I developed chat application for mobile platform which uses eJabberd xmpp chat server configured in my public Ubuntu machine.
To make the server connection i used https://mydomainname.com:5280/http-bind so how to protect this to access only by my client application not others.
Now my server is accessible by any client like pidgin, adium etc How to block this.
You can modify ejabberd to have a custom authentication that integrate a variation from the specification and implement that in your client. That way, unmodified standard client will not be able to read it.
However, as your client is Javascript and code is visible, it will still be possible to patch existing client to implement your variation, but there is not way around this. The approach of "shared secret" means that if the secret is found, other clients could find a way to connect. The secret is even less difficult to find when your code is public (even if obfuscated).
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We have come across similar problem, need your help to resolve this.
Can you please either let us know your contact number so that we can reach out to you or if you can provide your script if possible so that we can refer to
Here is the problem we are stuck with:
I am trying to test a Rest service through HTTP sampler using Jmeter. Not sure how to capture token from the sampler generates a token and to use this token for authorization in the header manager of another HTTP.
Loadrunner is not displaying the web address when trying to enter in the truclient browser. Below is the problem as this web address automatically redirect to another web address which is the authentication server.
Can you please suggest another solution for the below issue?
Here is the exact scenario we are trying to achieve
we want to loadtest the portal however due to redirect and different authentication method being used we are unable to do it using truclient protocol in loadrunner. Also tried Multiple protocol selecting LDAP, SMTP, HTTP/HTML etc but no luck.**
Thank You,
Sonny
JMETER is going to architecturally be the HTTP protocol layer equivalent with LoadRunner, with the exception of the number of threads per browser emulation.
In contrast to the code request, I want to architecturally visualize the problem. You mention redirect, is this an HTTP 301/302 redirect or one which is handled with information passed back to the client, processed on the client and then redirected to another host? You mention dynamic authentication via header token, have you examined the web_add_header() and web_add_auto_header() in Laodrunner web virtual users for passing of extra header messages, including ones which have been correlated from previous requests, such as the token being passed back as you note?
This authentication mechanism is based upon? LDAP? Kerberos? Windows Integrated Authentication? Simple Authentication based upon username/password in header? Can you be architecturally more specific and when this comes into play, such as from the first request to gain access to the test environment through the firewall or from a nth request to gain access within a business process?
You mention RESTFul services. These can be transport independent, such as being passed over SMTP using a mailbox to broker the passing of data between client and server, or over HTTP similar to SOAP messages. Do you have architectural clarity on this? Could it be that you need to provide mailbox authentication across SMTP and POP3 to send and receive?
I have tried Google with queries similar to the title of this question, but haven't found anything useful.
Background: I am building a web app and would like to add a user authentication level to it. I cannot imagine anything worse than building a user authentication system from the ground up, so I want a quick solution.
I'm looking for open source software I can host on my server that provides an auth layer I can connect to, with multiple user accounts
Criteria:
I want to host the software on my own server
Provide a log in screen that works with multiple sign in strategies - twitter, facebook, vanilla email, etc.
Persists users to a database (preferably postgres) and persists session data
Preferably lets me store a minimal amount of data per user, like key value store
Has a client-side (Javascript) API, like Facebook's JS, so I can use this auth service on multiple sites. Namely, I want to use it on localhost or my own file system (when allowing file cookies). Client side JS API exposes methods like log in / log out
Has a server side API (such as exposes local RESTful endpoints) so that when I do build out my server side app for other data storage outside of the user, my app can query the auth service for log in status.
I want to run this stack completely independently of my own app - in fact I want to run this auth service and purely communicate to it from my local dev environment without building any server side app of my own.
I have used Firebase and they do many of the things that I want, including log in strategies and the client / server side APIs, but I want to be able to host my own version of this.
I can't imagine anyone takes pleasure out of building user authentication of any kind, so I'm surprised I haven't found anything in research.
I also know this is an open-ended question, but as far as I can tell I haven't found anything satisfying my requirements.
I like Devise (https://github.com/plataformatec/devise), which is for Rails. It has an active community with a boatloads of plugins available that can fulfill many of your requirements.
I didn't see a language specified; most languages and frameworks have their own implementations. Can you provide more information?
Example: I use the Flask framework on python. In addition, I use the Authomatic library which provides Oauth access for twitter, google, facebook, etc.
What I was looking for is something called a Single Sign On solution. According to this list there is nothing currently that meets my criteria.
Instead I have chosen to just run a local webserver and implement a regular auth flow.
We intend to develop rest based api. I explored the topic but it seems, you can secure api when your client is an app (So there are many ways, public key - private key etc). What about websites / mobile website, if we are accessing rest based api in website which do not use any login for accessing contents ( login would be optional ) then how could we restrict other people from accessing rest based api ?
