Application Specific Password issues - passwords

I'd like to implement 2-factor authentication for a google account but also need to connect to Google services in various scripts.
Does each script require its own ASP? How does Google define what an "application" is?
If two people run the same script from different machines will they each need a unique ASP?

You should never embed passwords in code.
Instead, you should use OAuth to get a token that grants permission to perform the appropriate actions.
This is the preferred way to use services from code, and should be supported by all Google APIs.
The answer to your question is whatever you want.
The point of having multiple app-specific passwords is to allow you to revoke one of them without affecting others (in case one device gets stolen).
You can use each password as many times as you want.

Related

Restrict access of a connected app (Salesforce)

What is the best way to restrict the scope of a connected app to a set of objects? My current solution is to use the Manage user data via APIs scope but that still grants more access than required.
A solution I see frequently is to create a user with a restricted profile and connect with that user but then you lose context of actions made by users in the connected app so this solution doesn't work
Tricky, you typically don't. (consider posting on https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/, there might be a clever way I didn't think of).
You can flip the connected app from "all users can self authorise" to "admin-approved users are preauthorised" and then allow only certain profiles / permission sets to use the app. But the bulk of it is "just" enabling the connection via API and cutting it to say Chatter only or OpenId identifiers. And that's already an improvement compared to SOAP APIs where you don't have scopes and the app can completely impersonate the user, do everything they can do in UI.
Profiles/permission sets/sharing rules are "the" way even in not immediately obvious situations like Lighting Connect Salesforce to Salesforce or Named Credentials access to another org.
If you can't restrict the visibility with profiles and access to all tables user can see is not acceptable...
you could create series of Apex classes exposing certain queries, updates etc and grant profile access to these classes - but without full api access? You could even let them pass any SOQL (evil) but use with sharing, WITH SECURITY_ENFORCED, stripInaccessible + custom restriction on tables before returning results
you could look into https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.238.0.apexref.meta/apexref/apex_class_Auth_ConnectedAppPlugin.htm although I suspect it's run only on connect, not on every request. So at best you could deny access if user has right to see some sensitive data, not great
if there are few objects you need to block updates if done via app - Quiddity might be the way to go. Throw error in a trigger if action started from REST context?
give the Transaction Security trailhead a go. If it looks promising (there's way to check "application" and "queried entities" according to this) - might be a solution. You'll likely have to cough up $ though, last time I checked the cool bits of event monitoring & transaction security were hidden behind an extra paid addon (standalone or bundled with platform encryption and Field Audit Track into Salesforce Shield solution)
2 logins? dedicated user for querying stuff but inserts/updates running as your end user?

How to implement a one time authentication mechanism?

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.

Single sign-on and user's file (web page content) access

I don't want to store passwords on my server and I don't want to force my end users to create yet another account, that's why I'd like to use single sign-on. I'm looking for a widely accepted solution for the authentication, I think about OpenID and OpenID Connect, the former seems to be more widespread but obsoleted and no longer used by Google, the latter seems to be faster (thanks to JSON?), safer but less widely adopted.
I'd like to share some documents on Internet. I want to control who can view them. I have looked at OwnCloud but it seems to be too much for my needs.
My website contains some photos and some articles, I want to show some of them to everybody, I want to show some of them only to my family and my best friends but not my colleagues, I want to show some of them to all logged users but not everybody and finally, I want to show some of them to … nobody.
I use Apache HTTP Server, I want to be able to manage file access rights for my end users with their own means of authentication. I have looked at mod_auth_oid and mod_auth_oid_file, it handles the authentication with OpenID 2.0, it allows to define a mapping between OpenID and local user ids. Does it mean that I still have to store a password for each local user anywhere on my server?
A graceful server restart is required in order to load new mapping definitions
It's a bit annoying as I don't want to restart the server each time I edit the mapping. It's unclear to me whether it is still true when using mod_auth_oid_ldap. I really need an open source software that I can install on my server and adapt to my needs. I plan to use openid-selector with the Apache modules I mentioned earlier and some JavaScript code to handle gracefully the display of the forbidden content. Am I missing a more obvious solution? I'm not a big fan of Facebook but is this bridge working?

