I am currently building a web app using node.js and AngularJS.
I am using loopback.js in order to construct the API and associated models. Loopback provides its own User model, role system, and ACL tools, and makes it almost trivial to setup security for the API itself. However, being an API framework, it does not offer (to my knowledge) solutions for providing access-control for routes.
I would like to use the security model provided by loopback in order to secure routes as well. For example, if a user is logged in via Loopback, I would like to use that session data in order to control which urls the user can access in my app as well, other than the API.
How would I go about this in the proper way? For example, is there some way I can integrate the auth data provided by Loopback with Passport or similar auth framework?
LoopBack is unopinionated on the session mechanism you use. It simply provides tokens and controls access via token verification. For your case, I assume you want to use the combination of both. Take a look at these two examples for a more in depth tutorial:
https://github.com/strongloop/loopback-example-passport
and
https://github.com/strongloop/loopback-example-access-control
and finally the docs:
http://docs.strongloop.com/display/LB/Advanced+topics:+access+control
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I have currently developed a backend app that has some important functionalities. I want to consume my backend endpoints from my frontend but I want to be sure that only my fronted calls the backend endpoint and no other. Currently anyone that access my web-app can take advantage of the functionalities (I do not require any user registration or authentication).
How can I be safe that my backend is not being called form other possible malicious attackers that may try to steal the functionalities of my backend?
I have read some other posts regarding solutions how to secure a backend app that do not require user authentication but none has a precise and secure way for that. Some say enabling CORS but during my experience I can say that CORS can be manipulated easily with the help of a simple browser plugin. (not speaking about mobile apps that do not consider it at all)
I would really appreciate if I would have some opinions in case of a web-frontend-app, mobile app and other backend systems that would try to call my API and how can I stop them.
Typical front-end authentication would be best (OpenID, ...).
If you want something different, you could check on your backend whether a specific header with a specific token is sent in the query. If it is not then you send back a 401 HTTP code.
This requires that your customers somehow get that token (through some registration process, probably) and then keep it long-term (it can be stored in LocalStorage but can be lost when cleaning up the browser)
OWASP Authentication is a good source of information.
I've developed simple REST API using a expressJs. I'm using React as my client side application. So the problem is anyone can see my API endpoints because of react app is in client side. So they will also able to make request and fetch data from my REST API. (May be they will build their own client side apps using my API.) I've seen some question about this and couldn't find any comprehensive answer. How these kind of a security problem should be handled? Is it possible to give the access for API to only my client app? If not how huge brands that using REST API prevent that? (Also I don't have a user authenticating scenario in my product as well. People can just visit and use the website. They don't need to register).
Authentication can be a way but it can be bypassed. Another way is you can create a proxy server which strictly blocks cross origin requests, hence it blocks requests from other domains to make request to your API, and you can make your API call from that proxy server. In this way your API server endpoint will also be not compromised.
If, as you state in your comment, this is about users on your own website being allowed to use your site's API, while disallowing off-site use (e.g. other websites, wget/curl, etc) then you need to make sure to set up proper CORS rules (to disallowed cross-origin use of your API) as well as CSP rules (to prevent user-injected scripts from proxying your API), and you also make sure to only allow API calls from connections that have an active session (so even if you don't want user authentication: use a session managemer so you can tell if someone landed on your site and got a session cookie set before they started calling API endpoints).
Session management and CORS come with express itself (see https://expressjs.com/en/resources/middleware/session.html and https://expressjs.com/en/resources/middleware/cors.html), for CSP, and lots of other security layers like HSTS, XSS filtering, etc, you typically use helmet.
I developed my Heroku app that exposes APIs only (no UI) and it works fine.
But how can I restrict the APIs to certain authorized/authenticated users only?
I absolutely need an authentication layer to protect the app APIs and prevent unauthorized accesses. A sort of login(user, psw) call to use before an external system can start invoking my API.
But I don't find any reference in the docs, it only says that these are the main security best practices:
Heroku SSL
Force the use of HTTPS
Trusted IP Range
Any idea?
That's something you'll need to implement at the application layer and not something that Heroku provides. At it's simplest you could implement basic auth in your app so that the user would pass them with their request, a more complex solution would involve user accounts and oauth etc etc.
You could implement all the authentication logic directly in your app.
Alternatively, take a look Auth0, which basically provides you with authentication and identity management as a service. You can easily add Auth0 to your Heroku app as a free add-on via the Heroku Elements marketplace.
They have lots of different use-cases and associated walk-throughs, and they offer a very generous free-tier.
From your requirements, it sounds like you might want to look at Auth0 Machine to Machine applications, using the OAuth2 Client Credentials Grant. With that, your external system(s) would basically need to authenticate with Auth0 using a Client Id and Client Secret (that you could generate in Auth0 and supply to them). Then, they would access your API with a JWT that you could easily validate in your app (Auth0 will provide you with generated code in many different languages for you to do that very easily). Your API will then reject requests without a valid JWT (by sending a "401 Unauthorized" response).
This may all sound a little intimidating at first, but it's really worth going through the relevant Auth0 "quickstart". They really go out of their way to try to make it as easy as possible!
I am used to develop web apps using the Meteor JavaScript framework, which handles authentication. I am now developing for the first time a web app using a Node.js (Express) + GraphQL stack on the backend, with React on the frontend, so I have to handle authentication myself.
I read a lot of things about it, and I like the idea of token based authentication. I am thinking about using JWT, so I don't have to deal with sessions.
I know there are a lot of tutorials, but each one always has a sort of disclaimer like : "this tutorial is not production ready, use it for educational purposes only...". Every time I read something about authentication, it seems to be something so difficult to implement that I shouldn't implement it myself. But I don't want to use services providers like AWS Cognito, Google Cloud Platform because I want to keep my users data in my own system and database. I don't want to be tied to a third party provider.
I know how to generate jwt tokens, refresh tokens, how to verify them, etc... I am able to develop a working auth system, but I am never sure I do it in a secure and production ready way because of all those comments I can read on the Internet.
So, what would you recommend to implement a secured and production ready authentication system in a Node.js server without being tied to a third-party provider. Do you know any complete tutorial or documentation about it?
There are several approaches to implement authentication for an application.
Use a identity server manage by you
Use a fully manage service for authentication.
Use authentication middleware.
Write your own authentication solution.
If you are afraid in vender locking I would suggest to use an authentication middleware like PassportJS which will facilitate the abstraction of authentication strategy with its implementation.
On the otherhand writing your custom authentication can be challenging in terms of security, specially finding snd fixing these vulnerabilities.
Use case: I'm building a MEAN stack web app that adds functionality on top of an existing API service. Said service publishes an array of approximately 800 objects (that will grow by less than 25 objects a week). In order to avoid adding lots of load to this service and to speed up performance on my app I would like to "cache" the objects in my application.
My question is what would be the best practice for keeping this "cache" up to date? Express naturally lends itself to RESTful CRUD operations but I don't want to expose a public endpoint that would allow anyone to add or modify the objects from the external service.
What is the best way to restrict access to endpoints that will only be used by the application itself? Does it require a full fledged authentication scheme or is there a way to simply ignore requests that don't come from within the application itself? Or should this be done using something other than a RESTful api endpoint?
The simplest of all solutions would be basic auth which is totally okay if you use SSL. A more sophisticated solution would be Oauth2.
If you don't want to implement an authentication strategy you could require a client certificate in your new MEAN stack service (2waySSL with behavior "Client Certs Requested And Enforced").
Do checkout as well Express-JWT,JWT or JSON Web Token is an easy and light way to add authentication to your api.