Data authorization and OAuth - security

I would like to know if there is a way within OAuth to limit the data a user can see once the token has been accessed. For example, in the 'photo sharing' sample where one application contains a list of photos and another application wants access to the photos for printing purposes. How can the user indicate the photo print service should see a subset of the photos? Maybe I only want the printing service to see photos with a .jpg extension, or photos with after a certain date, or with a certain 'tag'. Where can additional authorization requirements be populated?
I have a java application and we are using Spring Security OAuth2 and hopefully we can accomplish this.
Thanks

For instance, you can use 'scope' for that purpose. Define a custom 'scope', and the endpoint of your service should interpret the custom scope and behave based on that.
For example, define 'pic_jpeg' as a scope name and describe about the scope in your API document like "'pic_jpeg' scope is required to access JPEG pictures."
A client application will access your authorization endpoint with a parameter 'scope=pic_jpeg scopeX scopeY', and your OAuth 2.0 authorization server implementation will finally issue an access token which is associated with the scopes (pic_jpeg scopeX and scopeY). The client application then accesses the 'pictures' endpoint of your service with the access token, so the endpoint should confirm that the access token is associated with 'pic_jpeg' scope and allow the client application to access JPEG pictures only when confirmed.

Related

Azure Active Directory add custom data to Oauth2 token

I'm using the auth endpoint https://login.microsoftonline.com/tenant-id/oauth2/v2.0/token programmatically (Nodejs) for getting back a token that will be used against my API. I have everything properly configured to send the request using a "Client secret" I setup on the Azure Portal - App registration service.
This issues a valid token that I can later check with the help of the Passport azure AD npm library. However I've been looking for a way of somehow adding more metadata to that token (i.e. a custom user name) so that when it gets validated and parsed by my server upon future requests I can extract this information.
When issuing tokens using a frontend application library (like msal) I have access to some of the user's information on the token (like its oid and email address). I'd like to be able to "extend" the token generated by the client secret to also contain a couple custom fields, which I can use after validating and parsing it.
Hopefully that's clear enough. I'm lost on how to achieve this. Thanks
It is a common requirement for APIs to authorize based on claims stored in the business data, eg roles or other custom data.
OPTION 1
Ideally the authorization server can reach out at the time of token issuance to an API or database to include the custom claims. This is not always supported though.
OPTION 2
Another option is for the API to process the incoming access token into a ClaimsPrincipal and to include custom values at that point. For an example see this code of mine.
PRIVACY
When adding more claims, you should also be careful about revealing sensitive data in JWTs returned to internet clients. Eg if you include names and emails, they are easily readable, and this can sometimes be a security concern.

Is it possible to utilise Open ID Connect flows for authentication but then have another source of authorization rules?

My situation is this. I have a legacy Angular application which calls a Node API server. This Node server currently exposes a /login endpoint to which I pass a user/pwd from my Angular SPA. The Node server queries a local Active Directory instance (not ADFS) and if the user authenticates, it uses roles and privileges stored on the application database (not AD) to build a jwt containing this user's claims. The Angular application (there are actually 2) can then use the token contents to suppress menu options/views based on a user's permissions. On calling the API the right to use that endpoint is also evaluated against the passed in token.
We are now looking at moving our source of authentication to an oAuth2.0 provider such that customers can use their own ADFS or other identity provider. They will however need to retain control of authorization rules within my application itself, as administrators do not typically have access to Active Directory to maintain user rights therein.
I can't seem to find an OIDC pattern/workflow that addresses this use case. I was wondering if I could invoke the /authorize endpoint from my clients, but then pass the returned code into my existing Node server to invoke the /token endpoint. If that call was successful within Node then I thought I could keep building my custom JWT as I am now using a mix of information from my oAuth2 token/userinfo and the application database. I'm happy for my existing mechanisms to take care of token refreshes and revoking.
I think I'm making things harder by wanting to know my specific application claims within my client applications so that I can hide menu options. If it were just a case of protecting the API when called I'm guessing I could just do a lookup of permissions by sub every time a protected API was called.
I'm spooked that I can't find any posts of anyone doing anything similar. Am I missing the point of OIDC(to which I am very new!).
Thanks in advance...
Good question, because pretty much all real world authorization is based on domain specific claims, and this is often not explained well. The following notes describe the main behaviors to aim for, regardless of your provider. The Curity articles on scopes and claims provide further background on designing your authorization.
CONFIDENTIAL TOKENS
UIs can read claims from ID tokens, but should not read access tokens. Also, tokens returned to UIs should not contain sensitive data such as names, emails. There are two ways to keep tokens confidential:
The ID token should be a JWT with only a subject claim
The access token should be a JWT with only a subject claim, or should be an opaque token that is introspected
GETTING DOMAIN SPECIFIC CLAIMS IN UIs
How does a UI get the domain specific data it needs? The logical answer here is to send the access token to an API and get back one or both of these types of information:
Identity information from the token
Domain specific data that the API looks up
GETTING DOMAIN SPECIFIC CLAIMS IN APIs
How does an API get the domain specific data it needs from a JWT containing only a UUID subject claim? There are two options here:
The Authorization Server (AS) reaches out to domain specific data at the time of token issuance, to include custom claims in access tokens. The AS then stores the JWT and returns an opaque access token to the UI.
The API looks up domain specific claims when an access token is first received, and forms a Claims Principal consisting of both identity data and domain specific data. See my Node.js API code for an example.
MAPPING IDENTITY DATA TO BUSINESS DATA
At Curity we have a recent article on this topic that may also be useful to you for your migration. This will help you to design tokens and plan end-to-end flows so that the correct claims are made available to your APIs and UIs.
EXTERNAL IDENTITY PROVIDERS
These do not affect the architecture at all. Your UIs always redirect to the AS using OIDC, and the AS manages connections to the IDPs. The tokens issued to your applications are fully determined by the AS, regardless of whether the IDP used SAML etc.
You'll only get authentication from your OAuth provider. You'll have to manage authorization yourself. You won't be able to rely on OIDC in the SAML response or userinfo unless you can hook into the authentication process to inject the values you need. (AWS has a pre-token-gen hook that you can add custom claims to your SAML response.)
If I understand your current process correctly, you'll have to move the data you get from /userinfo to your application's database and provide a way for admins to manage those permissions.
I'm not sure this answer gives you enough information to figure out how to accomplish what you want. If you could let us know what frameworks and infrastructure you use, we might be able to point you to some specific tools that can help.

