I have front end - x.sameDomain.io.
and a back-end y.sameDomain.io. It basically I use for signup/signin and some other basic queries and this backens sends a http only cookie to the front-end.
Recently I have created another bakc-end z.sameDomain.io in aws lambda. Now the problem is whenever a user sends a request to y.sameDomain.io the cookie authenticates the user. But since there is a new backend z.sameDomain.io, now I am confused how I may authenticate users in z.sameDomain.io.
Is there a way I can login using y.sameDomain.io but both the back-end will recognize me?
I am new to this multi back-end system and not sure how resolve this issue?
I am developing a website like Heroku. I confused what should I do with the Github OAuth part? when you wanna register in Heroku and login you can not use OAuth ways (login/register using Github).
but after login you can create App. now one of your options to upload your codes in the Heroku is to connect your Heroku account to your Github account.
My problem
When the user is logged in how could I redirect the user to another page and after authentication (Github OAuth) how could I detect that this user previously logged in and the user does not need re-login?
Exactly what the Heroku did.
I can not understand how can I send another data to the Github OAuth login page and retrieve it back in callback url to detect which user is logged in now and save his/her access_token & refresh_token in database.
Not that I use expressjs express-session sequelize and ejs.
GitHub, like all OAuth based APIs, requires that each request to the API made on behalf of a user is authenticated with an access_token. If you don't pass an access_token alongside your request, the request will fail with a 401 Unauthorized status code.
There's no way to ask GitHub if a random user has accepted your app. It's not something implemented in the OAuth framework - as it could lead to a security flaw. So it's your responsibility as the application's owner to record which user has authorized your app.
With this in mind, let's try to sum up the differents steps that Heroku had to achieve to display this "Connected" status under the GitHub logo.
When you've signed-up on Heroku, the status of the GitHub integration was "not_connected". If you visit the settings page, you would see a "Connect to GitHub" button.
At some point, in the Heroku dashboard, you have clicked on the "Connect to GitHub" button and have authorized Heroku's app for GitHub. This is where you've been redirected to the callback_url
At this particular time, while you were on the callback_url page, Heroku has recorded in its database the new status of the GitHub integration for your account. It was set to "connected". Heroku has probably saved alongside the access_token and refresh_token.
Every time that you visit the settings page of your app, Heroku can render that you are connected because it has the status in its database.
(optional) When Heroku performs requests to the GitHub API using your access_token it can confirm that the connection is still live. If ever the request failed with a 401 Unauthorized, Heroku can update its database and reset your GitHub integration status to "not_connected".
This work like this for the GitHub API, as well as with any other OAuth based APIs. If you plan to integrate with several APIs, I highly recommend you to use an API Integrations Manager, such as Pizzly. It will help you focus on the business logic ("is my user connected or not?") and totally handle the OAuth process for you.
I've been studying the OAuth 2.0 authorization code flow and am trying to write a React application with an Express backend that displays what a user would see on their own Instagram profile. I'm trying to do so with minimal external libraries (i.e. not using passport-js) and without bringing a database into the mix.
This is my flow as of now:
Resource owner clicks an <a> tag on the React application (port 3000) which redirects them to the /auth/instagram endpoint of my Express server (port 8000)
res.redirect(AUTHORIZATON_URL) sends them to Instagram's authorization server
Resource owner consents and the authorization code is sent back to the predefined redirect-url /auth/instagram/callback with the authorization code set as a query parameter
I strip the authorization code off the url and make a POST request to https://api.instagram.com/oauth/access_token to grab the access token
Now that I have the access token, how do I reach out to the React frontend to let them know that everything worked and that the user was successfully authenticated?
From what I've read, this is where the idea of sessions and cookies come into play, but I haven't had luck finding documentation on how to achieve what I want without bringing in third party libraries.
