My app logic (Android, iOS and Web) is all written in my server.
Since things got complicated, I decided to build my server as a REST web service so querying it will contain logic in the header.
My login flow is pretty simple, and I somehow tried to copy from Facebook API:
The user login to Facebook.
The user receive a Facebook access token
The access token is sent to my server with some other identifiers
The server checks with Facebook that the access token is valid with Facebook and that the other identifiers match the ones on Facebook.
The server returns an access token to the user, which he should use in each query until it expires.
The problem is that I didn't add any other restrictions like endpoints limitations (scopes) and stuff like this, so an access token generated by my server grant you access to each part of my api.
I think that inventing the wheel here will be foolish, so I'm looking for a framework or a generic solution that will allow me to add logic to the access tokens in a simple way.
I read about OAuth, but my concern that its more about user sharing with other users, but I only want to use it is login flow and scope protector.
Is it possible with OAuth ? Are there alternative to OAuth ?
That's possible with OAuth 2.0 and in fact one of the objectives: you may issue and use access tokens that have particular "scopes" (an OAuth 2.0 concept) associated to them that could relate to permissions that the client has (e.g. read/write, API A, API B).
But you need to issue your own access tokens from your own Authorization Server. You could allow users to login to that Authorization Server with their Facebook account.
Related
I've implemented an OAuth2 Server which currently handles two grant types, password and refresh_token.
Now, I need to allow my clients to authenticate using their Facebook or Google account, but my question may apply to any similar flow.
To authenticate against Facebook or Google, the user needs to authorize my application to fetch its data, then I need to access Facebook or Google to actually fetch them.
I though about two ways of doing it.
The user log in into its Facebook Account, authorize my application and retrieve an Access Token. It sends its Access Token to my server and I use it to fetch its data.
The user log in into its Facebook Account, authorize my application and get an Authorization Code, it sends it to my server, I use its Authorization Code to get an Access Token for the user, and use it to fetch its data.
From your experience and/or best practices (I was not able to find any about this kind of workflow), what is the best option?
At my workplace, the 2nd type (called explicit grant type) is used. It is preferred over the first one (called implicit grant type.)
One more advantage of explicit grant type over implicit grant type is that it supports the refresh token which implicit does not support that in a nutshell means either you have to keep a very long expiry time of your access token or the user have to do the redirection dance once the token expires.
So you are more secure with explicit grant type as the expiry time of the access token need not to be very high (I believe you can not change the expiry time of access token when using with facebook or google ) and it does not requires redirection thing (re-login)
I have a REST service that my mobile app uses to authenticate when the users click on the Facebook or Google icons.
The service accepts the user's id from the provider and checks if it exists on the database and then issues the access_token to be used for the other methods.
The problem is that I just thought that it could be pretty easy for someone to intercept the calls and discover which service authenticates and what the user id is and then call it with to get a token.
How can I avoid this?
I think you just need to separate the authentication and authorization functions. You can let Google (Google Sign-In) handle authentication. If you follow the API they will securely authenticate the user and send you the token which you can validate.
Once you know who they are for sure, your site can safely authorize that user approriately. For example, they might be an existing user, need to make an account, be an administrator. You can make those authorizations on your site based on the user authenticated by Google (in my example).
Twitter, Facebook and others do the same. Also see OpenID Connect.
We have a website where the only way to login and authenticate yourself with the site is with Facebook (this was not my choice). The first time you login with Facebook, an account gets automatically created for you.
We now want to create an iPhone application for our site and also a public API for others to use our service.
This question is about how to authenticate with our website from the app/API and is broken into 2 parts:
What is the correct way to handle REST authentication from an API to a website which only uses Facebook OAuth as an authentication method?
I have read and researched a lot about standard methods of authentication for REST API. We can't use such methods as Basic Auth over HTTPS, as there are no credentials for a user as such. Something like this seems to be only for authenticating applications using the API.
Currently, the best way I can think is you hit an /authorize end-point on our API, it redirects to Facebook OAuth, then redirects back to the site and provides a 'token' which the user of the API can use to authenticate subsequent requests.
For an official application that we create, we wouldn't necessarily need to use the public API in the same way. What would be the best way then to talk to our website and authenticate users?
I understand (I think) how to authenticate 3rd-party applications that are using our API, using API (public) keys and secret (private) keys. However, when it comes to authenticating the user who is using the app, I am getting rather confused about how to go about it when the only way we have to authenticate a user is Facebook.
I feel like I'm missing something very obvious, or don't fully understand how public REST APIs should work, so any advice and help would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: see below
I've been thinking hard about this question too. It's not entirely clear to me yet but here's the route I am thinking of going. I am creating a REST API an my users only auth with Facebook connect.
On the CLIENT:
Use the Facebook API to login and get an OAUTH2 code.
Exchange this code for an access token.
In every call to my custom API I'll include the Facebook user id and the access token.
On the API (for every method that requires user authentication):
Make a request to the /me Facebook graph using the access token from above.
Verify that the Facebook user id returned matches the user id passed to my API from above.
If the access token has expired additional communication is required.
I have yet to test this. How does it sound?
--- Update: July 27th, 2014 to answer question ---
I only use the above exchange once upon login. Once I determine which user is logging in, I create my own access token, and that token is used from that point going forward. So the new flow looks like this...
On the CLIENT:
Use the Facebook API to login and get an OAUTH2 code.
Exchange this code for an access token.
Request an access token from my API, including the Facebook token as a parameter
On the API
Receive access token request.
Make a request to the /me Facebook graph using the facebook access token
Verify that the Facebook user exists and match to a user in my database
Create my own access token, save it and return it to the client to be used from this point forward
This is my implementation using JWTs (JSON Web Tokens), basically similar to Chris' updated answer. I have used Facebook JS SDK and JWT.
Here's my implementation.
Client: Use Facebook JS SDK to log in and get the access token.
Client: Request JWT from my API by calling /verify-access-token endpoint.
MyAPI: Receives access token, verify it by calling /me endpoint of Facebook API.
MyAPI: If access token is valid, finds the user from database, logs in the user if exist. Create a JWT with required fields as payload, set an expiry, sign with the secret key and send back to the client.
Client: Stores the JWT in local storage.
Client: Sends the token (the JWT from step 5) along with the request for the next API call.
MyAPI: validate the token with the secret key, if token is valid, exchange the token for a new one, send it back to the client along with the API response. (No external API calls for verification of the token here after) [if the token is invalid/expired request client to authenticate again and repeat from 1]
Client Replaces the stored token with the new one and use it for the next API call. Once the token expiry is met, the token expires revoking access to API.
Every token is used once.
Read more answers about security and JWT
How secure is JWT
If you can decode JWT how are they secure?
JSON Web Tokens (JWT) as user identification and authentication tokens
I am trying to answer the same question and have been going through a lot of reading recently...
I won't have "the" answer but things are getting a little clearer for me. Have you read the comments in the article you mentioned? I found them really interesting and helpful.
As a result, and in the light of how things have evolved since the first article has been written, here's what I think I'll do:
HTTPS everywhere — this allows you to forget about HMAC, signing, nonce, ...
Use OAuth2:
When authentication requests come from my own apps/website, use this 'trick' (or a variation of it) described in a reply to the article mentioned before.
In my case, I have two types of users: those with classic login/password credentials and those who have signed up with Facebook Connect.
So I'd provide a regular login form with a "Login with Facebook" button. If the user logs in with his "classic" credentials, I'd just send these to my OAuth2 endpoint with a grant_type=password.
If he chooses to log in via Facebook, I think that would be a two-steps process:
First, use Facebook iOS SDK to open an FBSession
When that's done and the app is given back control, there should be a way to get a Facebook ID for that user. I'd send this ID alone to my OAuth2 endpoint with an extension grant understood by my server as "using an FB User ID".
Please note that I am still heavily researching on all this stuff, so that might not be a perfect answer... maybe not even a correct one! But I think that would make for a good starting point.
The idea of using an "extension grant" for the Facebook authentication might involve having to register it to do things properly? I'm not quite sure.
Anyway, I hope I was able to help you even a bit, and that at least it can start a discussion to find the best solution to this problem :)
Update
The Facebook login is not a solution as pointed in the comments: anybody could send an arbitrary user ID and log in as this user on the API.
What about doing it like this:
Show a login form with a "Facebook login" button
If this login method is chosen, act kinda like the Facebook SDK: open a web page from your authentication server, which will initiate the Facebook login.
Once the user has logged in, Facebook will use your redirect URL to confirm; make that URL point to another endpoint of your authentication server (possibly with an extra parameter indicating the call came from an app?)
When the authentication endpoint is hit, the authentication can securely identify the user, retain its FB User ID/FB Session and return an access token to your app using a custom URL scheme, just like the Facebook SDK would do
Looks better?
On my app the user can sign to Facebook and the app then has the user's access token (say it's 'abc'), I want to use this token to create a user on my own server.
Is it safe to send this access token to my server (using SSL), then get the user's username and ID using https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=abc on my server and check that the application the token belongs to is mine with https://graph.facebook.com/app?access_token=abc. If it is my application I then store the user in my user's database and/or log them in.
Can this system be fooled? Can you think of a way someone could log in as someone else?
You should check out all of the Authentication documentation and the Oauth spec to see the different auth flows available
Broadly speaking, you can create a user on your server based on the access token, and be reasonably certain that when you get an access token from Facebook for the same user ID that it's the same person.
If you require very high security for the app you can take steps to ensure the user's access token wasn't produced via malware or the Facebook user being tricked, there's an example showing protection against CSRF in the Server Side Authentication documentation, and there's also a reauthentication flow you can use
I assume that you are using facebook sdk for this, if so the facebook sdk takes care of the security for you and you don't have to worry about a thing.Supposing that you are accessing the api without the sdk then there are two things that must be noted:
1) Auth token expires frequently(facebook has taken great pains to ensure that the user is protected)
2)Making a request with just auth token is not enough there are some other parameters that are needed that can't be faked especially if you are doing this server side since an extra layer is added that fb calls server flow authentication
3)On top of that there are a lot of permissions that are in place that the user has to give in order for an application to access some data.The link below provides a nice article on authentication you can take a look
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
So long story short it is safe.
I need to post message on a certain FB page as a owner by cron, using php and ZF 1.1.X. For this small issue, I don't want to create a full OAuth stack. Is it possible to communicate with FB API (it's desirable, PHP SDK for FB) without it, such as twitter with his precreated access tokens (Access token, Access token secret)?
As long as you need an active user access_token to retrieve desired data this is not possible to skip OAuth flow.
Without authenticating user you only have application access_token (in old format APP_ID|APP_SECRET, but it's still works) and only limited access to most of Graph API endpoints and Application settings.
Actually there is nothing hard in implementing the user authentication with OAuth flow and it is completely transparent with usage of PHP-SDK.
Just look at the sample code in documentation for server-side authentication
Yes, you need to build an app and then authorize the page via the app while requesting the manage_page permission.
You should make yourself familiar with the Server Side Auth process as well.