Microsoft Graph API: how to get access token without browser

I would like to upload a given file to Sharepoint. I'm using the Microsoft Graph API.
The documentation follows this workflow:
1. If no token, redirect the user to the Microsoft signin page.
2. The user is then redirected to the application, with an access token
3. Use access token to have an authorization bearer
4. Do what you gotta do...
My problem is the sign-in part. I don't want my users to be redirected to the Microsoft signin page. I want my application to connect and get the access token in the background (with cURL or whatever).
How can I do that? Why is the "open in browser" necessary?
I tried to replicate the sign-in process, but all I get back is the HTML response from the signin page.
Thanks in advance.
Your application act as a single-tenant service or daemon app.
The documentation about this scenario is here : https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/authorization/app_only
The application must be registered in the AzureAD directory corresponding to the Office365 tenant
A first request is made by passing the application unique identifier and secret key as registered in the directory. This request returns an access token
The access token can now be used in the Authorization header of the following request to the Microsoft Graph API.
This method (of using Client ID and Secret) works well but there are other ways which may be better suited for similar scenarios.
The one major thing which is missing in access token generated this way is a user, meaning the token only contains the identity of the OAuth application (client) which called it but is not associated with any user for the request.
This could have a couple of implications:
Since the token is not associated with a specific user you will not know who performed the operation. In your example, you would not know who uploaded the file (and other similar information may be missing).
Access token without users will not work at all for some methods. For those, you need a delegated token.
Creating a delegated token requires some effort, if you are interested you can find the details in my article:
Getting Access Token for Microsoft Graph Using OAuth REST API

