I'm hosting a web application built with NestJs and React (NodeJs) in an IIS Server with IIS Node. To secure my app, I'm using a system with JWT Token + Refresh Token and Windows Authentication to automatically get the connected user and so generate tokens.
Everything (almost) is working fine, but I have a problem with the Windows Authentification. Each time the JWT Token of my application expired (so the API returns a 401 error page) and only after a refresh of the navigator page, the navigator prompt again the pop up to set windows credentials. The logic use case on this is that one day you're using the webapp, and some days later you want to use the app again, but your token is expired, 401 error, windows credentials is prompting.
If the token expires, and the user simply navigate to another page (so no page refresh with my React SPA) there's no problem, the JWT token is refreshed with the refresh token thanks to the API.
I've already tried some stuff:
Disable Loopback Check
Enable Anonymous and Windows Authentication
Changing some random settings
But I haven't found a solution yet.
My goal is to only have the Windows Credentials display once, when the user visits the page for the first time.
As I'm out of ideas, I'm considering setting a JWT that never expire, but of course it's not a great solution.
Thank you very much for your help!
I ended up using a custom 4xx code to handle my 401. So if my API is sending me a 499 http, I know it mean for my frontend that the session is expired. Hence, I don't have the prompt for Windows Credentials.
I'm working on a react app where the pages can be used both by authenticated and anonymous users. The pages show more features for the authenticated users.
If a user previously has signed in and revists the website, I want the user to be automatically authenticated, and am struggling to achieve this.
I'm using redirect methods because I don't believe popup is working well on phones (is that assumption correct?).
I have tried storing the homeAccountId in local storage and use that to get the account used and then calling login in the msal instance. I also set up a addEventCallback and listen for EventType.LOGIN_SUCCESS which I use to set some internal state about the logged in user.
I have tried using MsalAuthenticationTemplate but strangely this doesn't invoke a login. I have also tried to detect if this is a "first run" and then invoking the login, but that doesn't work all the time. Sometime I get a SSO error indicating I should provide a login_hint or sid which is not possible because I use B2C.
If I don't do anything the user can click the login button and if the user has a valid cookie with B2C the user is logged in without providing credentials which is a strange behavior for the user because my website indicate the user is not authenticated (and show no logout button).
So I can't really get this to work and are wondering if somebody has a concept for achieving this?
Please checkout the msal-react samples which all demonstrate the behavior you're looking for. The MsalAuthenticationTemplate would be the recommended way to do this and if you're still having issues getting this to work after reviewing the samples I would recommend opening an issue on our repo with code snippets so we can take a closer look at what's going on.
Also using localStorage, if you're not already, would help to maintain application state between browser sessions. sessionStorage is the default.
As for B2C not asking for credentials; server state is separate from client state. You can be signed in on the server without the application knowing about it. Until your application makes a request to the B2C server your application will show that a user is not signed in. If a session already exists on the server when you make a login request, the server may redirect you back to your application without asking for credentials again.
I am using Microsoft authentication for user but I don't want to keep the user credentials to be saved in cookies so that it should ask every time performing a particular action in application.
I have created a simple web app with external authentication from Microsoft but when a user gets signed in it doesn't ask user for credentials from second time and redirect to RedirectUrl directly because user information is already there in Cookies. Normally this behavior looks fine but I have certain tasks in my Web App which needs authentication from External Source (Microsoft) every time these tasks get performed by user. I tried setting token lifetime in Azure but it says lifetime can not be lesser than 10 minutes.
Note: I can't call signout user because it is not a silent signout.
How can I achieve it?
You can set prompt=login parameter in the authentication request. Then the user should be prompted to re-authenticate even if the user has already been authenticated.
Reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/azuread-dev/v1-protocols-oauth-code#request-an-authorization-code
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/msal-js-prompt-behavior
I've scoured the api docs, as well as StackOverflow, and I've yet to find the answer to my question. And it is possible I'm misunderstanding how the system works.
