AngularJS: how to implement server-side or client-side authentication? - express

I want to authenticate an AngularJS app, it is running on top of Node.js and Express.js backend with Jade templates.
I thought of the following strategies:
1) server side authentication - store credentials in session variables and redirect the user to the AngularJS app, the problem: how to pass the credentials to AngularJS? (I can render those as Jade variables, but how can I read them with AngularJS?), also, how to handle session expiry ?
2) client side authentication - do the authentication with AJAX calls and get the credentials,
the problems: how to handle 'session' expiry and how to remember users so they won't have to login every time the app starts ?
any insights may help.

Setting up authentication for a Angular.js application isn't any different then setting it up for any other website. You post your username and password to the server and it will set a session/cookie if your credentials are correct. To get data (in your case crdentials) from the server you use the same techniques you always use with Javascript. Xhr, websockets, render values in a text field, ...

Related

Sending xAPI statement to a web application instead of LRS

I have an xAPI content made by storyline I want for the statement to be sent to a webapp instead of the LRS.
this webapp is developped using laravel, and user should be authenticated with email and password to use it.
what I did to send the statement to this app:
1.in the webapp I created an API endpoint route that use POST method.
2.in the xAPI wrapper I changed the endpoint in the configuration to the route I made in the webapp.
const conf = {
"endpoint":"here I added my api endpoint route of the webapp",
"auth":"Basic " + toBase64(""),
}
now whith any interaction with the content where a statement should be sent the request making cors error like in the picture down, I think this is authentication error, how can I add my authentication credentials to the xAPI wrapper?
Your non-LRS LRS is probably not handling preflight requests which are necessary for CORS handling. Most common LRSs will handle those requests appropriately since they expect to be accessed from additional origins. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS#preflighted_requests
Also note that you'll likely run into issues unless you also handle state requests.
Additionally unless you are requesting the credentials from the user during runtime then hard coding the credentials into the package isn't a great idea from a security perspective.

Is there a way for a SPA to check if there's a proxy and handling it properly?

We have developped a SPA SaaS and went to a soft production launch recently.
Everything was fine until one of our customers told us they had trouble using the app.
Once they open the app, the first request to our backend triggers their proxy credential prompt. Hopefully on the login request.
They have to enter their proxy credentials to let the request go. All subsequent requests are passing properly and they can use the app.
The problem is:
When they stop using the app, close the browser and then come back the day after, the persistent login tries to connect them to our backend, but the proxy credentials prompt is not triggered and the request fails. All subsquent requests fail also.
For it work again, they have to delete all app data in chrome (so the service worker is unregistered, the localstorage and cache are cleared). The next api call will trigger their proxy credentials prompt and they will be able to work again.
So is there any way for the app to know if the proxy is set or not ? Any way of triggering the proxy prompt if not set or whatever ?
I don't exactly know how those proxies work and we have zero access to the proxy settings.
It surely is something with the credentials expiration after some time but that's all we can figure out right now. Maybe we could monitor some params in the request headers ?
We are using VueJS with axios for the requests.
My guess is when user session credentials get expired, your UI is not handling redirection to login page. When the user login for the first time you should store that the user has logged in successfully in browser localstorage. If your server returns 401 error code, you can delete the flag and redirect the user to login page. You can achieve that using meta fields in router.
Check out this link on how to use meta fields https://router.vuejs.org/guide/advanced/meta.html

Auth::user() returns null with the user logged in but works in blade template

I am using Laravel 6 and in the controller store method, Auth::user() returns null even when the user is logged in but works in blade template. I have gone through similar questions but nothing is working.
I am posting to an API route and I am not sure whether this is the reason. Kindly assist.
If you have not adjusted the api web group or the RouteServiceProvider that comes with the default application you will not have any session support in your API routes (routes/api.php). The APIs are usually stateless so no session support. If you want to deal with authentication using the built in authentication system you would want to deal with a token based system. The default api guard that is setup for you will use the TokenGuard which will look in the request for a token being passed to authenticate the user against. You would need to assign the middleware auth with the parameter api, to specify the api guard, auth:api.
If you send a request correctly to one of these end points now, including the token, you will have a user returned from Auth::user() or $request->user() etc.
Laravel 6.x Docs - API Authentication - Passing Tokens in Requests
Laravel 6.x Docs - API Authentication - Protected Routes auth:api
Pleease read the whole section for a better understanding of using this type of Guard with the built in Authentication system:
Laravel 6.x Docs - API Authentication
If you don't want to deal with a "stateless" API, and you would rather use sessions you can just move your API routes to the web.php file and prefix them with api.

Authorization between nuxtjs and the backend API

I have a Vuejs application created using Nuxtjs. I am also using Django as the backend server, and I made an API to interact with the backend server (Django) and front-end app (Vuejs/Nuxtjs). And any API related fetch are done in the AsyncData function of the page to render the data on the server-side using axios. Also, I am using json web token authentication, and the API generates a jwt token after successful login which is stored in the cookie. So on the backend, it will always check for the request's authorization header for the token. If the request is from a logged in user (authorized token) then return authenticated json data, or else return non authenticated data.
The problem:
When the user navigates to the app, I would like to check if the user is authenticated. If the user is authenticated, render the authenticated page. If not then display non authenticated page.
My thoughts:
When the fetch is done from the App on the AsyncData function, I would check whether there is any value for the cookie. If there is then send the token with the request's authorization header. But, since the page will be rendered on the server first, and not on the client side (where the cookie actually is) it will never find the token for the authorization.
How can I check if the user is already logged in or not so that I can get authenticated and non authenticated data respectively from the API?
Update
When I successfully log in (post authorized email and password), I get a json response back with the token, which I set in the cookie like this:
this.$cookie.set('my_auth_token', this.token, {expires: 15})
How can I retrieve client side cookie and into the nuxt server for server side rendering?
Cookies are exposed in the (Express) Nuxt server through middleware.
Specifically, they can be read from the req.headers.cookie property. You can see an example implementation of this in the Nuxt documentation.
Regarding your implementation: fetching the privileged data from your API using Node would seem to be the ideal way to delegate session handling to that single service (rather than both) and provide SSR for your users.
If you've chosen to instead implement your session handling on the Django service then you'll need to "forward" your cookies by passing them into your axios request headers.
I did something similar using Firebase authentication. There is an example project on Github as well as a blog entry outlining the important files and configuration used in the application.

User authentication and login flow with Ember and JSON web tokens

I'm trying to figure out how is best to do authentication and login flow with Ember. I'll also add that this is the first web app I've built so it's all a bit new to me.
I have an Express.js backend with protected endpoints using JWTs (I'm using Passport, express-jwt and jsonwebtoken for that) and that all works.
On the client-side, I'm using Ember
Simple Auth with the JWT authenticator. I have the login flow working (I'm using the login-controller-mixin) and correctly see the isAuthenticated flag in the inspector after a successful login.
The thing I'm struggling with is what to do after login: once a user logs in and gets the token, should I make a subsequent call to get the user details, e.g. GET /me, so that I can then have a representative user model client side? These details would then let me transition to the appropriate route.
See this example in the repo for an example of how to add a property to the session that provides access to the current user.