Building a Web-API with Oauth2/OpenID connect

I'm trying to understand conceptually and practically how to perform an oauth2 with openID-connect flow in my web-api application, utilising Azure AD.
Importantly, when a request is made to the API I want to know who made the request.
My current understanding is :-
My client would detect that the user isn't logged in and redirect to a sign-in.
The user would provide their credentials, and be redirected back to the client, along with an oauth2 token.
This token would be supplied to web-api endpoints for any requests.
This is where it gets murky for me.
How exactly do I use this token to authorize access to a particular resource, determine who is accessing the resource, and what is the mechanism that does so?
I'm sort of assuming that I would need to reuse the token to make a call to the Azure AD user endpoint - if the token was indeed valid, the AD endpoint would return the users details - thereby providing some means of determining that the token is valid and providing details on the users identity. Authorizing access to a resource could be done through membership of groups in Azure AD.
BUT ...
I can only assume this a solved problem, and have noticed use of OWIN middleware as per this example
https://github.com/AzureADSamples/WebApp-WebAPI-OpenIDConnect-DotNet
But I'm still rather unsure as to what is exactly going on.
The service makes mention of scopes and claims, but I don't understand where these are derived from (I assume from a token supplied by the client, but not sure). The service must be receiving identity information in the call.
Which brings me to two points, for this to be secure -
The token provided in call to the service would need to be secured in transmission (hence the use of HTTPS) - to prevent MITM.
The token would need to be signed some how - I guess by using client secret or something - to prevent information in the token being spoofed.
Can someone help me clear up this muddled mess?
In particular -
How is the identity of the API caller determined - is identity determined from a call in the client or the server?
How to limit access to some endpoints of the API based on a user role?
What do I do to practically achieve this by building on existing middleware and libraries available to me?
Disclaimer: This will not be a comprehensive answer. It is off the top of my head.
OpenID Connect provides an identity layer on top of OAuth. In your case, Active Directory provides the authentication and sends back an access_token. The access token represents a user that AD has authenticated. If your doing OpenID Connect, then AD will also send an id_token, which may contain additional identity information (such as birthday, avatar, and whatever else AD exposes.)
Neither OpenID Connect nor Active Directory have anything to do with the the roles that your app assigns to a user; roles are entirely the bailiwick of your app. You assign user roles just like you normally would; you assign them to the nameid though instead of to an email address or username. Your app no longer has to authenticate the user but it does need to assign roles to the nameid.
How is the identity of the API caller determined - is identity determined from a call in the client or the server?
The identity is embedded in the access_token that AD includes in its response. This token will have a nameid in it that your app can associate with a user and role. The nameid is like an email address, username, or other uniqueID that your app uses to recognize the user.
How to limit access to some endpoints of the API based on a user role?
You choose. When your app receives a request with a particular access_token, that token will be associated with a particular user via its nameid, and you can assign whatever roles and rights to that user. Basically, associate roles with a nameid.
What do I do to practically achieve this by building on existing middleware and libraries available to me?
There is an unfinished demo here, though it doesn't use Active Directory as the provider, instead, it uses an internal provider. For the demo, the username is shaun and password is Testing123!. The source code is here.
Here is the link to the source of another demo, though again, it doesn't use Active Directory as the provider, instead, it uses Twitter.
The nice thing about OAuth and OpenID Connect is that we can use whatever identity provider we want, so you can adapt the demos to use Active Directory.
Apart from question #1 (the identity is verified on the service side) all your question are very open ended and would require a super long answer.
I would recommend reading https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-authentication-scenarios/ - it is a good introduction to the flows underlying many of the modern authentication cenarios, including the web API one you are focusing on.
Once you have read that, you will find a complete set of samples in https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-code-samples/ - in particular, I suggest studying the web API and thru authorization one to find guidance on the 3 questions you listed. HTH!

how to secure azure mobile service / html - javascript

When I call an oauth provider like gmail and I get the token back, how can I make sure that all future calls I make are from that same client that did the authentication? that is, is there some kind of security token I should pass pack? Do I pass that token back everytime?
For example, if I have a simple data table used for a guest book with first,last,birthdate,id. How can I make sure that the user who "owns" that record is the only one who can update it. Also, how can I make sure that the only person who can see their own birthday is the person who auth'd in.
sorry for the confusing question, I'm having trouble understanding how azure mobile services (form an html client) is going to be secure in any way.
I recently tried to figure this out as well, and here's how I understand it (with maybe a little too much detail), using the canonical ToDoList application with server authentication enabled for Google:
When you outsource authentication to Google in this case, you're doing a standard OAuth 2.0 authorization code grant flow. You register your app with Google, get a client ID and secret, which you then register with AMS for your app. Fast forwarding to when you click "log in" on your HTML ToDoList app: AMS requests an authorization code on your app's behalf by providing info about it (client ID and secret), which ultimately results in a account chooser/login screen for Google. After you select the account and log in successfully, Google redirects to your AMS app's URL with the authorization code appended as a query string parameter. AMS then redeems this authorization code for an access token from Google on your application's behalf, creates a new user object (shown below), and returns this to your app:
"userId":"Google:11223344556677889900"
"authenticationToken":"eyJhbGciOiJb ... GjNzw"
These properties are returned after the Login function is called, wrapped in a User object. The authenticationToken can be used to make authenticated calls to AMS by appending it in the X-ZUMO-AUTH header of the request, at least until it expires.
In terms of security, all of the above happens under HTTPS, the token applies only to the currently signed-in user, and the token expires at a predetermined time (I don't know how long).
Addressing your theoretical example, if your table's permissions has been configured to only allow authenticated users, you can further lock things down by writing logic to store and check the userId property when displaying a birthday. See the reference docs for the User object for more info.

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