I have been experimenting with the REST API using my logged in user account's token to then make PUT requests on my user record to update some custom attributes.
In order to get to this work I had to grant my user account the manage-users role in Keycloak, prior to this I was getting forbidden responses back.
I can now make the PUT request successfully, and after logging out and logging back in I can see the updated attributes I set in my PUT request.
But I have now allowed my user to be able to manage all users in my realm, which I dont want to allow.
Instead I only want to be able to update my own account details.
I know the user can view their own profile and make changes on the Keycloak provided screens. But for certain custom attributes I want to be able to do this from the client side application they are logged in to, so using the REST API but not granting them a role that could allow them to update other users details.
Is this possible?
According to the User section Keycloak's Admin REST API, this is not possible.
One solution would be for your client app to send the update request to a backend. The backend will verify that the update request is legit (aka the JWT is verified and the update does apply to the user requesting the change).
Another solution would be to theme the User Account Service's screens to add input fields for your custom attributes, as the documentation says that:
This screen can be extended to allow the user to manage additional attributes. See the Server Developer Guide for more details.
The second option seems the more secure. I hope that helps.
This seems to be possible with the Account Management API.
Unfortunately, I didn't find any official documentation about that. However, there's an example in Keycloak that demonstrates how to do it.
Related
So I have a platform that works like this: Users can create accounts by logging in with their Google (I USE AUTH0) and then they can create "Projects" which contain lots of other unimportant stuff regarding my current problem (like todo lists, ability to upload files etc; they can also Edit the project by changing some of it's attributes like name, description, theme and so on). There is a home page where everyone can see each other's projects and access them (but not upload files, change the tasks in the to do lists; this is possible only by the person that owns it).
By using a tool like Burp, people can see the request made from frontend to backend, for example when accessing one of the projects, and modify it on the fly.
This is what it looks like inside Burp when they access one of the projects:
As you can see there is a Get request to /projects/idOfTheProject; they can replace the GET with DELETE for example and they will successfully delete it; they can also see what is sent to the backend when a project is edited (name changed, description, thumbnail picture etc) and change anything they want about it.
How should I prevent this?
What I've looked at so far:
a. JWT - Probably the best fitting for my situation, but required the most work to be done (as I already have my platform almost finished with no such a security measure implemented yet, so I may need to rewrite a lot of things in both backend and frontend)
b. Sending the user's id that initiated the action as well to the backend and verify if it has the necessary privileges - the worst solution as users can access each other's profile and see the id, then just change another field in the request's JSON
c. Have a sort of token for each user and send that instead of the user's id - in this way somebody can't get your token by just looking at the communication between frontend and backend (only if it is using YOUR account). That token should be taken maybe somewhere from the auth0 when they create their account? If they provide something like that; or I can just create it myself and store it alongside the other user variables. You would still see the requests in plain text but even if you modified something you would still have to "guess" the owner's token, which will be impossible.
For frontend I use NextJS and for backend Flask.
Thank you in advance!
The TL;DR is that you don’t. A determined user will always be able to see what requests are being sent out by the code running on their computer and over their network. What you are describing when asking how to prevent people from “sniffing” these requests is security through obscurity, which isn’t actually secure at all.
What you should do instead is have an authorization system on your backend which will check if the current user can perform a given action on a given resource. For example, verifying that a user is an administrator before allowing them to delete a blog post, or making sure that the current user is on the same account as another user before allowing the current user to see details about the other user.
Here is my scenario. Imagine there is a Yoga studio that uses a professional booking and reservation system that exposes an API. Through this API an application can make a reservation for a client. The API takes the client's userid and password to make the reservation. The booking API doesn't use OAuth or any social media sign-ins.
My desire is to create an Assistant Action that would retrieve the list of classes and allow the client to make a booking.
My puzzle is what design/architecture to look towards to supply the userid/password pair required by the booking API.
How have others solved this puzzle?
Should I store the userid/password as "user state" associated with the action?
First, you should have a conversation with the API provider about why they don't provide an OAuth-based solution. This is a security vulnerability waiting to happen, if it hasn't already.
Second, you need to think very carefully about your own risk profile in this case:
Google does not allow you to collect credential information (ie - passwords) through your Action.
Because of this, you must use Account Linking to authenticate them.
This means that you will need something (ie - a database or data store) to manage their account on your side.
This database would be a good place to keep the username/password you need to use for them for the API...
...but it now means that you need to take extreme care about protecting this database.
You don't really say how this API allows for accounts to be created and managed. If these accounts are just used for you (ie - the user doesn't necessarily see them), then you can mitigate some of that risk by treating the username/password as an opaque token that you manage and generate and that the user never sees.