Here's the scenario our client wants:
User logs into our website
At which point we authenticate the user in our system, and One Login via the api.
After the user logs into our dashboard, they can click an link and be redirected to their third party analytics app due to the fact that I've created a new session with One Login.
Here are the steps I've completed.
I've successfully received an access token via --> https://developers.onelogin.com/api-docs/1/oauth20-tokens/generate-tokens
I've successfully used the access token to generate a session login token via --> https://developers.onelogin.com/api-docs/1/users/create-session-login-token
I've successfully used the session login token to create a new session.
I'm receiving the proper cookies from One Login after making the create new session request, and - at that point - if I enter the URL onelogin.com/login, I am taken directly to the dashboard.
At this point I know I'm properly authenticated with One Login. However, I'm not sure how to directly access a third party app from a link on our website.
Thanks.
Two ways:
If the app supports SP-initiated SAML, just navigate the user to the application and it'll do the whole SAML flow- App redirects to OneLogin - OL authenticates user (because you have a session) --- redirects SAML to app
Use the launch endpoint - You can create a URL to an app by using this format: https://app.onelogin.com/launch/{app-id}. For example, you can provide a link to an app like this:
Time Reporting
Details on that endpoint can be found here: https://developers.onelogin.com/api-docs/1/embed-apps/get-apps-to-embed-for-a-user
Take note that you're probably going to want to use the optional flag that makes sure to redirect to your login page, not OL's if you've built a login facade.
How does one handle authentication (local and Facebook, for example) using passport.js, through a RESTful API instead of through a web interface?
Specific concerns are handling the passing of data from callbacks to a RESTful response (JSON) vs using a typical res.send({ data: req.data }), setting up an initial /login endpoint which redirects to Facebook (/login cannot be accessed via AJAX, because it is not a JSON response - it is a redirect to Facebook with a callback).
I've found https://github.com/halrobertson/test-restify-passport-facebook, but I'm having trouble understanding it.
Furthermore, how does passport.js store the auth credentials? The server (or is it service?) is backed by MongoDB, and I'd expect credentials (login & salted hash of pw) to be stored there, but I don't know if passport.js has this type of capability.
There are many questions asked here, and it seems that even though the questions are asked in the context of Node and passport.js the real questions are more about workflow than how to do this with a particular technology.
Let's use #Keith example setup, modified a bit for added security:
Web server at https://example.com serves a single page Javascript client app
RESTful web service at https://example.com/api provides server support to rich client app
Server implemented in Node and passport.js.
Server has a database (any kind) with a "users" table.
Username/password and Facebook Connect are offered as authentication options
Rich client makes REST requests into https://example.com/api
There may be other clients (phone apps, for example) that use the web service at https://example.com/api but do not know about the web server at https://example.com.
Note that I'm using secure HTTP. This is in my opinion a must for any service that is available in the open, since sensitive information like passwords and authorization tokens are passing between client and server.
Username/password authentication
Let's look at how plain old authentication works first.
The user connects to https://example.com
The server serves a rich Javascript application which renders the initial page. Somehwere in the page there is a login form.
Many of the sections of this single page app haven't been populated with data due to the user not being logged in. All these sections have an event listener on a "login" event. All this is client side stuff, the server does not know of these events.
User enters his/her login and password and hits the submit button, which triggers a Javascript handler to record the username and password in client side variables. Then this handler triggers the "login" event. Again, this is all client side action, credentials were not sent to the server yet.
The listeners of the "login" event are invoked. Each of these now needs to send one or more requests to the RESTful API at https://example.com/api to obtain the user specific data to render on the page. Every single request they send to the web service will include the username and password, possibly in the form of HTTP Basic authentication, since the service being RESTful isn't allowed to maintain client state from one request to the next. Since the web service is on secure HTTP the password is safely encrypted during transit.
The web service at https://example.com/api receives a bunch of individual requests, each with authentication information. The username and password in each request is checked against the user database and if found correct the requested function executes and data is returned to the client in JSON format. If username and password do not match an error is sent to the client in the form of a 401 HTTP error code.
