I'm building my first backbone app, and though I'm doing my authentication server side, there are features that non-authenticated users are unable to use, but because they are in my asset path, and part of my backbone files, everything gets loaded.
Is there a way to load only the resources that a user is actually able to use?
I'm using Rails with cancan to manage this server-side.
You need to split the assets out in to separate groups: a group that can be used by anyone, and a group that can be used by authenticated users. Only send the code that the user is allowed to use, basically.
I wrote a post about doing this with asp.net mvc recently. the same idea applies to rails, though the use of the asset pipeline makes the implementation a bit different:
http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2012/01/26/modularity-and-security-in-composite-javascript-apps/
The best way is to create a Base view with a property named requireLogin: true/false.
All other views should inherit this view and the views which need authentication you should set requireLogin:true, for all others this property should be false.
After this you should handle the authentication base of this property.
Related
Im using GWT, GAE to make a web app.
I looked at a bunch of tutorials regarding implementing a login system but most of those tutorials implement it so it's mandatory to login to access the web app. How would I go about making it so that anyone can access the app but if they want to use account specific functionality, they they have the option of signing up for an account.
There are two parts to it.
First, in your client code you check if a user is logged in. If so, you allow access to the "closed" parts of the app. If not, you show a link/button to login and hide tabs/views that are accessible to authorized users.
Second, in your server code you specify which requests do not require authentication and which do require it. This is necessary if a user somehow figures out how to send a request without using your client code.
For example, in my code some requests have checkSession() called at the very beginning. If no authentication object is found for this user in session, this method throws LoginException to the client. If the authentication object is present, the request continues to execute normally and returns requested data to the client.
Further to Andrei's answer, if you want a framework to manage the sessions for you, you can use GWT-Platform, which has an excellent Gatekeeper feature.
I use it for mine and I have a LoggedInGatekeeper class. Simply add #UseGatekeeper(LoggedInGatekeeper.class) to the constructor of each presenter proxy and it checks if the user is logged in. If you want anyone to be able to access that page simply annotate with #NoGatekeeper. Easy!
It takes a bit of setting up but it's a great MVP framework. There are maven archetypes and samples etc.
Hope this helps.
I'm working on a hobbyist project in order to become more familiar with CouchDB. This is my first time working with CouchDB. For this project, my goal is to investigate whether or not it's possible to build a web application with nothing but HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CouchDB, and nginx (i.e., I'm not hosting any of my code in Couch, just data).
It could be that this is highly impractical, but I'd first like to explore all the options in this stack.
At the moment, my biggest questions are about security. Let's say that I have a few databases in CouchDB, each corresponding to a hosted site. For this example, we'll focus on a single database-- i.e., a single site. Some of the content from this site should be available to everyone, even anonymous users; and other stuff should only be available to users with a certain role. What are my options, and how secure are each of them?
I've come up with a few ideas so far, and this is the one I was planning to work on over the weekend:
Add users and roles to /{site_db}/_security.
According to the Couch documentation, doing so will require any request for data in {site_db} to be from an authenticated user.
Add a user called anon, which will only have one role, which is anon.
When the user first visits the site, my JS model will check the status of the current session (GET /_session).
If no session exists, the JS model will authenticate using the anon account.
Define views in my design document.
Any views that should only be available to non-anonymous users should check the roles on the userCtx object.
Validation of any newly-created documents should check userCtx to see if the user's role is on the whitelist.
This seems like it should work, although I can't help thinking it's overly complex, and that there must be a better way. Also, I'm not sure how to prevent the anon user from updating his own user document to add more roles.
If you don't like CouchDB security model, you can implement yours easily in your reverse proxy instead.
Here is an example with Apache but it seems to be very similar in nginx.
I'm currently searching the best way for developing my next webapplication. I'm thinking about using Backbone.js and build a single page application. But I really can't imagine how to secure my app since nearly everything is done on client side. Of course I just could prevent the users from accessing my RESTful Api so they would not have access to my data. But all the view/model/collection/template js files are still accessible.
Or is there a known way to serve the js files with php (laravel), which would allow me to only serve the files I need for the respective user.
I just couldn't find a solution by searching the Web. But I just don't think that I am the lonely person who needs a clean and secure authentication method including different user rights.
Thank you in advance!
Your backend application will fetch data from a backend (= API), and probably send back some changes.
