Help! I have no clue what I am doing here. I am reworking old C# code and I need to use LDAP for integrated authentication on an intranet. The user should be completely unaware of this process but what I need is to have the React page contact the express server passing in the users domain id. From there I need to perform basic authentication then return all the groups that this user is a member of for validation.
I have read numerous tutorials on passport-activediretory and passport-ldap and so on but I am still confused.
What I am looking for is a single function that will run on every call to the API and will return either validation or, if requested, validation and group names the user belongs to.
What is available to make this process very simple. I looked at passport but to be honest authentication is not my milieu so I am at best uncertain as to how any of it works.
I am hoping that it will be as simple as app.all("*", functionHere());
Being very new to node (first project) I really need extensive help, hopefully in small words.
Thanks
For now I have switched to a .Net back end which support for LDAP integration without the need to a lot of excess code.
Will move back to Node once the application is finished then port it over.
Related
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
How would I go about deploying a web app intended for only a single user (myself)? I feel like making a login that only accepts 1 user is the wrong method and also easy to hack? Would it be a good idea to make it only accessible from a certain IP? Please advise! Thank you. Backend will be using nodejs.
If I were you, I would program the back-end the proper way. This involves generalizing the entire implementation so that any hypothetical user with the correct password could use your login system. You could still authorize and authenticate the application so that when anybody else tries to log in, you automatically decline their request. If you are concerned about security, ensure that you are using SSL, basic encryption, hash passwords and, most importantly, do not use your own authorization library. It is far more secure if you use OAuth instead of using an IP, for example. Last, but definitely not least, make it as hard as you can for hackers to steal your data in the client side. This way, you also learn a lot of things that might come in handy in the near future.
I'm relatively new to the modern JavaScript web development world. I've built a very simple Node/Express back-end and a separate React front-end. My vague plan is to have users that will have permission to access certain areas of the front-end, and then have the front-end make requests to the back-end. Can the front-end and back-end share the same authentication/authorization scheme? Can they both use something like Auth0? How can I make these two secure?
I'm a little stuck and would appreciate any advice or a nudge in the right direction. I'm mostly stuck because these are two separate applications but the same "user" would technically have permissions to certain React views as well as certain Express endpoints - how they moosh together?
Thanks.
Although seems not directly related to your topic, but I would actually suggest you try Meteor if you are not planning to immediately start working on large projects (not pressing too hard on scalability).
Meteor has a builtin support for Accounts and interacts with MongoDB nicely, and it also has its own DDP protocol that simplifies API call massively. It also interacts nicely with React.
If you think Meteor might not be a good choice for yourself, you could still learn from its design policies of authorization, etc. It has quite a bit package source code that are not too difficult to understand, and should be helpful for you to learn the basic idea. (Actually, Meteor's Accounts package already implements the basic idea mentioned by another answerer, you can learn from its design principles)
When users log in to your site, issue them with an access token that they keep client side. On front-end, check if user has token and correct permissions before rendering components. On back-end, send the token as request headers to the endpoints.
I have implemented a similar case, but with the spring boot kotlin at the backend instead. My solution is using JWT token to validate the authentication and authorization.
User logins by input login form and send POST method to backend via a REST API.Backend validates credential and returns the JWT token including encrypted user_role, expiration date, etc... if valid or 403 exception
Front-end decodes the JWT (using jwt-decode lib or something else),
save it to validate the access permission to specific page in the
website based on user_role. Eg: role='ADMIN' can access to admin dashboard page, role='USER' can access user profile page, etc.
If you use express as the backend, I suggest to use the feathersjs. It has backend solutions for this and an optional front end version. Refer: https://docs.feathersjs.com/api/authentication/jwt.html
Secure Front end (React.js) and Back end (Node.js/Express Rest API) with Keycloak follow this
I'm tackling the design of my first API and am struggling somewhat with authorisation concepts - I was hoping some kind people could give me some advice!
