I'm trying to construct a webapp to add events to an employee's google calendar and would like to use OAuth for authentication.
However, my webapp is forced to be on an intranet behind a firewall; the server has outbound internet access, but blocks in-bound access if you aren't on the intranet or VPNing into the intranet.
I'm reading up on OAuth, but can't figure out if part of the authentication-handshaking process would be blocked by my firewall. (And I'd like to know if its possible before spending time to implement if it isn't possible; and know so if I run into errors I can debug them).
To expand on planetjones's answer, as long as google can resolve the DNS for your application url oauth2 should work behind a fire wall. We had some issues getting getting oauth2 working behind our firewall because we were trying to use a non fully qualified domain name.
OAuth should work just fine over http, using POSTs and GETs and if your client can set the Authorizatioon header. The client should create all the requests and as long as it follows redirects this should be ok - there's never (to my knowledge) a case where an external server initiates an inbound connection.
For added confidence try OAuth with an existing third party service from behind your firewall to be sure. This looks like a good starting point and this is the definitive guide for following the flows of an OAuth call.
Related
We are developing asp.net core applications that will require sending emails with gmail among other providers (client accounts). This applications will not be hosted by us but by many of our clients.
The application may be hosted on their domain or no domain at all (IP address only).
I am struggling with which authorization process I should use since I can not use the Javascript client or any redirect URI method due to unknown origin/domain. I also can not use localhost origin since there is no way for me to start a local http server from a browser. Programmatic extraction is deprecated. The only thing I am left with is manual copy/paste but apart from it being very user unfriendly Google documentation states that that might be deprecated in the future as well.
Am I missing something?
Please point me in the right direction as to how I should proceed.
I am pretty new to Authorization/Authentication with openid connect. I guess I lack some basic understanding on how to set up a proper backend infrastructure.
There's a keycloak server running through which I want to authorize/authenticate my customers.
The user logs in by his company credentials and then should be authorized/authenticated against our backend service, which provides a REST-API.
So our part is to implement the backend service and use openid connect as authorization/authentication.
Could you tell me what components/software needs to be implemented on our side?
Often the Authorization Server is an external cloud system that your UIs and APIs just point to, with URLs equivalent to this:
https://api.mycompany.com/myapi
https://web.mycompany.app/myapp
https://login.mycompany.com
Not sure if this quite matches your setup but typically you provide some or all of these domains:
API
Web Hosting
Authorization Server (Keycloak)
My personal preference is to use Local Developer PC Domains to match the above. If it helps you might just be able to repoint my Open Id Connect
Code Sample to your infra once configured, in order to verify that it works.
I have a portal application that loads external content (widgets) via an iframe. Users login to CAS via the portal itself. There are a few portal APIs, though, that need to be called from that external content. What information do I have to pass from the portal to the widgets that the widgets can use to make these calls without being rejected by CAS?
UPDATE
The more I investigate, the more I think that my question boils down to how CAS actually does what it's supposed to do. In other words, how can I go from one site where I've authenticated to another and tell it that I've already done the authentication thing. What's the mechanism behind that and how can I employ in in a web context.
The portal scenario you describe is exactly what CAS' proxy ticketing was designed for. We use it with an iframe-based web portal system and it works fine.
The CAS proxy ticketing mechanism allows a client (your portal) to dish out service tickets to other clients (the widgets loaded in your portal's iframes). This saves your users a trip through the CAS server for each widget that their browser loads. Proxing is also useful if you're trying to use CAS for web service authentication (i.e. when one web service needs to connect to another CAS-protected web service).
Note though that for your purpose proxy ticketing isn't actually necessary. Your portal-iframe setup should work without it. But without proxy ticketing, each widget will have to go through the CAS server as it loads. At the very least this would slow down load times.
A while back I wrote a guide for setting up CAS proxy ticketing for RubyCAS-Client. The instructions are specific to the Ruby client, but they should give you a good overview of how CAS proxying works. Admittedly the implementation is a bit complicated -- mostly due to the "Proxy Granting Ticket" negotiation process:
http://rubycas-client.rubyforge.org/files/README_txt.html
(scroll down to the "How to act as a CAS proxy" section about 2/3rd down)
It looks like I may be asking CAS to do more than it's capable of doing. I've been thinking of it as an SSO engine where a given session can be passed around so that authentication only happens once. Instead, it seems that CAS is primary geared to be a centralized auth service (yes, I see the irony that this is what the acronym actually stands for). By handing authentication requests off to a central server, a single cookie can be read by that server. Stateless connections like APIs, then, cannot be validated this way.
