I have created my protected routes and i will like to access the protected routes using jwt token from postman
One way to get around this is this:
Store JWT in session/cookie for the user.
Send this as a request header. You can call it x-api-token or whatever you like.
Keep the public key for JWT in server's environment or file-system.
Read the value of header i.e. x-api-key
Verify using any JWT library to make sure it's authentic.
Related
I am working on jwt authentication based projects and I want to store the token which is created on user 's login request but this token can be decoded easily so where I have to store these token ?
//code to create token and cookie
const createToken=(id)=>{
return jwt.sign({id},secretkey);}
{....some code are written here.....}
const token= createToken(userid);
res.cookie('jwts',token,{httpOnly:true,maxAge:1000*60*60,sameSite:'lax'})
From your question, it feels like your JWT flow isn't clear. The token can be decoded - but it will only reveal some payload data and header - which doesn't contain any sensitive data.
Token's generation and explanation:
A JWT Token is formed of Header, Payload & Signature.
The header is metadata about the token itself.
The payload can be encoded in the token, i.e. the data e.g. user's Id.
Signature is created using header, payload, & the SECRET stored at the server. This process is called Signing. This 'SECRET' is what helps us to validate the signature's authenticity.
Well, so how do we make sure the data isn't modified?
A verification process is done at the server where JWT's header, payload, and secret are used to create a test signature. This signature is matched with the original signature (existing inside the JWT already) - then the data has not been modified.
Without secret - no one can manipulate JWT. That is, the verification will fail if the signatures do not match.
Token Storage:
There is some debate about whether to store the token in cookies or local-storage since both are prone to hacker attacks.
Login Flow:
The client sends a request to the server (POST - login).
The server validates the user and returns a JWT token in response if the provided credentials are valid.
The JWT token is stored in localStorage / cookies depending on the preferred choice (I prefer localStorage).
you need to send that token along with the API requests from client. I used to store in clients internal storage and used to send that token for each and every API call.
Im trying to create a protected route , once the user logs in user is issued a token and this token is checked when user tries to access a protected resource . Im able to generate the token and send it back as a response as the below code,
const token = jwt.sign({_id:found._id.toString()},process.env.KEY);
res.header('token', token );
res.render("dashboard");
So after a user is logged in , i go to the dashboard and i can see the response header where token is set as token .But when i try to navigate to the secret resource page the auth handler gets a request,but the request does not have a token in the header so im not able to verify it.
router.get('/secret',auth,function(req,res)
{
res.render('secret')
}
);
Trying to figure out how to set the token header correctly so it is issued and can verify it.
on client side, you should send token in header as authorization
after that, you can receive client's token on backend side using
req.get('Authorization')
and verify it using
jwt.verify
We have our development website password protected with htaccess and htpasswd. We have REST API on our dev website and we are able to bypass the password protection when we are not using any authorization header by passing the username and password as Basic Auth Type. Please check the below screenshot
Postman Authorization Type
However, we are having few other APIs as well where we need to pass the bearer(token) as authorization header. In this case we are not able to pass multiple authorization header for both htaccess password and token.
Is there a way we can pass both the htaccess authorization header as well as the API authorization header? Or can we bypass password protection only for API calls and not for the website?
For additional information, we are using Apache/2.4.28.
Thanks
Super old question, but I just ran into this issue and figured out you can combine the Basic Auth and the Bearer Token into 1 Authorization call.
This is how I did it with Postman:
Create the Basic Auth to get past your htaccess pw:
Go to the Headers section and copy the Hashed Basic Auth Value:
Still in Headers add a new Authorization Key. For the Value add your copied Basic Auth Hash and then your Bearer token. Should look like this:
Basic dGVhbToxxxXXXxxxXx== Bearer 2|XDIrp...wqhKCzvOpK
Now go back to the Authorization Tab (Step 1) and Change the Basic Auth back to Inherit Auth from parent
The final Header should look like this:
Now you can get through the htaccess and authenticate your Api route with the bearer token.
If you use postman basic authentication with username add password it will bypass the htaccess.
If you using through code, encode your "username:password" using base64 and pass it in the headers as,
'Authorization': "Basic BASE64ENCODE"
As the title suggests, where are JWT tokens stored on the server side? in database or in memeory? I understand the implementation can vary due to different requirements, but just in general where would you store it?
If I want to provide a very basic token authentication server, meaning upon receiving a username and password via a POST request, I would like to return a token. In this case, how is a token generated with a very basic algorithm work differently than a jwt token?
With a token generated by a simple algorithm:
it does not contain payload
its value is not computed based on the username and password, thus it cannot be rehashed back to anything meaningful
In this case, is there still value to use JWT?
Thanks!
client needs to store it, on server storage is not required.
JWT have all the claims in itself and is signed by the server as well. On receipt, server checks for the signature and reads the claims. It does not match it against a stored value. That is the whole point of using JWT against access tokens.
Look at how a JWT is structured.
You don't need to store token on server side.
You should store a private key ( any string of your choice)at server preferably as environment variable.The jsonwebtoken provided method use this private key to generate a token to pass to client.
Client has to store this token at client side so that it can pass this token to subsequent request to server in header.