If this is something that the user is aware of, then you'll need to approach the account linking in one of two ways:
Have them log into your service via an app or webapp using this credential info that you will need to save (ack!) and then link to the Assistant using OAuth.
Have them log into your service via an app or webapp using Google Sign-In, which will carry over to your Action. Then have them provide the credential info for the API, which you will need to save (ack!).
I want to use custom claims in my Firestore security rules but I read that they can apparently be overwritten by users:
However, if the same custom user claims are defined on a user signed
in via custom authentication, the overlapping claims defined in the
custom token have higher priority and always overwrite the custom user
claims defined on a user via this API.
[https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/custom-claims][1]
Which defeats the purpose, so I guess I must be missing something?
EDIT: moved extra question to another post
A user cannot set custom claims on their own account. The only way to set custom claims on a user profile is through the Admin SDK, which requires that you have access to the project credentials of the Firebase project, something only collaborators on that project do.
My company has userbase of course, but I want to allow users to login and use my applications with their social accounts e.g. Outlook, Facebook, Gmail. Something that is usually not clear to me when I read resources on the Internet on the topic is how to map the social credentials with ones in our database? I know we should use an API platform or something like that, but the user identity part is not clear to me.
You basically need to, as you noted, tap into the provided response and transform or link or provision it to existing identities in your own userbase. A lot of this depends on your method of delegating authentication to external provides and things they expose back to you as part of the user profile. You basically need to grab the user profile, parse it and then determine which field can be used to link that profile to an existing account, and then establish the authentication session based on the final result.
Here is a link to a technical walkthrough that describes the same process with an SSO solution: https://apereo.github.io/2018/04/20/cas-delegated-authn-account-linking/
I'm looking for some deep down detailed information on google's use of oauth scopes
My Drive app is working, so I get the simple use of scopes. However I have the following detailed questions/issues..
I specify scopes twice. Once in my app and then also in the API
Console. What is the respective significance of these two scope
declarations?
If I remove scopes, must my user re-authorise my app, or is this
only required for adding additional scopes?
If the answer to 2, is 'I can't silently remove scopes', will the
Google libraries deal gracefully with re-authorising the user, or
will I just get 403 failures? I've read How should an application add/remove scopes to an existing grant? but the accepted answer specifically references adding scopes, whereas my question is about removing scopes.
Can different modules within my app request different scopes within
the superset specified in the API console? To explain, my app has 3
components: a chrome extension accessing Drive, a web client using
JS to access Drive and YouTube (in online mode), and a server
component which accesses Drive (in offline mode)..
Can my app. enquire what scopes it has been granted?
A general question, I'm sure I face the same dilemma as many app authors. If I increase functionality (a good thing since it attracts users), I also need to increase permissions/trust a user places in my app (a bad thing since it repels users). Are there any recommendations on how apps should best handle this conflict of interests?
List of scopes in your client code - this is what a user authorizes your app to do
When you request authorization from a user, you need to specify what you would like the user to consent to. This is what the list of scopes is used for - it controls the text the user sees when they authorize your application, and the refresh / access tokens granted by that authorization are limited to making API calls that are allowed by those scopes.
List of enabled services in the API Console - this is what your app authorizes users to do
To my knowledge there is no list of scopes specified in the API Console. There is however a list of Google services that can enabled. Enabling/disabling a service here is more about turning on/off ability to make API calls and managing quota and/or accepting terms of service related to that API, than it is authorization.
When an API call is made - you send along an access token
The access token encapsulates the user making the request, the scopes the user authorized you for, and the client ID used for the authorization (which in turn belongs to your project). At this point you need to have the service that the API call is sent to enabled on the project, and the correct scope for the API request - or you will get a 403.
When your list of required scopes changes - you should expect users to need to re-authorize
At the point you request an access token (typically by sending a refresh token) you need to be prepared for that request not to succeed. Maybe it's because you've added scopes - but maybe a user has chosen to visit https://accounts.google.com/IssuedAuthSubTokens and has revoked your applications access. I'm not sure whether if you request less scopes than was granted by the user initially will trigger this, I would experiment to test - but the point is that regardless your code needs to be able to handle this scenario. I believe the OAuth2DecoratorFromClientSecrets (from the linked question) will handle this gracefully for you but am not certain - it should be easy enough to verify.
Using the same authorization across multiple clients - suggest reading through this doc and see if it covers all of your scenarios: https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/CrossClientAuth
To see scopes granted to an access token - use the OAuth2 API: https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/tokeninfo?access_token=yaxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx