We are prototyping in dialogflow which is going well but I have what is more of a strategic question. Our app will interact with APIs in a third party system that requires user/password credentials, I am wondering if anyone can recommend an appropriate approach.
For example when I start the app in Google Assistant it knows who I am from my google account, this account however has no authorization for the target system - it needs an ID / password. I can prompt the user for these and they can type/say the values with which we can connect but this prompts more questions:
Is this secure? Clearly speaking my password isn't a great plan.
If this approach is reasonable is there a way to save my credentials within the app so that I don't have to enter them next time?
Are there other approaches to remote authentication you'd recommend? I have searched around but so far without any success.
Any tips would be much appreciated.
Chris.
Google provides build in authentication options for Google Assistant. Have a look at the documentation. If you wish to connect your Google Assistant app to your own login you want to have a look at the 0Auth or Google Sign-in + OAuth options. Depending on your requirements, one might be a better fit.
Accountlinking is a build in solution, if you implement this you will have done it in a secure way and it is integrated with the users Google Account, so when they come back into your app they won't have to enter any credentials again.
I've been reading for the last hour but it's still not clear for me how to automatically authenticate the current windows user in my node js application.
On my office PC, I'm already authenticated with my AD user when I access our company portal in Chrome (as it was added as a trusted sites). So the main question for me is what do I have to do to automatically detect/authenticate the user in my nodejs app if I add my site to the trusted sites? I'm pretty sure the browser must do half of the job as it probably sends some kind of data (hash) in the request, based on which the application must authenticate the user. I suspect this is the "www-authenticate: negotiate" header as I noticed this sends a hash in the request when I access the portal.
So far, the only tracks I'm still investigating are:
https://gist.github.com/charlesdaniel/1686663
But it's still not very clear for me how this automatic authentication works and what are the leads I should follow next. The entire process is still unclear to me
I appreciate any advices on this or at least a mid-level explanation on what happens behind the scenes when I access a page in Chrome and it automatically authenticates me. Thanks
I'm trying to create a login system with Node as the backend/web service for the app, also with an iOS app. I'm trying to use Amazon Cognito to do this, but I can't figure out how to register/authenticate users from either end. The only tutorials I've been able to find use Facebook login, which don't help me.
Edit: I have unauthenticated identities working somewhat, but I'm still clueless as to the authenticated developer identities.
While I understand you are looking specifically for a Node sample, we do have a full end-to-end sample with a Java backend and iOS and Android clients.
The clients also handle transition from unauthenticated to authenticated, linking multiple logins with your developer identity and more. Hopefully this will help fill the gaps you have. If not, please let us know what we can do to improve.
I have the following scenario:
1.- A web api project in Azure, that I want to secure using Azure AD (I don't mind Token, cookie, whatever, as far as it meets the entire scenario)
2.- An Azure web site in asp.net MVC, also secured by Azure AD. This website has to call the web api controller with SSO (I'm using same Azure AD in the entire scenario)
3.- Some JavaScript code running in a page in SharePoint Online, also calling the web api controller in any secure way (The Office 365 tenant is also using same Azure AD). If you don't know about SharePoint, let's say I have an SPA project where I can only use Javascript and html (no server side code).
Following some of the MS Azure AD samples and some blogs from Vittorio Bertocci I'm able to get the points 1 and 2 working fine, using OWIN and Oppen ID connect. However, seems impossible to achieve point 3. As I'm inside a page in SharePoint Online, I can only use javascript, and not any server side code. I'd like to get a valid token for the current user, that is already logged in SP, and remember that SP uses same Azure AD that web api site.
Can I call the Azure AD and get a valid token, just from client code?
I'm open to any possible solution. I can do whatever in the web api project. If you are thinking in a SharePoint app with an appPart, and the appPart calls the web api from server side code, I agree that will work, but it's an option that is not allowed at the moment :(
Many thanks.
I have similar needs. While waiting for a Microsoft sponsored solution we’re working on the following approach.
3) in Your solution (i.e. HTML page with JavaScript, hosted in SharePoint Online and running in Browser) will call Services in 1) (i.e. Web Api Service layer in Azure).
In Our case we only want to validate that the calls made from SharePoint Online (via users browser, i.e. JavaScript) originate from a correct Office 365 / SharePoint Online user in our tenant.
We are opting out of using the App Model as we only want some simple HTML / JavaScript pages in our Intranet and don’t want App Webs. The Web Api server side code is kind of our “Web Part” code behind.
Change to the solution after trying it out and having workable code:
The auth cookies are ReadOnly and cannot be used. Instead we have registered one metod in our service layer as App in SharePoint Online (via appregnew.aspx). That methods url (e.g. https://cloudservice.customer.com/api/authentication/token) is registered as App start page in the app manifest and is deployed to a site Collection.
Now we can call our App via https://customer.sharepoint.com/sites/devassets/_layouts/15/appredirect.aspx?instance_id={GUID} i a jQuery ajax call and parse the result. AppRedirect sends the correct SPAuthToken which we use in our service endpoint (i.e. App start page) to call back to SharePoint and check context.Web.CurrentUser. User email is then stored in Table Storage with a generated Token which we send back to the caller (i.e. the jQuery ajax call to app redirect).
That token is then used in all other service layer calls in order to be sure of who is calling our service layer and in some cases perform authorization in our service layer.
Note, You can use the same approach in order to store Refresh and AccessToken in your client and provide that in all calls to your service from your client and use those tokens in order to do App Calls back to SharePoint. This enables HTML UI in SharePoint host webs and server code using user context in Azure service layer.
To follow up, ADAL.js has recently been released, and the ability to use CORS with O365 APIs was recently added, enabling a scenario for script clients to communicate with services protected by Azure AD, such as your Web API.
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/adal-js-cors-with-o365-apis-files-sharepoint
UPDATE 2018:
This is now supported by SharePoint Online and the SPFx development model, and officially documented, for instance here
Consume enterprise APIs secured with Azure AD in SharePoint Framework
Being said that the work done meanwhile by Vittorio, Kirk, and their teams, but extending that also to Andrew that has delivered great samples, is awesome; that doesn't really fully reply the original question because one of the requirements is to don't run the component as Add-in Part.
If you try to use ADAL JS (which starts its own OAuth flow) hosting that directly in a SP page, that's not going to work, or anyway you can expect a weird behavior for the user (cause of client redirects happening on the browser).
The solution proposed by Peter Karpinski is interesting, and will work matching the requirements in the original question, but requires quite some complexity and additional management/resources.
This recent article provides an alternative solution similar to Peter's one, but requiring less 'extras' and somewhat simpler, also reusing user's SP identity.
Consuming Azure Hosted Web API from SharePoint Online using JavaScript and Office 365 identities
and doesn't either require the use of ADAL on the client side and the implementation of custom security provider / token issuer on the server side.
The identity (cookie) will be passed via properly handling CORS (documentation) on both sides.
However, as you can read in my comments to that blog, this won't work normally with IE due to its security zone implementation. You'll have to be sure you have control on IE security zones on the clients, or have an alternative solution specific for IE.
As of today AAD does not support the OAuth2 implicit flow (or OpenId Connect variants) hence you can't obtain a token from AAD using a user-agent (browser), regardless of whether you hit the wire handcrafting the protocol or using a library.
However keep an eye on future announcements, as this is an important scenario for us!
HTH
Cheers,
V.
update we now support the implicit flow on our server, and we released a library for helping you consume the new feature: http://www.cloudidentity.com/blog/2015/02/19/introducing-adal-js-v1/
Thank youi for r your patience!
The fact that you say you can use only HTML/JS let me guess you're having a SharePoint-hosted App.
Azure AD Authentication Library (ADAL) doesn't provide yet in this moment support for HTML5.
I've been looking since a while (almost one year) on how to implement something as you say; but I couldn't find any working solution, which doesn't make use also of some 'code-behind'.
I'd suggest you then to move to a Provider-hosted App, where you'll be able to have some C# code, and make use of ADAL to retrieve and reuse the OAuth token.
Also, I think is worth to look at this documentation page:
Choose patterns for developing and hosting your app for SharePoint
at section Match your hosting pattern with your development goals
thanks for your help.
Well, it's not a SP-Hosted App, but it's same scenario. It's just a SP page in SP Online, so I can only use JS code like in a SP-hosted app.
As I said in my question, I agree the Provider hosted app is likely the right (or at least, the unique) solution, but that means to build and app, deploy it, and add teh appPart manually to the page (is not easy to package in a WSP). So, this solution is quite hard, when you only want to make some AJAX calls and show some data.
However, after all that I've seen, I think we can't do anything else. I'm gonna wait some more days to see if someone know any weird workarround that could work, and if not, I'll mark your answer as valid.
Thanks again!
I am developing an application which is only going to be required to be used by a few people within the organisation. It is being developed using Yeoman and expressJS.
What i need to do is only authenticate a few users to use their google accounts as they require access to google calendars etc which they currently share within their organisation. The only difference is that it will be used within the application.
The users will need to login but trying to find out how i can use their google accounts to login and colloborate?
I only want to limit it to certain users.
Hope someone can assist.
Regards
Passport.js is a popular choice of authentication/authorisation library. You can easily integrate it with express. It has a strategy for google account using OAuth as passport-google-oauth.
I have never used it, but it seems very straightforward.
If you have ever used the google API the examples seem easy to understand.
https://github.com/google/google-api-nodejs-client/