This code can't have "security holes / leaks" as long as your backend is secured.
If you are afraid of people stealing your code, you can always minify the JS (check grunt.js and almond.js for this)
To secure your backend you can make use of Laravel's auth class, and the auth filter as mentioned before.
Besides normal auth, you could implement roles, that you can assign to specific users, giving them more or less access to certain resources in your backend.
Here's the method I would try :
Separate the application in two parts.
One part - login via regular Laravel Auth on a separate page, and then when the user is logged in serve the single page app in a different view.
Wouldn't this work?
Web Services are no different than any other web application you build. At the end of the day you are exposing functionality to the client (which is also the attacker). It doesn't matter what the client is implemented in, if you expose dangerous functionality you will be hacked.
Have a session state, keep track of the user id and make sure that the user is only accessing resources they have been allowed to access.
I do not think that what JS/template files are exposed really matters. Essentially, you should only be allowing data interaction to authenticated users. Think of this as two separate applications.
The front-end application logs in, and a cookie is stored (or some other persistence is used).
The back-end application then uses the persistent authentication to validate every single user request for data, and every user action.
This way you don't have to worry about the security, the client can only fetch the data that the server allows it to, and, likewise, it can only interact with the data insofar as the server allows it. You shouldn't be relying on the client side for security anyway, even logged in, otherwise some malicious user could, conceivably, save all your frontend code and use it against you without authentication.
I have make rdoc to generate the documentation of my project but now i would like to make them accessible from application so allowed (logged in users) can access/view them from my site.
Thanks in advance.
Well, what type of application are you running? If it's something like MVC (or has a routing layer) you could probably specify some type of hook or serve them from a controller such that the path doc/<rdoc-files> was handled by a controller that would perform user-auth and then serve whatever static file the user is requesting.
You could also put everything into an IFrame that takes up the whole window (and really shouldn't be visible) and you could serve the IFrame server-side and include your authentication there.
There are really many ways in which you could prevent un-authorized users from accessing your documentation. It really just depends on what you are comfortable with.
I'm investigating using Kohana for my next project. The site will consist of user registration (and hence user profiles) where users will have certain privileges. The site will also have an admin section where administrators can go to say block a user or delete a post or look at usage statistics for example. A good comparison site would be a multi-user blog, where each blogger depending on her/his permissions can post/edit/delete blogs...just as an example.
Firstly, I'm not sure about how to set up the controller/view structure in order to separate the admin section from the front facing site. I'm using Kohana 3, so I was thinking of a controller structure like so: application/classes/controller/front (front facing)...and application/classes/controller/admin (for administrative section).
Or I notice you may be able to use the Route class to set up routes, so I could set up an "admin" route. for example: www.example.com/admin will lead to the admin logon screen.
www.example.com ---> front controller.
As well, can I somehow separate the "Admin" views and controllers from the "front facing" views and controllers like divide them up based on folder structure? Any help is very much appreciated.
Thank you.
You could have a separate application folder for the admin and front-end:
application
classes
controller
model
views
admin_application
classes
controller
model
views
This approach would allow you to customise each bootstrap environment individually, and separates the various files nicely. However, due to this separation you will need to structure shared code as modules, to allow the functionality to be shared across the two apps. You could just duplicate the code of course, but that would wrong now, wouldn't it! ;)
Another approach would be to have admin subfolders within each folder of a single application:
application
classes
controller
admin
model
admin
views
admin
This approach leaves files a little more intermixed, and might make things harder to maintain (depending on your perspective), but it's certainly easier to implement. One advantage of this approach is that you can create a /public_html/admin folder and protect it using .htaccess (you'll need to add a copy of the normal index.php file too). Then whenever any http://yourdomain.com/admin requests are made, the .htaccess file will kick-in and protect your admin application at the webserver level. Plus, the request will automatically route to the /admin subfolders within the various folders, so you've also got less work to do when it comes to routing.
Both situations would use Kohana's (awesome) routing mechanisms to handle which requests went where, and each is as secure as the other from an application access point of view. I've assumed you're using KO3 by the way...
EDIT
Actually, you are able to .htaccess protect the admin app if you use the first method too. You'd just need to adapt the /admin/index.php file to point to the admin app.
My approach would be similar to the first one but then for each module I would create a admin controller and a frontend controller - All my admin controllers would inherit from an abstract admin controller that would have the authentication in the before method - or something like this.