I am working on a desktop application using GCP Speech-to-Text API to perform streaming recognition. I'm using Python 3 and Google client libraries, google.cloud.speech. I've started off the transcribe streaming infnite Python sample and built around those concepts, and everything works nicely. I'm now trying to get to the end user access question, as I'm currently using a service account file for development purposes, which I'm obviously not willing to distribute to all users.
Basically, how do I give access to my end users to the Speech-to-Text service for streaming recognition in the least intrusive way possible? I have no need for accessing storage or the like, as I don't access buckets contents and stream all audio directly. I actually don't need any user information, I only need GCP to process the STT requests and send me the responses.
I see 2 solutions that should work on paper, out of the three the documentation mentions (I leave out the service account file ones):
API key
OAuth2
API key
API keys sound like my dream option: it's simple, doesn't require user interaction past initial setup, I can manage such keys in GCP's console, and it should be able to grant access to what I need (as I effectively don't need any user info, an account is mostly irrelevant).
However, how to use an API key using the Google Speech client library totally eludes me. I can see a PUB/SUB Go example, but I can't find any mapping to Python. I'm not even 100% sure it can work, as the Go documentation for the option seems to note it only works for JSON-over-HTTP, and I believe the client library for Speech-to-Text is using gRPC.
Yet, at least with a JSON non-streaming recognize request, I can use such an API key, and successfully did so manually using cURL on the command-line. So I still have a little bit of hope, in case the gRPC restriction either isn't true or doesn't concern my use case.
This part's question would summarize as: "how do I specify an API key using the Python SpeechClient?".
OAuth2
This sounds like my second-best option, as it uselessly asks the user for authentication while I don't actually need any personal data. Yet, I still have serious issues I'm struggling to overcome:
How do I reliably store info that prevent me from having to re-ask the user for authorization every single time the app runs? google_auth_oauthlib's InstalledAppFlow doesn't seem to provide such feature, so I'm rolling my own based on google.oauth2.credentials.Credentials.from_authorized_user_file() after having saved them with the to_json() the first time I obtained them with InstalledAppFlow. I'm however confident this will not last, and I'm really not sure how to check whether the credentials are still good before I fail to use an API with them (e.g. I can't seem to be able to rely on Credentials.valid before they actually get used).
There seem to be no specific Speech-to-Text scopes, and the required one is way broader than what I need, leading to an overly complex and frightening authorization request. And no, without this scope I cannot access the Speech-to-Text API, I tried :)
Summary
To summarize: what is my best and least-intrusive option to provide credentials to be able to use GCP Speech-to-Text in my desktop application?
Related
Is there any way to restrict post requests to my REST API only to requests coming from my own mobile app binary? This app will be distributed on Google Play and the Apple App Store so it should be implied that someone will have access to its binary and try to reverse engineer it.
I was thinking something involving the app signatures, since every published app must be signed somehow, but I can't figure out how to do it in a secure way. Maybe a combination of getting the app signature, plus time-based hashes, plus app-generated key pairs and the good old security though obscurity?
I'm looking for something as fail proof as possible. The reason why is because I need to deliver data to the app based on data gathered by the phone sensors, and if people can pose as my own app and send data to my api that wasn't processed by my own algorithms, it defeats its purpose.
I'm open to any effective solution, no matter how complicated. Tin foil hat solutions are greatly appreciated.
Any credentials that are stored in the app can be exposed by the user. In the case of Android, they can completely decompile your app and easily retrieve them.
If the connection to the server does not utilize SSL, they can be easily sniffed off the network.
Seriously, anybody who wants the credentials will get them, so don't worry about concealing them. In essence, you have a public API.
There are some pitfalls and it takes extra time to manage a public API.
Many public APIs still track by IP address and implement tarpits to simply slow down requests from any IP address that seems to be abusing the system. This way, legitimate users from the same IP address can still carry on, albeit slower.
You have to be willing to shut off an IP address or IP address range despite the fact that you may be blocking innocent and upstanding users at the same time as the abusers. If your application is free, it may give you more freedom since there is no expected level of service and no contract, but you may want to guard yourself with a legal agreement.
In general, if your service is popular enough that someone wants to attack it, that's usually a good sign, so don't worry about it too much early on, but do stay ahead of it. You don't want the reason for your app's failure to be because users got tired of waiting on a slow server.
Your other option is to have the users register, so you can block by credentials rather than IP address when you spot abuse.
Yes, It's public
This app will be distributed on Google Play and the Apple App Store so it should be implied that someone will have access to its binary and try to reverse engineer it.
From the moment its on the stores it's public, therefore anything sensitive on the app binary must be considered as potentially compromised.
The Difference Between WHO and WHAT is Accessing the API Server
Before I dive into your problem I would like to first clear a misconception about who and what is accessing an API server. I wrote a series of articles around API and Mobile security, and in the article Why Does Your Mobile App Need An Api Key? you can read in detail the difference between who and what is accessing your API server, but I will extract here the main takes from it:
The what is the thing making the request to the API server. Is it really a genuine instance of your mobile app, or is it a bot, an automated script or an attacker manually poking around your API server with a tool like Postman?
The who is the user of the mobile app that we can authenticate, authorize and identify in several ways, like using OpenID Connect or OAUTH2 flows.
Think about the who as the user your API server will be able to Authenticate and Authorize access to the data, and think about the what as the software making that request in behalf of the user.
So if you are not using user authentication in the app, then you are left with trying to attest what is doing the request.
Mobile Apps should be as much dumb as possible
The reason why is because I need to deliver data to the app based on data gathered by the phone sensors, and if people can pose as my own app and send data to my api that wasn't processed by my own algorithms, it defeats its purpose.
It sounds to me that you are saying that you have algorithms running on the phone to process data from the device sensors and then send them to the API server. If so then you should reconsider this approach and instead just collect the sensor values and send them to the API server and have it running the algorithm.
As I said anything inside your app binary is public, because as yourself said, it can be reverse engineered:
should be implied that someone will have access to its binary and try to reverse engineer it.
Keeping the algorithms in the backend will allow you to not reveal your business logic, and at same time you may reject requests with sensor readings that do not make sense(if is possible to do). This also brings you the benefit of not having to release a new version of the app each time you tweak the algorithm or fix a bug in it.
Runtime attacks
I was thinking something involving the app signatures, since every published app must be signed somehow, but I can't figure out how to do it in a secure way.
Anything you do at runtime to protect the request you are about to send to your API can be reverse engineered with tools like Frida:
Inject your own scripts into black box processes. Hook any function, spy on crypto APIs or trace private application code, no source code needed. Edit, hit save, and instantly see the results. All without compilation steps or program restarts.
Your Suggested Solutions
Security is all about layers of defense, thus you should add as many as you can afford and required by law(e.g GDPR in Europe), therefore any of your purposed solutions are one more layer the attacker needs to bypass, and depending on is skill-set and time is willing to spent on your mobile app it may prevent them to go any further, but in the end all of them can be bypassed.
Maybe a combination of getting the app signature, plus time-based hashes, plus app-generated key pairs and the good old security though obscurity?
Even when you use key pairs stored in the hardware trusted execution environment, all an attacker needs to do is to use an instrumentation framework to hook in the function of your code that uses the keys in order to extract or manipulate the parameters and return values of the function.
Android Hardware-backed Keystore
The availability of a trusted execution environment in a system on a chip (SoC) offers an opportunity for Android devices to provide hardware-backed, strong security services to the Android OS, to platform services, and even to third-party apps.
While it can be defeated I still recommend you to use it, because not all hackers have the skill set or are willing to spend the time on it, and I would recommend you to read this series of articles about Mobile API Security Techniques to learn about some complementary/similar techniques to the ones you described. This articles will teach you how API Keys, User Access Tokens, HMAC and TLS Pinning can be used to protect the API and how they can be bypassed.
Possible Better Solutions
Nowadays I see developers using Android SafetyNet to attest what is doing the request to the API server, but they fail to understand it's not intended to attest that the mobile app is what is doing the request, instead it's intended to attest the integrity of the device, and I go in more detail on my answer to the question Android equivalent of ios devicecheck. So should I use it? Yes you should, because it is one more layer of defense, that in this case tells you that your mobile app is not installed in a rooted device, unless SafetyNet has been bypassed.
Is there any way to restrict post requests to my REST API only to requests coming from my own mobile app binary?
You can allow the API server to have an high degree of confidence that is indeed accepting requests only from your genuine app binary by implementing the Mobile App Attestation concept, and I describe it in more detail on this answer I gave to the question How to secure an API REST for mobile app?, specially the sections Securing the API Server and A Possible Better Solution.
Do you want to go the Extra Mile?
In any response to a security question I always like to reference the excellent work from the OWASP foundation.
For APIS
OWASP API Security Top 10
The OWASP API Security Project seeks to provide value to software developers and security assessors by underscoring the potential risks in insecure APIs, and illustrating how these risks may be mitigated. In order to facilitate this goal, the OWASP API Security Project will create and maintain a Top 10 API Security Risks document, as well as a documentation portal for best practices when creating or assessing APIs.
For Mobile Apps
OWASP Mobile Security Project - Top 10 risks
The OWASP Mobile Security Project is a centralized resource intended to give developers and security teams the resources they need to build and maintain secure mobile applications. Through the project, our goal is to classify mobile security risks and provide developmental controls to reduce their impact or likelihood of exploitation.
OWASP - Mobile Security Testing Guide:
The Mobile Security Testing Guide (MSTG) is a comprehensive manual for mobile app security development, testing and reverse engineering.
No. You're publishing a service with a public interface and your app will presumably only communicate via this REST API. Anything that your app can send, anyone else can send also. This means that the only way to secure access would be to authenticate in some way, i.e. keep a secret. However, you are also publishing your apps. This means that any secret in your app is essentially being given out also. You can't have it both ways; you can't expect to both give out your secret and keep it secret.
Though this is an old post, I thought I should share the updates from Google in this regard.
You can actually ensure that your Android application is calling the API using the SafetyNet mobile attestation APIs. This adds a little overhead on the network calls and prevents your application from running in a rooted device.
I found nothing similar like SafetyNet for iOS. Hence in my case, I checked the device configuration first in my login API and took different measures for Android and iOS. In case of iOS, I decided to keep a shared secret key between the server and the application. As the iOS applications are a little bit difficult to reversed engineered, I think this extra key checking adds some protection.
Of course, in both cases, you need to communicate over HTTPS.
As the other answers and comments imply, you cant truly restrict API access to only your app but you can take different measures to reduce the attempts. I believe the best solution is to make requests to your API (from native code of course) with a custom header like "App-Version-Key" (this key will be decided at compile time) and make your server check for this key to decide if it should accept or reject. Also when using this method you SHOULD use HTTPS/SSL as this will reduce the risk of people seeing your key by viewing the request on the network.
Regarding Cordova/Phonegap apps, I will be creating a plugin to do the above mentioned method. I will update this comment when its complete.
there is nothing much you can do. cause when you let some one in they can call your APIs. the most you can do is as below:
since you want only and only your application (with a specific package name and signature) calls your APIs, you can get the signature key of your apk pragmatically and send is to sever in every API call and if thats ok you response to the request. (or you can have a token API that your app calls it every beginning of the app and then use that token for other APIs - though token must be invalidated after some hours of not working with)
then you need to proguard your code so no one sees what you are sending and how you encrypt them. if you do a good encrypt decompiling will be so hard to do.
even signature of apk can be mocked in some hard ways but its the best you can do.
Someone have looked at Firebase App Check ?
https://firebase.google.com/docs/app-check
Is there any way to restrict post requests to my REST API only to requests coming from my own mobile app binary?
I'm not sure if there is an absolute solution.
But, you can reduce unwanted requests.
Use an App Check:
The "Firebase App Check" can be used cross-platform (https://firebase.google.com/docs/app-check) - credit to #Xande-Rasta-Moura
iOS: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck
Android: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2013/01/verifying-back-end-calls-from-android.html
Use BasicAuth (for API requests)
Allow a user-agent header for mobile devices only (for API requests)
Use a robots.txt file to reduce bots
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
I have a setup on a Raspberry Pi (with its native camera) that uses a cronjob to start an ffmpeg session with its output streaming to YouTube. I re-use the same stream key each time, which is written into my ffmpeg scripts. This all works perfectly each week, automatically starting and stopping at the desired time.
However, each week PRIOR to that livestream, I have to "manually" go into YouTube Studio and "schedule" a new future event. This is easy enough, since it lets me "reuse" previous settings -- all I have to change is the Title, date, and time. But I would love to figure out a way to automate that part of the process, as well. I assume it involves using the YouTube Data API, but I'm not well versed in API's, JSON, etc.
(I do have a strong Linux background, bash scripting skills, and general programming background.)
My final solution just needs to:
create the new scheduled event (maybe 12 hours prior to going live), with Title, Date, Time, "Unlisted" status, category, and so forth -- all the usual settings I do manually within Studio
retrieve the assigned URL for the upcoming stream (my script will then email that to me)
So, basically, I'm asking for help getting started with the API, or whatever method is capable of doing this. I would prefer to code it on the same Pi that does the ffmpeg encoding (although in a pinch, I could create the schedule from another computer, even Windows). Any examples would be great.
So far, all I have done is create my Google project, enable the YouTube Data API in the project, and create my API key. But I'm not sure where to go from there.
If Python as implementation language suites you, then I'd recommend to use the Google's APIs Client Library for Python.
Basically, this library is of good quality and (compared to other client libraries) simple to use. It will, for example, insulate you from having to deal explicitly with REST API calls, JSON and the like. Your code will also work under both GNU/Linux and Windows.
You may begin your journey by reading the official getting started doc: YouTube Live Streaming API Overview. Then I recommend absorbing these two important documents: Life of a Broadcast and Understanding Broadcasts and Streams.
Then go read, understand and run the following sample program from Google: create_broadcast.py. Of course, you'll have to adapt that code to your use case.
