I am using laravel 5.1
I want to make login using REST api. I have searched about Sentry. But there is no documentation for Laravel 5. I don't know it will work with laravel 5. I just want to know what is the best way to login my laravel application using REST?
Laravel for Rest API development Good Choice
Even I am using it for Rest API development
For Login I am using a session field from database which acts as token for validating user accessing the API
so, if the request has the session token and it matches to the token from database then its a valid request
this approach is taken by me for validating request to my API, And every login I am resetting the token
How to create the token
Token should be able to identify the user i.e. which user is sending the token for that I am creating token by hashing userID + salt(Random and very long string).
How it works
User who is able to access the API sends login credentials, if the credentials are valid I am creating token for the user and storing the token in database with the user whose credentials are provided and sending the token value to the user as response and next time I am validating each request with the Access token
Recommendation
Instead of Laravel you can consider using Lumen(A micro-framework by Laravel) also for developing rest API.
For detailed information about rest and rest authentication
How to do authentication with a REST API right? (Browser + Native clients)
What exactly is RESTful programming?
What is REST? Slightly confused
RESTful Authentication
Related
I have a website allowing authenticated users to submit and edit data. I also want to offer a REST API as part of a chargeable service.
Now the problem is that a non-paying user could theoretically use the same calls my website uses as API for authentication and sending data from his external application since it is very easy in the browser to see the endpoint what and how exactly the data is being sent to a website.
How can I protect my website from such usage and force the user to use API for external access?
Actually you cannot prevent people making requests to a public API. You can just validate the user when a request arrives. So there are more than one approach to solve this problem.
I would provide a token per session for each user and validate the rest API request at back-end.
Use OAuth2. So you will give paid user secret id and key then they will ask for the access token to access the API's using secret id and key.
Read about public/private key encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
Read about oAuth
https://oauth.net/2/
I have used passport to implement oAuth2 in laravel. passport is oAuth2 implementation and available in other languages also.
I'm evaluating whether to use Ionic's cloud Auth service and it seems like it's relatively easy to implement client-side, where you can check this.auth.isAuthenticated. You can also set the user info from the client side as well.
However, if I want to do check their identity server-side, such as check that a user is authenticated when they call my custom api to post a comment - how can I get some sort of token (preferably a JWT token) that I can use to validate their identity server-side? Assuming we are using email/password authentication.
Also - using their send notification on a user's birthday example, how can I query the user data in ionic cloud's database to say find all users who have a birthday today. Can I export out the user data in any way if I want to migrate away in the future?
You should implement a JWT authentication service server side.
In other words when the user is authenticated, the app can send a JWT token to the server which should be evaluated to trust the remote user.
For more info reads: https://docs.ionic.io/services/auth/custom-auth.html
A php example here: https://github.com/driftyco/custom-auth-examples/tree/master/php
Regards from Italy
I am new to Fuel PHP... I am working on a project with REST architecture in Fuelphp..... I didn't found any tutorial how to achieve the required functionality "User Authentication using Fuel PHP REST".
As REST server is stateless how do we use auth package of fuelphp in rest api?
As you also pointed, REST calls are somewhat stateless meaning you have no session to store.
The auth documentation has some methods which checks user credentials, but does not store authentication. There are no offical way of doing this.
One of the methods that I have used in the past is to use a token based system. You have an API token linked to an Auth user then this token is supplied in the Authorize header when making a request, the token is then checked against known tokens and if valid a forced login is performed with the Auth package.
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'm currently tyring to build an API driven symfony2 web applicaiton.Just a basic application to learn symfony2 and REST.
It would be based on a RESTful api. Calls to the API will be authenticated using OAuth.
For e.g.:
if a client application wants to get data (information about all the fruits) through API it will need to make a GET request to the url and pass the access token as a parameter.So the url will look something like this.
http://www.mysite.com/api/fruits.json?=<access token>
Now the problem is that i would be needing the same data in one of my actions as well.
I need some help here.In order to get get data from above url in one of my actions i will also need to send an access token in the url.
How do i get this access token??
Should there be a fixed token which will be used for all such calls within my application??
You basic application project will grow manifold if you try to do what you want here.
Basically, you need to implement an Authentication Server for this.
i) First, the app should be registered for a scope;
ii) Using the app the user logs in to the authentication/authorization server.
iii) The server verifies if the app has access to the scope and if the user is registered in your system.
iv) Server creates an access token (which is a HMAC signed string) and returns to your app.
v) The app then hits the endpoint (restful API) with the token.
vi) The RESTful service then internally sends the token to the server and fetches the customerID for which the call is made and performs the actions that it's supposed to.
I wrote an answer once on how to create a OAuth Service/Provider - How would an efficient OAuth2.0 server / provider work?
Also, OAuth was designed such that client apps/3rd party software can access a user's resources on his behalf. A very simple example is = An app posting something on your facebook wall on your behalf. It is actually accessing a resource that you own (the wall) and posting to it. You do not need OAuth just to get some data - there are other ways to secure the API.