I am access third party API from javascript framework but it gives me Access-Control-Allow-Origin. After going through API documentation they suggested to set up a proxy server to make calls to API behind the scenes
It is really understandable that at the time API call we are passing some confidential parameters which will revel in JavaScript as it is client side
I am using azure, so on that basis somebody can guide me how we can create proxy server to make calls to API
You can use the proxy feature in Azure Functions. It is really easy to get started with, an probably powerful enough to do what you need.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-proxies
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Im building a chat that uses a api rest full, but i found a problem storage jwt in client side (cookies and his problems), so i opted to use sessions(it's a better option in security terms), that adds state to my app.
I should create a separate server that handles the sessions and also have my rest api?, and apart another server that implements some functionality such as a push server (which I plan to implement). Because I really don't like the idea of having everything on one server, and if so, what should I take into account? (have more than an rest api server and other with his funcionality).
I'm a developer and i think so this require architecture knowledge, and i have no many idea about servers. If you can give me some idea about the topic to get better on it will be great, and what's the better option in this case.
Thanks, give a nice day
i'm working on an electron js app & i need to connect it to an API
knowing that the source code of an electron-js app is visible it's a huge security risk to leave the API key there !
how can i solve this problem ?
Instead of having the electron app (whether from the page or from the main process) make a request to the API directly, you can have it make a request to your own server instead - then, your server can make the request to the API, so that the key is only visible to your server, and isn't exposed publicly anywhere.
This will also let you gate requests from clients - if, for example, the credentials a client sends don't match what you need, or if they make too many requests in too short a time, you can cut them off.
You can't. If API key is shared, it's probably designed to be used in the backend.
The solution for that is to create a backend API for proxying API calls. Such proxying API should utilize authentication, so each user must send individual credentials.
How about obfuscate it using a utility like js-beautify.
I really like the Wolkenkit server but when I looked at the client library it seemed a bit too opinionated and I might be using graphQL -- which I think will work well to wrangle all the read models. In that case, can I just use the server with http? What would be involved with that?
Basically, you can access wolkenkit using HTTP or web sockets directly, without the need to use the JavaScript client SDK. All the client SDK does is wrapping the HTTP respective web socket calls in a convenience API.
The server is built upon tailwind, which is a base module for applications built with CQRS in mind. The best place to start is to have a look at the HTTP server API of tailwind, which is used by wolkenkit. There, one could also add a GraphQL endpoint.
Please note that I am one of the developers of wolkenkit, so please take my answer with a grain of salt.
I've been looking at node.js, REST APIs and WebSockets lately to further my knowledge about backend and frontend web development. Trying to go with best practices I see REST API comes up all the time. Now my problem which I don't seem to understand how to properly solve.
Say for example I'd like to have client / server decoupled and for this I implement a REST API in the backend so that my frontend will access and get data to render. Specific (imaginary) example: lets say I want to build a rental service website. Now I would like to have an endpoint for my frontend to access information about certain products, let's say the number of bikes that have been rented so far. I'd like to be able to show this on my frontend (through the help of the REST API) but I wouldn't like for other people who call this REST API to be able to get the data (because espionage is a serious business and I'd like to keep the evil ones away, yes they can webcrawl but bla bla). So in essence I'd like for the localhost machine to be able to access (part of) the REST API but not anyone else. Things get complicated because I'd also like people to be able to create a user on my website so then I'd like to have other endpoints which can then be accessed without restriction because I'm thinking, what if at some point I'd like to have a mobile app that is integrated with the service. Then it will be unfeasible to restrict all requests to localhost.
How would you architect a secure server / client as this one? Or in your opinion is it not that big of a deal to have the REST API exposed to others (the evil ones)?
The above goes for WebSockets as well. I know REST APIs are all nice and neat but I think the future lies in near-realtime connections and so I'm likewise as interested in WebSockets (through higher level modules of course, Socket.io, SockJS etc.).
There are many solutions to secure your API out there and many of them are opensource. Which one you'll use really depends your detailed needs.
But to get you started I will mention a solution that is very accepted and supported by a large community:
Have a look at JSON Web Token, which are for example explained in this Article.
Basically your client requests an authentication token from the server and then stores it locally to reuse it for every request to your API.
The Server on the other hand may protect your API as needed. That means you may also have a public API that does not expect a token in the HTTP Header.
Tokens may also expire. That is handy if you, for example, will allow a new user for registering on your site for a limited time.
Here is another article that explains things.
Now on to the websocket part of your question. YES, you definetly want to protect your server side sockets as well. So look out for a library that supports authentication. Again, I think there are a number of opensource libraries out there.
To mention one: Primus.
Primus is an abstraction layer for many socket libraries underneath and lets you quickly change the socket provider. But it also has an authentication hook that you can implement.
And guess what.. you can use it to check for a JSON Web Token!
Hope this gets you started.
For my current side project, which is a modular web management system (which could contain modules for database management, cms, project management, resource management, time tracking, etc…), I want to expose the entire system as a RESTful API as I think that will make the system as more usable. The system itself is going to be coded in ASP.MET MVC3 however if I make all the data/actions available through a RESTful API, that should make the system very easy to use with PHP, Ruby, Python, etc… (they could even make there own interface to manage certain data if they wanted).
However, the one thing that seems hard to do easily (from the user's using the RESTful API point of view) with a RESTful API is security with ajax functionality. If I wanted something that was complex to setup and use, I would just create SOAP services but the whole drive for using a RESTful API is that it is very easy. The most common way of securing a RESTful API with with a key that is associated with a user. This works fine when all the calls are done on the server side however once you start doing ajax functionality, that changes. I would want the RESTful API to be able to be called directly from javascript however anyone who are firebug would easily be able to access the key the user is using allow that person access to the system. Is there a better way the secure a RESTful API where it does not make the user of the RESTful API do complex things just to set it up?
For one thing, you can't prevent the user of your API to not expose his key.
But, if you are writing a client for your API, I would suggest using your server side to do any requests to the API, while your HTML pages provide the data from the user. If you absolutely must use Javascript to make calls to the API and you still have a server side that populates the page in question, then you can obscure the actual key via a one-way digest algorithm in a timestamp-dependant way, while generating the page, and make it that your api checks that digest in a time-dependant way too.
Also, I'd suggest that you take a look into OAuth Nonces and timestamps a bit more deeply. Twitter and other API providers obviously have this problem too, so they must be doing something with the Nonce values.
It is possible to make some signature in request from javascript. But I'm hot sure, how 'RESTfull' urls would be with this extra info. And there you have the same problem: anyone who can see your making-signature-algorithm can make his own signature, witch you server will accept as well.
SSL stands for secure socket layer. It is crucial for security in REST API design. This will secure your API and make it less vulnerable to malicious attacks.
Other security measures you should take into consideration include: making the communication between server and client private and ensuring that anyone consuming the API doesn’t get more than what they request.
SSL certificates are not hard to load to a server and are available for free mostly during the first year. They are not expensive to buy in cases where they are not available for free.
The clear difference between the URL of a REST API that runs over SSL and the one which does not is the “s” in HTTP:
https :// mysite.com/posts runs on SSL.
http :// mysite.com/posts does not run on SSL.