In the end, I would like for my app to support multiple users viewing their profiles simultaneously. Since I imagine passing the access token to the frontend defeats the purpose of securely retrieving it on the backend, I'm guessing I will somehow need to pass a session id between the frontend and backend that is somehow linked to an access token.
Any ideas as to what my next steps should be are greatly appreciated, as well as any articles or documentation you see fit. Thanks!
Since you're doing the OAuth authentication on the server side, you have to pass some parameter to the redirect_uri, identifying the user session (see: Adding a query parameter to the Instagram auth redirect_uri doesn't work? );
When the redirect uri is called from the authority server, you will know which user was authorized. To notify the browser there are two options: 1) Notify the client using web sockets; 2) Pull the state from the client using a timer triggered function;
We have developed a website in normal html and js in the frontend and node.js in the backend.
I have used sessions data to get somethings done such as welcome email or mobile otp verification after the successful registration.
Now we are developing a cordova app with same backend api's and the actual problem comes here.I am unable to access my sessions data i.e.. req.session.user is null which I have updated after the successfull registration.
Can someone please suggest what is the solution for this?
In order to work session properly, you need to pass the sessionId in every request on the website this ID will set in a cookie and automatically send in every request.
When comes on to mobile you can achieve the session with the following approach.
1)When a user successfully logged in issue a token and store that token in your Cordova app (usually in local storage).
2)For every request pass this token along and check whether the token exists or not.
Note: You can attach the token in the authorization header
How does one handle authentication (local and Facebook, for example) using passport.js, through a RESTful API instead of through a web interface?
Specific concerns are handling the passing of data from callbacks to a RESTful response (JSON) vs using a typical res.send({ data: req.data }), setting up an initial /login endpoint which redirects to Facebook (/login cannot be accessed via AJAX, because it is not a JSON response - it is a redirect to Facebook with a callback).
I've found https://github.com/halrobertson/test-restify-passport-facebook, but I'm having trouble understanding it.
Furthermore, how does passport.js store the auth credentials? The server (or is it service?) is backed by MongoDB, and I'd expect credentials (login & salted hash of pw) to be stored there, but I don't know if passport.js has this type of capability.
There are many questions asked here, and it seems that even though the questions are asked in the context of Node and passport.js the real questions are more about workflow than how to do this with a particular technology.
Let's use #Keith example setup, modified a bit for added security:
Web server at https://example.com serves a single page Javascript client app
RESTful web service at https://example.com/api provides server support to rich client app
Server implemented in Node and passport.js.
Server has a database (any kind) with a "users" table.
Username/password and Facebook Connect are offered as authentication options
Rich client makes REST requests into https://example.com/api
There may be other clients (phone apps, for example) that use the web service at https://example.com/api but do not know about the web server at https://example.com.
Note that I'm using secure HTTP. This is in my opinion a must for any service that is available in the open, since sensitive information like passwords and authorization tokens are passing between client and server.
Username/password authentication
Let's look at how plain old authentication works first.
The user connects to https://example.com
The server serves a rich Javascript application which renders the initial page. Somehwere in the page there is a login form.
Many of the sections of this single page app haven't been populated with data due to the user not being logged in. All these sections have an event listener on a "login" event. All this is client side stuff, the server does not know of these events.
User enters his/her login and password and hits the submit button, which triggers a Javascript handler to record the username and password in client side variables. Then this handler triggers the "login" event. Again, this is all client side action, credentials were not sent to the server yet.
The listeners of the "login" event are invoked. Each of these now needs to send one or more requests to the RESTful API at https://example.com/api to obtain the user specific data to render on the page. Every single request they send to the web service will include the username and password, possibly in the form of HTTP Basic authentication, since the service being RESTful isn't allowed to maintain client state from one request to the next. Since the web service is on secure HTTP the password is safely encrypted during transit.
The web service at https://example.com/api receives a bunch of individual requests, each with authentication information. The username and password in each request is checked against the user database and if found correct the requested function executes and data is returned to the client in JSON format. If username and password do not match an error is sent to the client in the form of a 401 HTTP error code.
