This is the my web-app "User Settings" page.
I have simplified it to a minimum to better highlight the problem.
To authenticate users I use Auth0, I wanted to use the sub claim user_id to identify the users inside my MySQL database for update and retrieve user's info. Unfortunately the user_id is different for each provider, for example, if the same user with the same e-mail logs-in via Auth0 he gets a user_id if he does it via google he gets another one.
I thought about using email to link logged user to his info.
The problem is in my API. Before the change it was "localhost: 8080 / api / users /: id"
each time it created a new id and in any case it was impossible to recover the data of the single user. Now that I have replaced "id" with "email" my API has also changed in "localhost: 8080 / api / users /: johnsmith#xxx.com".
Before:
After:
In a few words, the request url on the client side has also changed.
I would like to make sure that the GET and PUT requests are made based on the e-mail of the logged user without going to modify the whole back-end.
Sounds like something is wrong with how you authenticate users. If you have multiple ways to authenticate a user, those methods need to be in a one to many relation with the user. For example each user has a list of auth-methods, and whenever an authentication is made you check your table of authentication methods and find the one user it maps to.
Im not sure if you are doing this yourself or if the framework you are using is handling that, but it sounds like you need to change the model to allow many Auth methods for a single account.
Also you could use email, but that is also an "old" way of uniquely identifying users almost every single person has multiple active email accounts nowadays, so you should also have a one-to-many relation for users to emails. What if the user has different email accounts for their Facebook and Google accounts?
See account linking here: https://auth0.com/docs/users/user-account-linking
It is dangerous to trust that the external providers are truthful about what email belongs to who. What if I open a new account using someone else's email on one of the providers? Then I can log into that users account in your application, which is a pretty big security risk.
I wish to add Social Login feature to a Shopify store that I am building. (I'm using the professional plan.)
I explored a few of the available social-login apps on the Shopify App Store. Upon studying closely as to how they actually work - I have come to the following understanding of the general scheme being followed by all of them.
The Shopify shop owner sets up a social app (e.g. Facebook app) with their store identity, but configures the Callback-URL/Redirect-URL to one supplied by the App author (i.e. pointing to their infrastructure).
Upon successful login by a shop customer on the social platform (via a link/button inserted on the shop login page), the request gets redirected to the App.
The App retrieves the user's email address from the their social profile (that they now have access to).
They then lookup their own database to see if this is an existing customer. If so they go directly to step 7 below.
If it's a new customer, they use Shopify API to create a new 'customer' on the target Shopify store. They set the customer up with a randomly generated password.
At the same time they also make an entry of this customer account (email + generated password) in their own database.
They then redirect the request back to the Shopify store's login page but this time with the customer's email address (retrieved from social platform) and their password (from the App's own database) included as part of the data that comes back to the users browser as part of loading the login page.
Then the App's javascript embedded on the shop login page uses the customer email address and password to programmatically submit the login form - thus establishing a valid customer session on the Shopify shop.
My questions are as follows:
Has someone else also looked closely in to this, and thus can validate if my above understanding is correct or not?
If it is correct - is this the only way to achieve social login on Shopify (without using Shopify Plus/Enterprise plan)?
I am trying to understand if this indeed is the only way, because I strongly feel that this method is not at all secure. And thus I'd rather not use this method; or if I just have to - then I'd rather write my own (private) app for this so that at least I am in control of the security of the app/database that holds sensitive users credentials.
Would appreciate any help/thoughts I can get with this, please.
If you are rolling your own you probably want to look at Multipass. It would be the thing to use if you can set up another web service that handles the trusted partner registration process.
Our web app. sends reports out to users which contain links that point to various items within our web app. (specific records). Users ordinarily have to login to our system to access it, so I am wondering what the best methods are of allowing one of these links to direct the user to the area of the system, without them having to repeatedly login.
When you create a link, you can note which user this link is for. When user clicks on the link, fetch information for the user. Guid in your url would guarantee that no other person can guess path for that users data. This will not technically authenticate a user. But will allow them to see data you need.
First of all it's bad idea to distribute user credentials even to a known email address.
You can generate a unique key for each customer and insert it in query string of included URL in the email. once user clicks on the sent URL, system discovers which user is dealing with and authenticates user. After successful authentication process it really makes sense if you disable the sent unique key.
Let me start by saying I really like Deployd. I want to use it in production, but I want to incorporate OAuth and social logins, so I installed the dpd-passport module. It works great, except for two little (big) problems:
When a user signs in via an OAuth provider (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Github) a new user record is created...but if the same user clears their cookies or uses a different browser to log in, a new user record is created.
If I do something clever (read: hacky) and assign users with social logins an ID based on the socialAccount and socialAccountId (something unique but constant for each social account), someone could use the standard method of user creation to spoof a user by making a POST request to the /users endpoint if they knew that user's socialAccount and socialAccountId.