Does it make sense using Oauth2.0 ? I don't have clear idea of that.
More clear question could be ,How can we secure get or post request exposed over web for the website which doesn't use any login ?
If it's simple get request or post request , which will return you json data on specific input, now i have mobile website , who will access those data using get request or post request to fetch data. Well, some else can also access it , problem is i am not using Login, user can access data directly. But how can we restrict other people from accessing that data.
What do you think is the difference between securing a website that is not using REST vs one that is using REST API?
OAuth provides authorisation capabilities for your site, in a REST architecture this means a user of the mobile application will have to provide their credentials before being allowed to access the resource. The application can then decide on if that user has access to the requested resource. However you've said your website doesn't need use authorisation.
You can use certificates however good luck managing the certificate for each client. My take on it is for your explanation you don't need to secure your website because you will never be able to manage a trust relationship between the client and the server. There are some options though:
You build your own client application that you ship out to people which can verify itself with the server using a packaged certificate with the client. E.g. iOS has this kind of feature if you build for that device.
You provide a capability to download a certificate that is 'installed' in the browser and used when communicating to your REST API
Use something like a handshaking protocol so when a client wants to make the first request it says; 'hi I'm a client can we chat?' And the server responds with 'yes for the next X minutes we can however make sure you send me this key everytime you tell me something YYYYYY' (you can use something like SecureUDID or equivalent for other devices than iOS).
There are probably others but you get the basic idea. Again in my opinion if your resource doesn't need authorisation then you don't need to secure that REST API. Can I ask what kind of data are you exposing via this REST API or functionality your providing? That might help provide a better answer.
You want authorization: only some agents (mobile clients) and/or users should be allowed to access those APIs.
To solve that problem, you need identification: a way for the server to tell who is who (or what), so the right decision can be made.
There are many different way to provide some form of identification, depending how much you care about security.
The simplest is a user agent string, specific to your mobile clients. But it can be faked easily. Slightly harder to fake are client based 'secrets' - embed some kind of secret or key in your mobile client code. You can make it really complicated and secret, but as ramsinb pointed out, you can't get security this way as it would require you to be able to guarantee that the secret you're shipping with the client (wether it's code, algorithm or any other fancy construct) can't be compromised or reverse engineered. Not happening when you don't control the client.
From there, 3 choices:
Security isn't really required, don't bother
Security isn't really required, but you still want to limit access to your API to either legit users/agents or people ready to invest some time hacking your protection - go with a specific user agent or a client embedded secret - don't invest much into it as it won't block people who really want access to get it anyway
Security IS required - and then I don't think there is a way around authentication, wether it's login/password, user specific (device specific?) keys, OpenID, etc... No matter what, you'll have to add to the user burden to some extent, although you can limit that burden by allowing authentication to persist (cookies, storage....)
I currently have:
a REST API (Jersey) that runs as a seperate application
a GUI application (JSF) that is a client of the REST API
I'm wondering what the best way is to talk to the REST API from the GUI application. The REST API is stateless, but the GUI application is stateful and has to pass authentication info (basic auth) with every rest request. Because we have to support hundreds of simultaneous users, we want to configure our Jersey client for connection pooling.
We can handle connection pooling by configuring the Jersey client with Apache's HTTP client. Authentication can be handled by using the HTTPBasicAuthFilter, which will automatically send the same credentials with every request.
However, I'm not sure if it is best to configure 1 client for the entire GUI application, or to create a new client per session.
With 1 client for the application, connection pooling makes sense, but then I have to find a way to set the correct authentication info on every request. The HTTPBasicAuthFilter assumes that the credentials never change, which is not the case our app.
If I create a client with a new HTTPBasicAuthFilter per session, then authentication is trivial, but I don't get any benefit from connection pooling, since every client will have its own pool.
I doubt I'm the first one to run into this, so I am curious how other people have solved this.
Kind regards,
Glenn
You can attach client filters at the WebResource level. So you can have a single shared client and per-session WebResource objects that you attach the HTTPBasicAuthFilter to.
I am building an application in which front end is iPhone and I am using ROR as my backend with mongoDB as my database. It is a kind of chatting application for which I am using jabber protocol and XMPP server. Now I want that when a user is created in my rails app, the same user should be created on the XMPP server. Any help would be much appreciated.
The ideal situation is to have only a single source for users and configure your XMPP server to use that same service.
For example it is common to have an XMPP server authenticate against LDAP, then all user management is delegated to the LDAP server. The XMPP server doesn't handle user management at all, but defers any user related queries to LDAP.
This would ultimately be more reliable than trying to keep two separate systems in synch. If the user management in your case is custom (which it appears to be), it might mean you will also have to add a custom module/plugin to your XMPP server (you haven't mentioned which one you are using) to use that service.