It looks like CAS' proxy tickets may offer some hope, but I'm not ready to venture down that path just yet.
I have a set of .NET applications running in a public web environment which connect to a centralized component made up of web pages and web services.
Is there any way to implement a security feature to make the centralized web pages be sure of the caller applications identity? Making a post and supplying a querystring parameter stating the caller application is a naive solution, someone can manually change it.
Any ideas? Tks in advance.
Assign secret keys to each client-server pair and use them to sign messages passed between client and server (using HMAC for example).
TLS/SSL/HTTP. You just need to enable client authentication. SSL is usually only used in the scenario where the server needs to be authenticated. But the server end can be configured to authenticate the client also. Digital certs need to be installed on both ends. This then uses all the appropriate crypto to do the job, ie. public authentication, establishment of secure channel, using Diffie-Hellman, RSA, AES/3DES, whatever you configure.
Take a look at this post. Good place to start.
Another option, perhaps have you look at OpenID?
The current situation:
Servers A, B, and C are trusted and controlled by you. A visitor comes to site A and views a page that sends data to site C, and the data contains something like "origin=A". We're concerned that the user will change that to "origin=B".
A simple fix:
You control all three servers, so let them communicate to verify incoming data. For example, A will change "origin=A" to "origin=A&token=12345", where the token value is random. The user tries to tamper with it and sends "origin=B&token=12345" to server C. C makes a trusted connection to B, saying "Did you send someone to me with token 12345?" B says "Nope" and C knows to reject the request.
This can be arbitrarily elaborate, depending on your needs and whether you're using https. Maybe tokens expire after a certain time period. Maybe they're tied to IP address. The point is that server C verifies any information that comes from the end user with servers A and B.
Are you asking about single-sign-on? (i.e. someone authenticated on AppA should also be able to use AppB and AppC without re-authenticating)
You can do this by configuring the machineKey for your apps so they can share asp.net authentication tokens.
The company I work for currently uses shared forms authentication cookies across the enterprise by using the same machine keys on each web server. However, this is not ideal if you wish to SSO across different domains and it's not very neat for windows app that need to come into the web farm to use the web service methods...
So, where we have to do this we are using SAML
But to clean this all up and make it more unified and more secure we are beginning to implement Geneva
If you communicate with the web services and web pages using http post, you avoid putting the info in a query string.
Send the data over https so that it cannot be tappered with.
You then need to make sure that the call is coming from your public web environment. One way of doing this is to use windows authentication, based on the identity of the application pool.
EDIT 1
Take a look at this link: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WCF/WCFBasicHttpBinding.aspx
It shows how to set up windows authentication for WCF basic http binding.
Maybe look at the HTTP REFERER field. Under certain conditions this may be treated as reliable. In particular: An A mimic site won't send users from A to C according to HTTP REFERER.
We are developing an app that consists of a web server that hosts a web service (amongst other things) and a client that will be communicating with that web service. Both the client app and the server are expected to be used within a corporate firewall. This application will be packaged up and deployed to organizations across the world—so it needs to be flexible enough to work in multiple types of environments.
My question revolves around web service authentication and what is appropriate for real world scenarios. I know some companies have proxy servers that require a separate authentication. How often is this a requirement across organizations? When does the proxy server force the user to authenticate (can you access internal sites without authenticating.. is the authentication for only external sites)?
Reason I ask these questions, is I’m not sure what kind of capability we should build into our client application for authentication to the web service. By default, we are taking the current user credentials and passing that up to the server. Do you think this is sufficient? In a case where a company will require some form of alternate authentication for internal access, this will not work. My question revolves around this last case—how often does it happen? Why would a company force alternate credentials for internal access?
Thanks!
Why not make it configurable? Further, use WCF and you have the ability to configure just about anything you might need, in most cases without changing your code.
If Internet Explorer can reach a site through the proxy server without prompting the user, your call to the web service should "just work". If the user is prompted by IE, you'll need to put together a way to fill in the proxy server authentication information.
I've run into quite a few problems getting web services rock solid, but never had a proxy server authentication issue.