Instead of forcing clients to send username and password with every request you can have a "get_access_token" function in your RESTful service that takes the username and password and responds with a token, which is some sort of cryptographic hash that is unique and has some expiration date associated with it. These tokens are stored in the database with each user. Then the client sends the access token in subsequent requests. The access token will then be validated against the database instead of the username and password.
Non browser client applications like phone apps do the same as above, they ask user to enter his/her credentials, then send them (or an access token generated from them) with every request to the web service.
The important take away point from this example is that RESTful web services require authentication with every request.
An additional layer of security in this scenario would add client application authorization in addition to the user authentication. For example, if you have the web client, iOS and Android apps all using the web service you may want the server to know which of the three the client of a given request is, regardless of who the authenticated user is. This can enable your web service to restrict certain functions to specific clients. For this you could use API keys and secrets, see this answer for some ideas on that.
Facebook authentication
The workflow above does not work for Facebook connect because the login via Facebook has a third party, Facebook itself. The login procedure requires the user to be redirected to Facebook's website where credentials are entered outside of our control.
So let's see how things change:.
The user connects to https://example.com
The server serves a rich Javascript application which renders the initial page. Somehwere in the page there is a login form that includes a "Login with Facebook" button.
The user clicks the "Login with Facebook" button, which is just a link that redirects to (for example) https://example.com/auth/facebook.
The https://example.com/auth/facebook route is handled by passport.js (see the documentation)
All the user sees is that the page changes and now they are in a Facebook hosted page where they need to login and authorize our web application. This is completely outside of our control.
The user logs in to Facebook and gives permission to our application, so Facebook now redirects back to the callback URL that we configured in the passport.js setup, which following the example in the documentation is https://example.com/auth/facebook/callback
The passport.js handler for the https://example.com/auth/facebook/callback route will invoke the callback function that receives the Facebook access token and some user information from Facebook, including the user's email address.
With the email we can locate the user in our database and store the Facebook access token with it.
The last thing you do in the Facebook callback is to redirect back to the rich client application, but this time we need to pass the username and the access token to the client so that it can use them. This can be done in a number of ways. For example, Javascript variables can be added to the page through a server-side template engine, or else a cookie can be returned with this information. (thanks to #RyanKimber for pointing out the security issues with passing this data in the URL, as I initially suggested).
So now we start the single page app one more time, but the client has the username and the access token.
The client application can trigger the "login" event immediately and let the different parts of the application request the information that they need from the web service.
All the requests sent to https://example.com/api will include the Facebook access token for authentication, or the application's own access token generated from Facebook's token via a "get_access_token" function in the REST API.
The non-browser apps have it a bit more difficult here, because OAuth requires a web browser for logging in. To login from a phone or desktop app you will need to start a browser to do the redirect to Facebook, and even worse, you need a way for the browser to pass the Facebook access token back to the application via some mechanism.
I hope this answers most of the questions. Of course you can replace Facebook with Twitter, Google, or any other OAuth based authentication service.
I'd be interested to know if someone has a simpler way to deal with this.
I greatly appreciate #Miguel's explanation with the complete flow in each cases, but I'd like to add some on the Facebook Authentication part.
Facebook provides a Javascript SDK which you can use to get the access token on client-end directly, which is then passed to the server and used to further pull all the user information from Facebook. So you don't need any re-directs basically.
Moreover, you can use the same API end-point for mobile applications as well. Just use the Android / iOS SDK for Facebook, obtain the Facebook access_token on the client end and pass it to the server.
Regarding the stateless nature as explained, when get_access_token is used to generate a token and passed to the client, this token is also stored on the server. So it's as good as a session token and I believe this makes it stateful ?
Just my 2 cents..
Here is an awesome article I found that can help you authenticate with:
Facebook
Twitter
Google
Local Auth
Easy Node Authentication: Setup and Local