Is it possible to create a public OAuth Client id that never expires in Smartsheet using their simple developer account they provide?
They provide trial accounts, but my concern is what happens with the OAuth client when the account expires? Will the client expire to?
Developer accounts are fully featured and can participate in the OAuth flow.
The account would need to remain active for the client id to continue working. Trial accounts are just that - trials, so naturally you wouldn't want to setup anything permanent with an account you don't intend to keep.
You might be confusing client ids (essentially an identifier for your app) with access tokens? The client id would remain the same for the life of your app. Access tokens would need to be refreshed periodically. See the documentation for details.
Related
I am currently developing financial services as a personal project.
In order to strengthen security in the project, it is designed and implemented to process authentication at the gateway stage using AWS API Gateway.
I tried to log in using a mobile phone number and the received authentication number, and I don't think this is appropriate for Cognito and IAM identifiers, so I'm going to run the Node Auth Server that issues and verifies JWT tokens in AWS Lambda.
In the process, I tried to include an identifier such as user_id or uuid in the payload of the JWT token, but my colleague opposed it.
His opinion was that access token should only engage in authentication and that the token should not contain a user identifier.
I agreed with him to some extent, but if so, I wondered how to deliver the user identifier in an API such as "Comment Registration API".
Should we hand over the user identifier along with the access token to the client when login is successful?
in conclusion
Is it logically incorrect to include the user identifier in Access Token's Payload?
If the answer to the above question is yes, how should I deliver the user identifier when login is successful?
I wanted to hear the majority's opinion, so I posted it.
Thank you.
Typically you want enough information in the access token so that you can also do proper authorization about what the user/caller is allowed to do.
Typically, you separate authentication and authorization like the picture below shows:
So, to make an effective API, you do want to avoid having to lookup additional information to be able to determine if you are allowed to access some piece of data or not. So, I typically include the UserID and some other claims/roles in the token, so that I can smoothly let the user in inside the API.
However, adding personal information in the access token might have some GDPR issues, but sometimes it might be necessary to also add. But I don't see any issues adding information like UserId and roles in the token.
Yes it is logically correct and a normal thing to do. To see how to do it in a Node Auth Server, you can look at this: https://auth0.com/blog/complete-guide-to-nodejs-express-user-authentication/
I have a web app built on oAuth2 that has been in production for 5+ years. Users Authenticate and Authorize with Google and grant my application access to the Google Analytics data.
All of a sudden I am seeing a surge in failures when refreshing my users oAuth2 tokens. This is the call:
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token
Passing these parameters:
client_id=xxyyzz
client_secret=xxyyzz
grant_type=refresh_token
refresh_token=xxyyzz
This seems to be be on accounts that are less active (i.e. it could be 15+ days between instances where we make calls on their behalf). I have to reach out to them and have them "ReAuthorize" against Google to get things working.
1) Did something recently change with Google oAuth2 or the GA Core Reporting API?
2) If access tokens are not refreshed after some time period will my refresh token become invalid? i.e. should I make calls against all accounts even thought I don't need the data; just to keep the refresh token from going stale?
Thanks,
Mark.
Update on Scope
It was requested to provide the scopes in play here:
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly
11/17/2016 Update:
We did find an issue that resulted in some tokens being purged. We are working on to make sure it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately there is no way to restore the tokens that were deleted and your users will have to reauthorize again.
11/11/2016 update:
We are actively investigating the issue. You should ask your users to re-authorize the application.
(from Google Identity/Auth team) We would like to investigate this a bit more to make sure our system is working as intended. Other than the token revocation (with certain scopes) on password change, we haven't changed the token revocation policy.
Would you please ping me via my G+ profile?
Use-case: Emails to be sent from a web-application upon an event, as someuser#somedomain.com via MS Exchange or Outlook.com, using the RESTful APIs exposed by Outlook.com. Only HTTP access allowed (=> no SMTP/IMAP).
All documentation seems to mention that the app has to forward users to MSOnline, sign-in and then use the authorization code sent back by MS online.
But, this won't work for a background task (=> no sign-in possible!) where a pre-built token(with some predefined scope) is necessary so that Outlook.com can be accessed via APIs to send mail as someuser#somedomain.com.
Any hints/pointers to how it could be done? Basically, automated authentication without explicitly signing in as 'someuser#somedomain.com' on the MS Online login page.
I did not find M$ documentation regarding Outlook REST APIs to be of any great help and found it to be pretty difficult to navigate/understand. :(
Thanks!
At some point you will have to have the user sign in to grant access to your app. So you would need to have some sort of user-facing web front end where they can do this. Once they have signed in and you've obtained an access token/refresh token, your background app should be able to use those tokens silently, without user interaction, at least until the user either revokes access or the refresh token expires.
Currently Azure (which provides the login/token functionality) does expire the refresh tokens after some time (90 days), at which point the user must sign in again to grant your app continued access.
