account on my system on their website, getting the response from my servers with the access token and refresh token, and using my API however they want, without restrictions, and having access to the entire user profile?
Lets say I'm sticking to the resource owner flow, receiving back from the server a token and a refresh token. What should I store on the mobile device and how? What should be stored in the browser and how? the refresh token? and each time he opens the app get a new updated token with that refresh token?
Edit
Just to clarify, because I find a lot of lectures and articles that explain the process from an API consumer point of view (ie. the third-party developer): I am the API owner and the auth server owner, I'm the owner of the user accounts (they are my users of my services), I'm also my own consumer (though the website and the mobile app), and in the future I want to enable third-party developers to allow my users to login with their accounts of my service (kinda like Facebook or Google)
You're correct that you shouldn't store the client_secret in your app, but I doubt you will get around storing the client_id. You could disable the consent screen for your app as well, and build a native login view. You need to store the access_token and the refresh_token on the device (maybe encrypted in a database) if you don't want the user to login everytime they use your app.
As for problem 4, you could do the following:
Embed the client_secret in your (web) app
Set up which hosts have access to your api on the IdentityServer
The IdentityServer generates a salt and sends it to the client
The client calculates a session_secret using hash(ip_address + session_salt)
The client uses the session_secret and the client_secret for the API call
Server validates the hash and client_secret
It's nearly impossible to completely prevent someone from using your API. But you should add various rate limiting methods, such as limiting IP addresses, API calls etc. But nothing will stop someone decompiling your app and accessing your client_id.

API oauth2 which grant type should I choose

I'm working on a personal project composed of an API and 4 clients (web, android, iOS, windows phone).
I'm using django-rest-framework and oauth2 toolkit on the API side and I wonder which grant_type would be more suitable in my situation.
I read somewhere that the implicit grant_type is appropriate for working with mobile clients.
I'm currently using the resource owner password credentials system.
My current workflow is:
The user creates an account on the API registration page (http://mysite/api/register) then gets redirected on the web client.
The user have to authenticate himself on the API from the web client (the secret and client ID are store in the web client). If the authentication is successful the access_token and refresh_token are both stored in the user session.
Each time the user want to access a page I verify if he is authenticated by requesting the API using his access_token. If the request fails, I retry with the refresh_token. If it's fails again I redirect the user on the auth page.
The user can use the API on a mobile client with the same account without extra manipulations (the secret and client ID are store in a secure location ex. share preferences or keychain)
I like this workflow, it's simple and convenient for the user: he registers once and can use all the clients and I get a perfect separation between the logic (API) and the UI (client). But I'm worried about the security of this system. I don't want to expose my users to threats. Do you guys have any thoughts, recommendations, suggestions?
You help in this matters would be very appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

How does SE's single signon work?

Basically I just want to know how does StackExchange's single signon system work?
In the SE network you need to login only once in one of the websites to be automatically logged in to the other sites upon visiting.
How should I implement such a feature in my own network of sites?
I assume it uses the cookie which resides on the user's browser and then authenticates it with the originating site. If it is legit then it logs the user in automatically.
You have to implement SAML or oauth2 to allow sso on your network.
In case of SAML your child websites will be service providers or resource servers.
While you need to setup and identity provider.
The sequence of events will be like this.
1. User hits a url of songs website, this site is resource server and does not handle authentication.
2.To authenticate resource server will construct a SAML authrequest and redirects to identity provider after signing it.
Idp verifies the signature after receiving authrequest.
3. User will be presented with a login form, user has to end login credentials.
4. After user authentication idp will generate a SAMl token and redirect back to resource server.
5. Resource server will extract identity information from SAML token, resource server will login the user with session or cookie.
Depends upon which technology you are working in i have implemented it in php using simplesamlphp.

Login to Single Page Application with Google authentication and Google Oauth 2.0

We are developing an SPA - full client base javascript application and need to authenticate our users to get access to the internals.
As I found from the search we can outsource our authentication mechanism and use Google accounts for that. I learned from this site
https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2Login -
How to deal with Google API and mechanism for authentication.
In the short word, we need:
send request to google url with params to ask user to allow SPA use their personal data
in case of success we get a token from Google
we may use this token to get access to API we were asked and work with it.
This is described well and I understand it and have some JS code to make it happen.
What I do not understand.
I have an application with it's private data. I want use user's e-mail as the login, or user id (doesn't matter how to call it) to access app's internals, such as user's created tasks, user's profile, etc. So, to display user's created tasks in my SPA I need query database with the user's e-mail.
I imagine the next scenario:
user click Login with Google button
we obtain an token - this means user was authenticated successfully
we persist user and his e-mail to work with SPA
when user click Logout we clear all access data
Where should I persist this data?
In case of Forms Authentication I understand that we pass login/password to server and if they match the database we create Forms Ticket and store it in cookie.
Is there any similar case with Google's auth? If I'll store user's email in cookie I think that's not very good from security reason. If I'll save a token - I'm not sure why I need it and how to use it in my SPA, I'm not using any Google API after authentication.
Do you have any example case how do we build our process in similar cases?
Thank you.
If all you need is the user's email address, then you would be better off using OpenID instead of OAuth. OAuth provides access to a user's account and services, scoped to a specific resource or set of resources. OpendID is designed just for logging into a third-party service. You can then extract the user's ID and email address from the OpenID login. Note: The ID will always be sent but the email address has to be explicitly requested during authentication.
Google also supports a hybrid OpenID+OAuth scheme that lets you piggyback OAuth requests on top of an OpenID login if there is some resource you need to authenticate to. Take a look at the authentication document to get an idea of how both protocols work and which is better for your scenario.
Once you have the email address returned, you probably shouldn't persist it in a cookie. The normally recommended way to handle it is to add it as a session parameter. That way only the session cookie is stored on the client, and the server can use it find the values it needs. This answer has a good explanation of the differences and when you want to use sessions versus cookies.