Here is the scenario. I have two objects Users (with username/password) and UserInfo with rest of the data related to user. The Users is an old table with thousands of records and UserInfo is fairly new. I want to get as much UserInfo as I can when the user first logs in.
I'd like to force user to a custom screen after first login and ask for the UserInfo data. Once I get the "required" data in the new screen, I dont show it till the user voluntarily wants to fill in the data under "Profile".
Since there are multiple entry points to the application, I dont want to update all the controllers to check for this.
Is there a way I can use a Spring Security filter or something which is executed on successful login? I had a look at ApplicationListener<AuthenticationSuccessEvent> but it doesnt solve the problem as if I copy paste the link in the browser, it lets me go ahead to the destination without asking for "extra information".
In a nutshell, I want a check after each login which, if fails, user is not allowed to enter the application. No matter how he tries to get in.
In your Config.groovy, configure Spring Security's defaultTargetUrl and tell it to always redirect there:
grails.plugins.springsecurity.successHandler.alwaysUseDefault = true
grails.plugins.springsecurity.successHandler.defaultTargetUrl = '/userInfo/edit'
In your UserInfoController's edit action, you can check that the required fields are present (userInfo.validate() perhaps?) and if they are, redirect to wherever you like, perhaps '/', otherwise render the edit info view.
You can adopt what #doelleri proposed and enhance the rule by those steps:
run a batch task to assign a temporary ROLE_DISABLED role to each user who does not provide supplemental information yet. If the user already had some roles, save them in some property.
setup your authorization rule as that users with ROLE_DISABLED role only allowed to access /userInfo/edit.
in /userInfo/edit, if the user has a ROLE_DISABLED role, render the information input view, and resume user's role after it successfully updated its information. Otherwise redirect to '/' or the path it requested.
Related
Being in a view and you know the area-name, controller-name and action-name of a destination to which you want the user to provide a link to, how can I figure out if the area/controller/action is authorized for the authenticated user.
Imaginary Use-case:
I have a table with a list of books (the result of bookscontroller.index). To the far right are some icons to edit or delete a specific book. The edit link refers to bookscontroller.edit and the delete link to bookscontroller.delete.
On the actions there are custom authorizationattributes and this works perfect. If a user want to access books/edit/1 and the user is not allowed to edit books, the user gets redirected to the logon page.
It is a bit stupid to have that edit-icon there if the user is not allowed to edit books. So at view level I would like to be able to figure out if the user is allowed to use the edit action of the bookscontroller. If he is, show the icon if not, do not show the action.
Goal: use that knowledge to create a custom tag-helper.
The go-to method is reactive, i.e. you check if a user can do action when the user tries to do. Since you do not want to go that way, here is how. (yet, this is anti-pattern)
Have the authentication token of the user send back to backend. The backend should have an API end point for each button on the page user can click. With the authentication token, the back-end resolve whether to dim or enable the buttons.
Now, what the backend does to resolve this is not very efficient. The backend needs to literally attempt certain actions and aborts the transaction. For create and retrieve, it is trivial (you can pre-resolve them) but for edit and delete, this requires a lot of resources.
The standard way of controlling such actions on UI is to use role based authorization.
For the buttons or other such UI elements, setup role tags, e.g. "admin:edit", "viewer:readonly" etc.
When you are authenticating a user, send the applicable roles from the backend server, store them in a way that is globally accessible to your UI and use them for filtering UI elements across your application.
At this point I have a users resource and a roles resource. I can edit a user fine, but when I go in and edit a role, it shows all the role fiels properly, but clicking Save and it's sending the wrong info to the backend. It seems to be caching some data, because it's sending the last user id that I edited and some of the user fields, along with some of the role fields from my actual role model.
Not even sure how to explain this properly, but I can try and give some better examples of what I am seeing if it will help.
EDIT: Perhaps it is some form of local caching. I went back to start debugging more and now it's sending everything properly.
EDIT #2: Definitely some sort of caching. Now when I edit a user it is sending some of properties of the role that I last edited along with the user properties.
I need to log in a user into Dropbox using Core API. Then remember his/her access token and allow logging in with another credentials (looks like a second Dropbox user). But when I make request to https://www.dropbox.com/1/oauth2/authorize it automatically ends up with redirect page with first user's access token giving no chance to enter another credentials. I know I can revoke first access token but then I will not be able to silently come back to first user.
Does anyone know is the possible to implement?