We would like to implement "Sign-in with LinkedIn" in our app. Since the app has JS fronted and RESt-based backend, we decided to exchange JSAPI tokens for REST API OAuth tokens as described here.
If a user successfully signs in, the frontend sends credentials cookie with client-side bearer token and member ID to the backend. On the backend we check if a user with such a member ID already exists and if not, we exchange JSAPI token for REST API OAuth token, retrieve user details from LinkedIn a store it in our database.
Now the question is if we can use that cookie to authenticate each user's request to our REST backend. After a user successfully signed in via JSAPI, the cookie should be automatically passed to our backend on all subsequent requests so we can check member ID. Are there any drawbacks that we missed? Or is this idea as a whole wrong?
Should we rather authenticate a user only once by means of the cookie and then issue our own authentication token and send it back to the client?
The way cookies work in general is they are passed on every request to the domain they belong to. LinkedIn is setting a credentials cookie to your domain.
As long as you are validating those credentials on every request it's perfectly acceptable to use their tokens as authentication.
Personally I don't find that to be a great idea and would prefer to validate their credentials once and create my own auth token to use from there on out. You can always set that token to expire at some-point and re-validate the LinkedIn credentials (which will still be getting sent on every request anyway). This limits the amount of times you're checking with LinkedIn and should increase the responsiveness of your app.
Either way could work.
If you are using the LinkedIn cookie to validate a user by member id, you should validate the cookie's signature on each request per section 2 of the doc you linked and question 2 of the FAQ.
Using your own token could make it easier to implement an account which belongs to your app and is not necessarily connected to LinkedIn, assuming there's the potential to either connect solely with some other service(s) or no 3rd part(y/ies). Still should validate any time you trust the member id in the cookie though.
The doc provides a validation example in PHP, and if you're interested in improving a ruby version, I have a shameless plug.
The flow that you've outlined in your latest comment of going straight for the OAuth tokens is the best way to go if you were only signing in to convert the JSAPI tokens to OAuth tokens and then not using the JSAPI further. If you were planning to actually use both the JSAPI tokens within your front-end app and the OAuth tokens on your back-end, then it's better to take the conversion route.
I've been reading a lot about the topic but all I find are obsolete or partial answers, which don't really help me that much and actually just confused me more.
I'm writing a Rest API (Node+Express+MongoDB) that is accessed by a web app (hosted on the same domain than the API) and an Android app.
I want the API to be accessed only by my applications and only by authorized users.
I also want the users to be able to signup and login only using their Facebook account, and I need to be able to access some basic info like name, profile pic and email.
A possible scenario that I have in mind is:
The user logs-in on the web app using Facebook, the app is granted
permission to access the user Facebook information and receives an
access token.
The web app asks the API to confirm that this user
is actually registered on our system, sending the email and the
token received by Facebook.
The API verifies that the user
exists, it stores into the DB (or Redis) the username, the token and
a timestamp and then goes back to the client app.
Each time the
client app hits one of the API endpoint, it will have to provide the
username and the token, other than other info.
The API each time
verifies that the provided pair username/token matches the most
recent pair username/token stored into the DB (using the timestamp
to order), and that no more than 1 hour has passed since we stored
these info (again using the timestamp). If that's the case, the API
will process the request, otherwise will issue a 401 Unauthorized
response.
Does this make sense?
Does this approach have any macroscopic security hole that I'm missing?
One problem I see using MongoDB to store these info is that the collection will quickly become bloated with old tokens.
In this sense I think it would be best to use Redis with an expire policy of 1 hour so that old info will be automatically removed by Redis.
I think the better solution would be this:
Login via Facebook
Pass the Facebook AccessToken to the server (over SSL for the
android app, and for the web app just have it redirect to an API endpoint
after FB login)
Check the fb_access_token given, make sure its valid. Get user_id,email and cross-reference this with existing users to
see if its a new or old one.
Now, create a random, separate api_access_token that you give back to the webapp and android app. If you need Facebook for
anything other than login, store that fb_access_token and in your
DB associate it with the new api_access_token and your user_id.
For every call hereafter, send api_access_token to authenticate it. If you need the fb_access_token for getting more info, you can
do so by retrieving it from the DB.
In summary: Whenever you can, avoid passing the fb_access_token. If the api_access_token is compromised, you have more control to see who the attacker is, what they're doing etc than if they were to get ahold of the fb_access_token. You also have more control over settings an expiration date, extending fb_access_tokens, etc
Just make sure whenever you pass a access_token of any sort via HTTP, use SSL.
I know I'm late to the party, but I'd like to add a visual representation of this process as I'm dealing with this problem right now (specifically in dealing with the communication between the mobile app and the web api by securing it with a 3rd party provider like facebook).
For simplicity, I haven't included error checks, this is mostly just to outline a reasonable approach. Also for simplicity, I haven't included Tommy's suggestion to only pass your own custom api token once the authorization flow is over, although I agree that this is probably a good approach.
Please feel free to criticize this approach though, and I'll update as necessary.
Also, in this scenario, "My App" refers to a mobile application.