What I'm building:
An API that will eventually be accessed by third party apps and a mobile app.
A web-based 'client' (first-party single page app) that will use the API. (Should this first-party app be 'a part' of the API, or a completely separate node app?)
Technology I plan to use:
Node
Express
Passport
Mongodb with Mongoose
I'm not wed to express or passport, they just seem like the best options and are well documented - bit I wouldn't want a potential solution to be dismissed because of alternative dependencies. Same with Mongoose, I actually prefer the look of Monk (or even just Mongojs), but every tut seems to use mongoose, so seems like the safest option for a node beginner.
Authenticating a user is simple enough (I've gone through the fantastic Beer Locker tutorial), what I'm struggling with is ongoing authorisation. Naturally I don't want the user to have to input a username and password with every request they make - should this information be stored locally and sent with every request? (if so, how? I can't find any info on handling an API with a session) or should I be working with tokens of some sort? The small amount of reading I did on 'Digest' authorisation (including the Beer Locker tutorial follow-up) made it seem like it had security issues, at least with the Passport implementation (this I don't fully understand, but seems to relate to hashing passwords, which passport doesn't do as standard, and only MD5 is supported even if it's added?).
I have built a working API that I can authorise with 'Basic' (directly, through Postman), so I have the foundations in place - authorisation works, I just need the tools to take that to the next step and add sessions into the mix!
I've been trying to get my head around this for a couple of days now, but I fear I'm too stuck in a more traditional local web-app workflow - the whole API thing is throwing me somewhat.
Any help is hugely appreciated, even if it's just pointing me at an appropriate tutorial - the above set of requirements must be quite common!
I have come accross this problem too...
I can only recommend doing this for the beginning:
http://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript/easy-node-authentication-setup-and-local
tell me if it helped :)
As I understand you have done the authentication and the only thing you have to do now is store somewhere that the current user is authenticated, his name, roles etc to use later with other requests. In the Passport you will do it in the function callback (instead of the "If this function gets called..." comment).
Now you have to decide, you have two options:
Store the user information (name, roles etc.) on your server (in a session) and give the user some long code which will identify his session for the next requests
to store the information on your server you may use for example the express-session middleware
it would be probably best to save the session identifier in a cookie, but read some security issues before
Give the user something that would prove to you he/she is authenticated and which name, roles etc. he/she has
you can generate a token, that contains the user information (name, roles etc.) that the user will send with every request. to know this token is legit, you will have to sign it. more on this is on jwt.io and you can use express-jwt middleware.
you dont have to care about storage of session with this one
the token can be placed to a cookie too, but same security issues apply. it is still considered better that localstorage (more here)
Im using GWT, GAE to make a web app.
I looked at a bunch of tutorials regarding implementing a login system but most of those tutorials implement it so it's mandatory to login to access the web app. How would I go about making it so that anyone can access the app but if they want to use account specific functionality, they they have the option of signing up for an account.
There are two parts to it.
First, in your client code you check if a user is logged in. If so, you allow access to the "closed" parts of the app. If not, you show a link/button to login and hide tabs/views that are accessible to authorized users.
Second, in your server code you specify which requests do not require authentication and which do require it. This is necessary if a user somehow figures out how to send a request without using your client code.
For example, in my code some requests have checkSession() called at the very beginning. If no authentication object is found for this user in session, this method throws LoginException to the client. If the authentication object is present, the request continues to execute normally and returns requested data to the client.
Further to Andrei's answer, if you want a framework to manage the sessions for you, you can use GWT-Platform, which has an excellent Gatekeeper feature.
I use it for mine and I have a LoggedInGatekeeper class. Simply add #UseGatekeeper(LoggedInGatekeeper.class) to the constructor of each presenter proxy and it checks if the user is logged in. If you want anyone to be able to access that page simply annotate with #NoGatekeeper. Easy!
It takes a bit of setting up but it's a great MVP framework. There are maven archetypes and samples etc.
Hope this helps.