You'll have to exercise patience and perseverance (since you say you have no prior experience using the YouTube Data API). This API is non-trivial, but it'll pay off to you at the end of your (programming) journey (you mentioned to be versed in programming).
A special mention: for to be able to call the live streaming APIs you will first need to get acquainted with the things related to the so-called OAuth 2.0 authorization and authentication: Implementing OAuth 2.0 Authentication. There's an official document that you need absorb: OAuth 2.0 for Mobile & Desktop Apps.
A few more references: the live streaming API has an official documentation too. The main site documenting the client library is: Google API Client Library for Python Docs. Its source is public, to be found within the client library's public repo under the directory docs.
Also useful is to see the YouTube Data API's list of all instance methods.
I am writing a desktop app using PyQt5 which uses the Wordnik API to get word definitions. I do not have server-side access, nor do I wish to invest in acquiring it. Is there any way I can reliably hide my key so I can share my program on GitHub?
At the very least you could store your API key in a separate source file (which you would exclude from the repository via .gitignore) and check for exceptions while importing that file (see this), alerting to provide own API key if that fails.
Storing the API key in a non-source configuration file is another option, but then your worries are in storing that file in a way that is not accessible to the end user of your application.
Unfortunately, no, our Wordnik terms of service don't allow for sharing keys where they are accessible by end-users. If your app is noncommercial you can share instructions for users to help them apply for and add their own Wordnik keys to their copy of the application (and this also helps you, in that your key won't hit our API limits based on your users).
If this is a commercial application, please get in touch with us (apiteam#wordnik) with more details about your use case as we are looking into how to make this easier. As a small nonprofit with limited engineering resources we can't promise a quick solution but since our mission is to find & share every English word we're always interested in learning more about how folks are using our API. :)
Thanks for using Wordnik!
I apologize for the question but I don't have the resources to figure it out myself.
I'm looking for features my next iOS / android app should have and as you can imagine, I'm interested on a "pinch of social" that's why getsream seems to be my saver.
After reading the getting started section and the documentation, I found this warning http://getstream.io/docs/#mobile that confuses me.
I supposed getstream is a managed service that takes care of everything letting me use the REST API to build my mobile community within their phones.
Could you please tell me where I'm wrong?
Many thanks
There are two main reasons we do not recommend integrating Getstream client side (i.e. in the browser or on mobile). First, it is hard to guarantee security when you integrate from the client-side, you have to somehow provision tokens for each user's feed (and feeds they want to target with activities http://getstream.io/docs/#targetting), you could also generate an application wide (read/write) token and ship this to all clients but this is also a bad idea for obvious reasons. Second, we do not recommend using Getstream to store all your activity data, you store references to objects in your local database and enrich the activities from getstream at read time (have a look at our integration libraries for Django/Rails).
Reading through the Flickr API documentation it keeps stating I require an API key to use their REST protocols. I am only building a photo viewer, gathering information available from Flickr's public photo feed (For instance, I am not planning on writing an upload script, where a API key would be required). Is there any added functionality I can get from getting a Key?
Update I answered the question below
To use the Flickr API you need to have an application key. We use this to track API usage.
Currently, commercial use of the API is allowed only with prior permission. Requests for API keys intended for commercial use are reviewed by staff. If your project is personal, artistic, free or otherwise non-commercial please don't request a commercial key. If your project is commercial, please provide sufficient detail to help us decide. Thanks!
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.api_keys.html
We set up an account and got an API key. The answer to the question is, yes there is advanced functionality with an API key when creating something like a simple photo viewer. The flickr.photos.search command has many more features for reciving an rss feed of images than the Public photo feed, such as only retrieving new photos since the last feed request (via the min_upload_date attribute) or searching for "safe photos" only.
If you have a key, they can monitor your usage and make sure that everything is copacetic -- you are below request limit, etc. They can separate their stats on regular vs API usage. If they are having response time issues, they can make response a bit slower to API users in order to keep the main website responding quickly, etc.
Those are the benefits to them.
The benefits to you? If you just write a scraper, and it does something they don't like like hitting them too often, they'll block you unceremoniously for breaking their ToS.
If you only want to hit the thing a couple of times, you can get away without the Key. If you are writing a service that will hit their feed thousands of times, you want to give them the courtesy of following their rules.
Plus like Dave Webb said, the API is nicer. But that's in the eye of the beholder.
The Flickr API is very nice and easy to use and will be much easier than scraping the feed yourself.
Getting a key takes about 2 minutes - you fill in a form on the website and then email it to you.
Well, they say you need a key - you need a key, then :-) Exposing an API means you can pull data off the site way easier, it is understandable they want this under control. It is pretty much the same as with other API enabled sites.