Remote access to laravel models

Is it possible that a website uses the models of another lavarel website to access the database, without the first website having the sql credentials hardcoded. But with the credentials to log into the second lavarel website hardcoded.
This way the first website doesn't have to have the sql credentials on it's ftp server, but can still access the databases through the other website (with their personal login of that website).
If that is impossible, I am wondering, is there a way to access a databases without having to hardcode the credentials anywhere.
UPDATE (the actual problem)
Only a part of the database should be visible to a particular user, so i can provide different users with different credentials and they all see something different in the database
What you are talking about is an API. So you'd build out the entire infrastructure on the first website, then on the second website, it would make some kind of calls to the first website to get back the information it needs, usually using some kind of credentials or access token.
This way, you can allow anyone in the world to communicate with your website, kind of like how Facebook, or Twitter does.
As far as accessing your database, you would need to tell your app somewhere the credentials to use, so technically, you do need to hardcode them somewhere as they can't just magically make up some credentials somehow to access a database.
if your different users are defined:
use laravel model/db event to replicate the data to a database by
user.
Or sync each database with a cron job..
These have benefits to avoid security transport problems.

secure the code in google chrome extension

I want to write a google chrome extension, that should make a request to my website to send and get some data, so, actually I should do an ajax request like it is written here https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/xhr.html
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("GET", "http://api.example.com/data.json", true);
I wanted ask if there is a way to somehow secure the code or prevent others from using my api, because actually the other users can see the source code of the extension when they install it and so use my api without me being aware of it.
EDIT:
If I need to make some sort of authentication, than how can I authenticate the user before making the ajax call ? for authentication I will need to send a request to my server , but for that I should send , e.g. username and password, that should be saved somewhere in the extension's files, which, in fact, can be seen by the users, when they install the extension.
Thanks
Don't trust the browser, take steps to authenticate the user instead. So, in this case, you could require that YOU enter in a password that is used to communicate with your server.
Your Google extension would simple require you to enter in a password before it attempts to use AJAX to communicate with your server.
Be aware that you should build in means of protecting yourself from brute-force attacks. So, do things like lock everything down if there are more than some small number of wrong passwords, etc.
You could also consider using the password to simply decrypt the destination of the XHR, but if you go this route, you should store this very carefully, because this will be brute-forceable offline.
EDIT
Trying to lock down an API so that only a single application can use it is just not practical nor technically possible, so you're only hope of doing this is to authenticate the user using the API, regardless of the accessing software he is using. You could have the user sign an agreement that legally limits them to only your extension, but I suspect this will go largely unenforceable and will consume your time tracking abusers down.
If you don't want unauthorized people even knowing where the API is, you could perform authentication using an out-of-band mechanism: over the telephone, email, SMS, or simply, another API that will grant the user a password or token that requests to your API must be accompanied with.
During this out-of-band process, you could also grant the user, a unique URI (the API access point) that is only valid per authenticated session (https://api.totally-cool-extension.com/api/ijyeDvB5dYvSiWG97OLuTAoNWwbhuZ0/, for example). Any requests to your server on OTHER URIs simply won't work. However, this isn't theoretically much different than using the same API access point, and having a good password. It just changes the number of places in your architecture that will be performing authentication and/or authorization checks.
<aside>My vote would be to reduce the number of authorization/authentication points to as few as possible so that you can spend more time on getting that one place correct rather than having multiple places and possibly multiple logic flaws or other things that could lead to vulnerabilities.</aside>
You could also explore using Public Key Infrastructure and/or one-time passwords schemes or device-based token generators, etc., but in the end, you'll be allowing authenticated and authorized users to use your API. And, thanks to the Internet, this will not remain an undisclosed URI for long.
And, more importantly, it will not prevent someone from using the data on their own. Even with all these measures in place, it would be trivial for an authorized user to collect this data as it is being streamed to your extension. Or, if you employ point-to-point encryption, they could screen-scrap or use some form of JS introspection on your very code or even extract the data from their computer's memory.
I know you were looking for a silver bullet here, but it doesn't exist.
I think you are doing it wrong. You should never trust what's going on on internet users PC's. Never!
Move the line of trust one step inward, make your API public and then design the security where you have perfect control - server side.
I could not get correct aspect of your use case
Few Points:
Your extension code is always traceable( Any one who has installed extension can view the code)
If you are looking for security through complicated or obfuscated coding patterns you end up slow down of understanding process not the whole.
If your target is to ensure users who install your extension should be able to access and inert all other users( Who have gained illegal access or downloaded and edited code) have a session shared key per installation.
Please explain further use case so i can help you better.