Server would extract the token value from header and validate it using private key by calling a method of jsonwebtoken.If token is not modified by any means then validate will succeed.
Jwt token is not required to be stored but the "secret-key" needs to be stored.
The structure of jwt is header.payload.signature where signature is generated as below by the server :
signature = HS256(base64Header + '.' + base64Payload, 'mysecret')
So in essense:
1.header.payload.signature is sent to client on first sign in
2.client return back header.payload.signature in subsequent api call
3.server decodes it for verification as below:
base64Header, base64Payload, signature = token.split('.')
header = base64Decode(base64Header)
payload = base64Decode(base64Payload)
serverComputedSignature = HS256(base64Header + '.' + base64Payload,
'mysecret')
if serverComputedSignature != signature:
print('FAILED')
A token is a generic term. JWT defines the structure of a token which contains the below three parts.
1. header
2. payload
3. signature
Storing JWT or any other format of token is driven by the business need.
If the content of the JWT has to be used/validated for any reason then it can be stored in a DB or any other storage.
If the need is to validate the signature then there is no reason to store the issued JWT.
I am trying to understand the new OWIN Bearer Token authentication process in the Single Page App template in MVC 5. Please correct me if I'm wrong, for the OAuth password client authentication flow, Bearer Token authentication works by checking the http authorization request header for the Bearer access token code to see if a request is authenticated, it doesn't rely on cookie to check if a particular request is authenticated.
According to this post:
OWIN Bearer Token Authentication with Web API Sample
public override async Task GrantResourceOwnerCredentials(OAuthGrantResourceOwnerCredentialsContext context)
{
using (IdentityManager identityManager = _identityManagerFactory.CreateStoreManager())
{
if (!await identityManager.Passwords.CheckPasswordAsync(context.UserName, context.Password))
{
context.SetError("invalid_grant", "The user name or password is incorrect.");
return;
}
string userId = await identityManager.Logins.GetUserIdForLocalLoginAsync(context.UserName);
IEnumerable<Claim> claims = await GetClaimsAsync(identityManager, userId);
ClaimsIdentity oAuthIdentity = CreateIdentity(identityManager, claims,
context.Options.AuthenticationType);
ClaimsIdentity cookiesIdentity = CreateIdentity(identityManager, claims,
_cookieOptions.AuthenticationType);
AuthenticationProperties properties = await CreatePropertiesAsync(identityManager, userId);
AuthenticationTicket ticket = new AuthenticationTicket(oAuthIdentity, properties);
context.Validated(ticket);
context.Request.Context.Authentication.SignIn(cookiesIdentity);
}
}
The GrantReourceOwnerCredentials function not only compose the ticket with this line: context.Validated(ticket); but it also compose a cookie identity and set it to the cookie with this line: context.Request.Context.Authentication.SignIn(cookiesIdentity);
So my questions are, what is the exact purpose of the cookie in this function? Shouldn't the AuthenticationTicket be good enough for authentication purpose?
In the SPA template there are actually two separate authentication mechanisms enabled- cookie authentication and token authentication. This enables authentication of both MVC and Web API controller actions, but requires some additional setup.
If you look in the WebApiConfig.Register method you'll see this line of code:
config.SuppressDefaultHostAuthentication();
That tells Web API to ignore cookie authentication, which avoids a host of problems which are explained in the link you posted in your question:
"...the SPA template enables application cookie middleware as active mode as well in order to enable other scenarios like MVC authentication. So Web API will still be authenticated if the request has session cookie but without a bearer token. That’s probably not what you want as you would be venerable to CSRF attacks for your APIs. Another negative impact is that if request is unauthorized, both middleware components will apply challenges to it. The cookie middleware will alter the 401 response to a 302 to redirect to the login page. That is also not what you want in a Web API request."
So now with the call to config.SuppressDefaultHostAuthentication() Web API calls that require authorization will ignore the cookie that is automatically sent along with the request and look for an Authorization header that begins with "Bearer". MVC controllers will continue to use cookie authentication and are ignorant of the token authentication mechanism as it's not a very good fit for web page authentication to begin with.
The existence of the cookie also left me puzzled, since it clearly is not necessary in a bearer token authentication scenario... In this post the author dissects the individual accounts template, and has the following to say about the cookie:
The method also sets an application cookie. I don’t see a good reason for that.
My guess is that the authors of the template wanted to show examples of different kinds of authentication logic, and in this particular case they wanted to show how the authentication information could be stored in both the bearer token authentication JSON payload, as well as in a standard authentication cookie.
The fact that the JSON authentication payload is set to also include an additional (unnecessary) unencrypted property (the user id), in addition to the encrypted ticket, seems to support this theory:
var properties = CreateProperties(user.UserName);
var ticket = new AuthenticationTicket(oAuthIdentity, properties);
It seems that the authors of the template wanted to provide some useful examples, rather than the bare minimum needed to achieve bearer token authentication. This is also mentioned in the linked post above.
The cookie has one important purpose. Its value contains the bearer token which can be extracted by client-side javascript on your pages. This means that if the user hits F5 or refreshes the page, the cookie will typically persist. Your client-side javascript can then grab the bearer token from the cookie when the page reloads.