You can set the force_reapprove parameter for the /authorize page to true to prevent the automatic redirect:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#oa2-authorize
Note that the /authorize page is hosted on www.dropbox.com though, so the user will get their www.dropbox.com session, even if force_reapprove=true is set. With that parameter set though, the user has the opportunity to switch accounts, using the dropdown in the upper right of the page, before authorizing the app.
If that's not sufficient for whatever reason, you can try to end the user's www.dropbox.com. The simplest way is to direct them to www.dropbox.com/logout first. Be sure to make it clear to the user what is happening though.
Or, if you control the entire browser, e.g., if it's an embedded web view in your app, you can clear the browser's cookies, which will clear the session, forcing users to log in again.
Let's think of a simple REST-based web service to store and retrieve JSON objects. Without any authentication, every user can access any data.
Now let's add usage of JWTs to authenticate users. Of course, since we are not doing authorization, still every user can access anything, but at least now we know who accesses what.
Next step: When storing an object, save the user's sub claim with the object, and verify that the user's sub claim matches the one of the requested object, and if so, deliver it. Now we have authorization on a per-user basis. So far, so easy.
Now let's add the possibility to let users share objects with other users. For the sake of simplicity, say, we want to have predefined groups (i.e., roles) and we want to let the user choose which group (role) has access to the objects they create. This is still easy, as you have a predefined list of groups, so you can let the user choose one or more, and attach them to the object. Additionally, the identity provider needs to be configured in a way that it put a groups claim into every user's token, so we can match them. As we can already see from the length of this paragraph, things become more complex.
Question 1: Am I right so far, that handling "static" groups this way it the way to go?
Now, let's give the users the opportunity to create groups on their own. This is still not complicated, but how do we make the identity provider use the dynamically created groups? For sure we do not want to make an administrator update the identity provider's configuration every day ;-).
Question 2: How do we handle dynamically created groups?
Now, finally, let's forget about groups, and let's say, that we want to allow the users to be able to simply share their objects with other users. This should be configurable for every object individually. How do we do this? Do we save a list of users on the object? If so, what exactly do we save? The sub claim? If so, how does the owner user know the appropriate values? Or ...?
And: Supposed the users want to put their friends dynamically into dynamically generated circles, how would we do that?
Question 3: How do tokens and dynamically created groups with dynamically assigned users work with each other?
In my opinion the tokens should only include identity-information(-claims) you'll need to identify the user on your ressource server or that wont change when refreshing, since you wouldn't want your user (or your app in place) to have to refresh his access tokens each and every time his permissions change (since access tokens grant access for a specific amount of time you wouldn't want your user to have access to certain ressources that he's lost the access rights to since his last token refresh by not refreshing the token and simply using the old one either). The more security related information you append to your token, the more vulnerability you may add to your system (depending on your token lifetime).
Stating so, I would (and always do) identify the users roles or groups by his user-id (which is included in the jwt-token) on the ressource server. To achieve this, I always attach the users identity-information to the current request on my ressource server and attach "dynamic"-claims like the users role or group to the identity.
By adding only the identity information I need to identify the user and the user's rights on my ressource server, I tend to use my identity providers across multiple applications without handling application scope on the identity provider, so I can use the exact same access token for multiple independent ressource servers.
I'm trying to get my standalone webapplication to use my Liferay 6.2 as "user store". That means I want the user to log in to Liferay and then be able to move on to another application with some credentials and user specific information passed as well. Moving on and passing information is already working, the issue I'm having right now is making sure the user-object that is passed on is the user that is actually logged in right now.
I use the LFR_SESSION_STATE_ cookie do determine the logged in user. But when I log in again with another user I get a second cookie with a different user-id. So now I need to make sure that I'm passing the correct user. The USER_UUID cookie does not contain the same uuid as provided by Liferay (as of now I didn't check if it's a hash of the uuid).
Long story short, I'm looking for a way to recognize the currently logged in user and be able to pass the credentials and additional information to my application.
I will take care of security concerns like manipulated cookies etc. subsequently. Maybe that will raise another question wenn I get to that point ;-)
I'd really appriciate any help or push in the right direction.
Thanks in advance guys ... sebastian
Some possibilities:
Make your application a portlet application
Publish your Liferay Database through LDAP (EE only) and use a separate SSO application
Create a Liferay-Hook that sets a cookie (to "/") containing the required user information - encryption and signatures are on yourself. You can create hooks that get executed on every successful login