I'm building an application using AngularFire + Firebase.
To prevent new users from being created, and authenticated, from domains other than my application's domain, I'm trying to use the Authorized Request Origins feature in Firebase.
Currently, it is only configured to allow authentication from localhost. However, when I create a new user using the createUser API from my application's domain, the user gets created in my Firebase.
This should not happen since I used "err" from createUser is null.
Is there anything else I need to configure?
[Engineer at Firebase] The authorized request origins is actually only applicable to the OAuth-based authentication providers (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub) though your confusion is definitely warranted given our current interface. E-mail and password authentication is not subject to the same origin verification because it is not vulnerable to a malicious site taking advantage of an existing login on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Keep it mind that email / password authentication only creates a mapping of an email address to a password hash, and generates a corresponding Firebase authentication token upon login. It does not read or write any data to / from your Firebase, and your Firebase is still subject to the same security rules that you've written for your application. Feel free to reach out to support#firebase.com if you have other concerns, or we can help out in any way.
Related
I am trying a post-call to generate an access token using the client username and password. I would like to know how we can achieve this through Node Js Code.
Generally speaking, access_token are rattached to the OAuth2 authentication framework, which doesn't require the application owner (you) to have access to one of your user email/password. This is a more secure approach that is broadly adopted.
The way OAuth2 works on the Google Calendar API is a 3-parties (or 3-legged) authorization. Let's take the example of a user that browses your website and want to sign-in using its Google Account. The steps to authenticate him are the following:
The user clicks on "Sign-in with Google"
The application owner (you) performs a request to Google saying that a user wants to connect (that's the OAuth consent screen)
Google replies by giving you a URL (authorizationUrl) where to redirect the user
On that URL, the user is prompted with several information about your application and can grant access.
When the user has granted access, Google will redirect the user to your application success page (callbackUrl) with a unique code.
Using that code, the application can retrieve an access_token, which temporarly lets your application performs requests on behalf of a user.
These steps are a rapid overview of the OAuth-flow, also known as the OAuth dance. To make POST requests to the Google Calendar API, you will have to perform that OAuth dance for every single of your users.
Implementing that flow can be tricky. Fortunately, Google gives very helpful documentation on that. If you don't want to bother, you can also use API-tools (like Pizzly) that takes care of that for you.
I've been recently learning to use JWT to secure user endpoints for an API I am creating for my mobile application.
I currently have a loginless system, where the app user gets automatically registered on the server, then gets automatically authorized and issued a JWT to use for all further requests. All the routes are protected except the following 2:
1) POST /register:
The most important one, that I could not figure out how to protect. Anyone with the URL can currently pass any login/password combo and consider himself registered, and subsequently obtain a JWT. I want to limit registrations to only my mobile application. How can I do that?
2) POST /auth: Used to validate login/password and issue JWT. I guess it's ok to remain unprotected if I manage to protect the registration. But I do actually want to restrict it to my mobile client as well.
Thank you.
To protect the registration, it is not enough to protect the end-point. Users always able to make requeststo your server.
You should do: Email validation, or Phone validations, or using Captcha. This will Prevents robots from registering.
Recommended Captcha Library by Google:
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html
I'm learning Node, doing authentication stuff at the moment with passport.
Say my server has 2 pages, a public home page with various login options, then a super-secret page(and perhaps more) that is only accessible after authenticating.
If I'm only going to be using 3rd party strategies, is there any reason to have a database?
I know that you'd obviously need one for local user's id and pass, but if the server exclusively relies on 3rd party authentication, would session persistence be enough things to work? Or are there still various things that you would need to save for some reason (apart from logging) ?
Could you do without a database, sure... but in this case what is the point in authenticating at all? All you would be proving is that the user has a Google account which anyone can set up for free in a matter of minutes.
If your content is super secret then chances are you want to have a database of users (email addresses and the like) that have permission to see the content. By authenticating through OAuth you will be given an access token that will allow you to fetch the authenticated users email address. This can then be looked up against your user table to see if the user is registered and if your app enforces it, check whether the user has access to the page requested.
OAuth is proving that this person is the owner of the Google/Facebook/Twitter/Github Account. You can use this knowledge to sign someone in against a database of "local accounts" based on email used at sign up, assuming you validate the email on sign up locally.
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.
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