Is there any way to get the IP of the website that made the request to the API?
I am working on an application that allows multiple websites to access the API, while the end user IP doesn't really matter. Using the Origin header is not really helpful since you can mock it in Postman.
Can I safely allow just a few websites to access the API? Using CORS, from what I know it uses the Origin header as well.
Are other workarounds for this?
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I've developed simple REST API using a expressJs. I'm using React as my client side application. So the problem is anyone can see my API endpoints because of react app is in client side. So they will also able to make request and fetch data from my REST API. (May be they will build their own client side apps using my API.) I've seen some question about this and couldn't find any comprehensive answer. How these kind of a security problem should be handled? Is it possible to give the access for API to only my client app? If not how huge brands that using REST API prevent that? (Also I don't have a user authenticating scenario in my product as well. People can just visit and use the website. They don't need to register).
Authentication can be a way but it can be bypassed. Another way is you can create a proxy server which strictly blocks cross origin requests, hence it blocks requests from other domains to make request to your API, and you can make your API call from that proxy server. In this way your API server endpoint will also be not compromised.
If, as you state in your comment, this is about users on your own website being allowed to use your site's API, while disallowing off-site use (e.g. other websites, wget/curl, etc) then you need to make sure to set up proper CORS rules (to disallowed cross-origin use of your API) as well as CSP rules (to prevent user-injected scripts from proxying your API), and you also make sure to only allow API calls from connections that have an active session (so even if you don't want user authentication: use a session managemer so you can tell if someone landed on your site and got a session cookie set before they started calling API endpoints).
Session management and CORS come with express itself (see https://expressjs.com/en/resources/middleware/session.html and https://expressjs.com/en/resources/middleware/cors.html), for CSP, and lots of other security layers like HSTS, XSS filtering, etc, you typically use helmet.
I created MongoDB and Node.js REST API for my website. I am accessing my database data from the API and showing it on my website. I am doing these things locally on localhost.
Now I want to host my REST API. I don't have any idea regarding hosting. If I host my REST API somewhere and start getting data through its endpoints, then anybody can use those endpoints and access my data, but I want to restrict it to my website only. Meaning, that only my website can make requests to that API, no other websites can make a request. If other websites try to access it, it should show an error. How can I achieve this? Can someone please explain me step by step how do I do this?
I think you are referring to CORS. You need to set your API to have a response header like this on all requests:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://yourSiteDomain.com
You can read more about it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Access-Control-Allow-Origin
Other people can still access your API directly though, through postman etc.
What you need is a CSRF(cross site request forgery) token
for node js you can use
csurf : http://expressjs.com/en/resources/middleware/csurf.html
look online on how to implment it
How can I build rest API with nodejs and limit user access with whitelisted ip or domain?
so, if domain or ip address not whitelisted, they cant access the API.
anything I need to build that?
If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want to whitelist domains that can make cross-origin requests to your API.
You can use something like NPM's CORS package, which will let you develop a request whitelist and reject calls from unapproved origins.
I am working on web application that has angular 4 on frontend and WEB API on backend. This application is hosted on MS Azure and until now we didn't have any issues.
Currently we need to integrate with one payment provider. During payment user is redirected to his payment page, and if everything goes well user is redirected back to our web site. Beside the browser redirect (which may fail) payment provider supports server to server call (HTTP GET). In this way they make sure we get information about the transaction. The problem here is that instead of one call to our Web API backend we get always two calls. After checking the request origin IP addresses I concluded that there is two origins (one is payment provider address and another is IP located in USA, which I assume belongs to MS). This looks to me like a routing problem, but I am not very experienced at this.
Did anybody have similar problem on Azure while hosting web application ?
According to your decription, it seems that fails for cross domain request. Azure website is supposed to manage CORS for you.
I think you missed a handy Azure website blade: Specify the origins that should be allowed to make cross-origin calls (for example: http://example.com:12345). To allow all, use "*" and remove all other origins from the list. Slashes are not allowed as part of domain or after TLD.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) allows JavaScript code running in a browser on an external host to interact with your backend. Specify the origins that should be allowed to make cross-origin calls (for example: http://example.com:12345). To allow all, use "*" and remove all other origins from the list. Slashes are not allowed as part of domain or after TLD.
I am currently developing an API that will be launched into production in a matter of weeks. I am relatively new to REST, started reading about CORS - and realized that it could impact me.
What conditions will a REST service not be accessible to a client? I have been using sample html/js on the same server, and through Postman - a google chrome addon - to access my API. I have had no issues so far.
When the API goes live, it will be hosted at 'api.myserver.com'. Requests, at the beginning, will come from 'app.myOTHERserver.com'. Will these requests be denied if I do not use a CORS-friendly approach like JSONP or special 'access-control' headers that permit my domain?
What about accessing rest APIs from other non-browser clients? Such as a C# application? Are these requests permitted by default?
Assuming I do need to add 'access-control' headers server-side, to permit the scenario described above when my API goes live, is it better (performance-wise) to let your web server (NGINX in my case) handle the headers, or should I add them through PHP or NodeJS?
This is more about the same-origin policy applied by web browsers than it is about RESTful APIs in general.
If your API is intended to be used by web applications deployed on a different origin host/port than the API, then you have these options:
Respond with appropriate headers that allow for techniques like CORS to work.
Have the web server which serves up your web content (in your example, app.myOTHERserver.com) handle your REST API requests too by proxifying your API requests from the web server through to the API server. For example, you could have your API exposed on your web server under the URL /api, and then it's just a matter of setting up a web proxy configuration that forwards requests under that URL to your API server.
Use JSONP or other techniques.
If your API is going to be used by non-web applications, you have nothing to worry about. This is only a restriction applied by browsers when running JavaScript code to make sure that the user hasn't inadvertently clicked on a phishing link with some hackery in it that tries to send their PayPal password to Pyongyang.
When the API goes live, it will be hosted at 'api.myserver.com'.
Requests, at the beginning, will come from 'app.myOTHERserver.com'.
Will these requests be denied if I do not use a CORS-friendly approach
like JSONP or special 'access-control' headers that permit my domain?
You can specify what clients can access your web service to an extend. Assuming you're using Express: How to allow CORS?