My question is: How can I A) prevent #1 from occurring, or B) disable the standard method of user creation without also preventing OAuth user creation?
Has anyone ever successfully used Deployd and dpd-passport in production? If so, I want to speak with you...
Thanks in advance!
First of all, I think you haven't added the custom fields per the docs.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/dpd-passport#requirements
I hadn't either, and observed the new user feature (because it couldn't lookup the response from the auth service to find the user from before). Adding these fields fixed it.
Also, there is a google group here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/deployd-users
Hope that helps.
When supporting a new web app in an enterprise environment, it is often necessary to log in as a specific user in order to diagnose a real or perceived problem they are having. Two opposing issues apply here:
Best practice is to use hashed or encrypted passwords, not clear text. Sometimes, there is a third-party SSO (single sign-on) in the middle. There is no way to retrieve the user's password. Unless the user provides it (not encouraged), there is no way to log in as that user.
Many web app's have personalization and complex authorization. Different users have different roles (admin, manager, user) with different permissions. Sometimes users can only see their data -- their customers or tasks. Some users have read-only access, while others can edit. So, each user's view of the web app is unique.
Assume that in an enterprise environment, it isn't feasible to go to the user's desk, or to connect directly to their machine.
How do you handle this situation?
Edit: I want to reiterate that in a large financial institution or typical Fortune 500 company with hundreds of thousands of employees all of the country, and around the world, it is not possible for a mere developer in some IT unit to be able to directly access a user's machine. Some of those are public-facing web apps used by customers (such as online banking and stock trading). And, many of those are intranet applications rely on Active Directory or an SSO, meaning that user credentials are the same for many applications. I do thank you all for your suggestions; some may be highly useful in other kinds of environments.
A number of these ideas inconvenience the user, either by forcing them to change their password, or by occupying their desktop for your debugging session.
Markc's idea is the best: augment your authentication logic to allow superusers to log in as a particular user by supplying not the user's credentials, but the user's name plus their superuser credentials.
I've done it like this in the past (pseudo-ish python):
if is_user_authenticated(username, userpassword):
login the user
else if ':' in userpassword:
supername, superpassword = userpassword.split(':')
if is_superuser_authenticated(supername, superpassword):
login the user
In other words, if the username and password don't authenticate, if the password has a colon, then it's actually the admin username and admin password joined by a colon, so login as the username if they are the right admin username and password.
This means you can login as the user without knowing their secrets, and without inconveniencing them.
For our web applications we use a process that for lack of a better term is defined as 'hijacking' a user's account.
Basically, administrators can 'hijack' a user's account with a simple button click. In the code, you simply use a unique identifier (user id works in a less secure environment) that then establishes the necessary credentials in the session so that they can then work within that user's profile. For a more secure environment you could use a unique hash for each user.
In order to ensure that this hijack method is secure, it always first verifies that the request is being made by an authenticated administrator with the appropriate rights. Because of this it becomes necessary for either the administrator's session to be hijacked or for their authentication credentials to be captured in order for someone to ever exploit the hijack function within the application.
I had 4 ideas. While I was typing 3 of them were already suggested (so I upvoted them)
Variant on idea 3 - impersonation:
To make this as "identical as possible" to a normal login with minimal code changes, you might add the ability to impersonate directly at login by supplying Admin credentials plus an alternate username, e.g. login as Admin:user, adminpassword. The system would treat this exactly as logging in as user with userpassword.
Idea 4: Can you access the password store? If so, temporarily replace the user's hash with the hash of a known password. (the passwords are often stored online in a database. A SQL Query tool can do the swaps )
An administrator should be able to change a user's password. Change the password for the user to something you know. You can then log in as that user.
Tell the user to reset his/her password after you are done debugging.
Usually by some sort of remote control software that can be used to view their desktop. If they're on a Windows terminal server, then the built in admin tools can be used for that. Otherwise I'd use something like VNC across an internal network, or an external service like LogMeIn (http://www.logmein.com/).
Could you have a testing environment where there is a regular cut of live data copied to (obviously sanitised to meet any security or data protection issues). A user similar in setup to the one having trouble could be used to troubleshoot or indeed the very user if this is allowed.
Use a remote desktop client as mentioned in other answers, but again this may not be practical for you. If you have these rights within the domain, I have heard of error handling even doing a screenscrape and including this in logs! but this sounds a little odd to me.
Could you have an admin tool to clone a user into a demo account?
The solution we have used in our web apps is to have the authN/authZ return the desired user as the effective user. We do this by having an admin feature to setup a masquerade, and then when we ask for the currently logged in user (current_user), we handle the masquerade:
def current_user_with_effective_user
if masked?
current_user_without_effective_user.masquerade_as
else
current_user_without_effective_user
end
end
alias_method_chain, :current_user, :effective_user