Instead of forcing clients to send username and password with every request you can have a "get_access_token" function in your RESTful service that takes the username and password and responds with a token, which is some sort of cryptographic hash that is unique and has some expiration date associated with it. These tokens are stored in the database with each user. Then the client sends the access token in subsequent requests. The access token will then be validated against the database instead of the username and password.
Non browser client applications like phone apps do the same as above, they ask user to enter his/her credentials, then send them (or an access token generated from them) with every request to the web service.
The important take away point from this example is that RESTful web services require authentication with every request.
An additional layer of security in this scenario would add client application authorization in addition to the user authentication. For example, if you have the web client, iOS and Android apps all using the web service you may want the server to know which of the three the client of a given request is, regardless of who the authenticated user is. This can enable your web service to restrict certain functions to specific clients. For this you could use API keys and secrets, see this answer for some ideas on that.
Facebook authentication
The workflow above does not work for Facebook connect because the login via Facebook has a third party, Facebook itself. The login procedure requires the user to be redirected to Facebook's website where credentials are entered outside of our control.
So let's see how things change:.
The user connects to https://example.com
The server serves a rich Javascript application which renders the initial page. Somehwere in the page there is a login form that includes a "Login with Facebook" button.
The user clicks the "Login with Facebook" button, which is just a link that redirects to (for example) https://example.com/auth/facebook.
The https://example.com/auth/facebook route is handled by passport.js (see the documentation)
All the user sees is that the page changes and now they are in a Facebook hosted page where they need to login and authorize our web application. This is completely outside of our control.
The user logs in to Facebook and gives permission to our application, so Facebook now redirects back to the callback URL that we configured in the passport.js setup, which following the example in the documentation is https://example.com/auth/facebook/callback
The passport.js handler for the https://example.com/auth/facebook/callback route will invoke the callback function that receives the Facebook access token and some user information from Facebook, including the user's email address.
With the email we can locate the user in our database and store the Facebook access token with it.
The last thing you do in the Facebook callback is to redirect back to the rich client application, but this time we need to pass the username and the access token to the client so that it can use them. This can be done in a number of ways. For example, Javascript variables can be added to the page through a server-side template engine, or else a cookie can be returned with this information. (thanks to #RyanKimber for pointing out the security issues with passing this data in the URL, as I initially suggested).
So now we start the single page app one more time, but the client has the username and the access token.
The client application can trigger the "login" event immediately and let the different parts of the application request the information that they need from the web service.
All the requests sent to https://example.com/api will include the Facebook access token for authentication, or the application's own access token generated from Facebook's token via a "get_access_token" function in the REST API.
The non-browser apps have it a bit more difficult here, because OAuth requires a web browser for logging in. To login from a phone or desktop app you will need to start a browser to do the redirect to Facebook, and even worse, you need a way for the browser to pass the Facebook access token back to the application via some mechanism.
I hope this answers most of the questions. Of course you can replace Facebook with Twitter, Google, or any other OAuth based authentication service.
I'd be interested to know if someone has a simpler way to deal with this.
I greatly appreciate #Miguel's explanation with the complete flow in each cases, but I'd like to add some on the Facebook Authentication part.
Facebook provides a Javascript SDK which you can use to get the access token on client-end directly, which is then passed to the server and used to further pull all the user information from Facebook. So you don't need any re-directs basically.
Moreover, you can use the same API end-point for mobile applications as well. Just use the Android / iOS SDK for Facebook, obtain the Facebook access_token on the client end and pass it to the server.
Regarding the stateless nature as explained, when get_access_token is used to generate a token and passed to the client, this token is also stored on the server. So it's as good as a session token and I believe this makes it stateful ?
Just my 2 cents..
Here is an awesome article I found that can help you authenticate with:
Facebook
Twitter
Google
Local Auth
Easy Node Authentication: Setup and Local