I have a website where a user can login using MVC5 Identity. (Although this question is not specific to that technology)
For a user to register with this website we must have spoken to them over the phone and an account manager must go through a registration form which sets up an "unverified" account for the user.
Following this the user is sent an email verification link, along with a generated password to login. The registration you would normally fill out pre-login is done post-login.
So I was wondering if in this scenario I can simply treat the users first login as email verification becuase the only way they get their password is from the email.
Is there any way this could be exploited and open up any security holes/allow validation without owning the email?
Edit:
Wanted to add the password is temporary (expires after a fixed period) and the user will be able to drop into a password reset form and a have a new one emailed if they don't do it in time. If the user has given us the wrong email I assume most will phone us.
I do not see this having any exploitation or holes and you are right to think this can be used as the email verification. Try it, and see how it works. Maybe after the temporary password is typed the user is prompted to type in a new password of their choosing.
Related
I have a process of adding new users that requires me to send two emails. One from Keycloak to ask the added user to create a password and one inviting them to my site.
I would like to use only one email sent by my site, not Keycloak. I know I can modify the reset email sent from Keycloak, but I would rather just send the email from my site.
Is there a way to get a password reset link or token from Keycloak so that I can insert it into my email?
I am implementing an email verification service, with the purpose of confirming that the person registering is indeed the owner of that email address (specifically, that they work at the organisation that the email domain belongs to).
I will send an email post-registration with a single-use link in it that will set their status to verified = 1.
Users can choose to register and log-in using either a simple email/password combination, or by using the Google Sign In service.
My question is: do I need to verify the ones that have registered with Google Sign In? In order to provide their email address to me, they had to sign in with Google, who then confirmed the address. Is there anything I've missed here, or can I immediately consider these users to be the verified owners of these addresses?
If you are using google sign in there is no need to verify the user.
Whereas if have your own login system, then you must verify the email because
if the email is not verified then you cannot have forgotten password feature through email
and also the user might not have actually had the email so anyone else could create the same email and if you have forgotten password through email someone else could easily access others data.
At http://docs.developer.intuit.com/0025_Intuit_Anywhere/0010_Getting_Started/0030_Integrate_your_app/0030_Signing_Into_and_out_of_Intuit_From_Within_Your_App/Sign-in/Implement_SSO_and_OpenID_in_Your_App
it says the following:
"Intuit does not verify the user email address associated with the user's OpenID account. Therefore, do not use the email address for authentication and do not link user accounts based on email address."
What does it mean "do not use the email address for authentication"? I mean, isn't the user already authenticated, through OpenId.
Also it says that the user email address is not verified. But what if my app needs to send an email to a user that has logged through OpenId. How can I be sure the user will actually get the email? What is the recommended pattern to handle that?
Thanks
EDIT: also, can I use the email to uniquely identify a user, and if not, what should I use to uniquely identify a user from the open id response?
EDIT 2: also, is the developer charged when a user logs in with open id and the 36 day trial expires? Or is it just when using the "Connect to quickbooks" that the developer is charged, in which case, open id authentication itself is free?
Clement,
It means when a customer goes to the Intuit Appcenter and creates an account the email is not verified immediately, so you cannot single sign on a user based only on their email address if they already have an account in your system. You need to prompt them to login one time to map the two accounts.
If they are completely new then you can auto provision an account on your side and single sign them in, if you require the customer to verify their email address then you can send them a verification email.
thanks
Jarred
I'm using Register with Facebook as one of the ways to log in to my web app, and expressly ask for the "email" permission..
On login, some of the user data ($facebook->api('/me')) is stored into the users database, however, sometimes the email field just doesn't exist - is this a common problem?
Just a guess...
The facebook documentation says:
note: this field will not be returned if no valid email address is available for the user
Source: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/
So when an email address become invalid (users who haven't used facebook in years and have destroyed/changed their email address since for example), facebook may stop returning this field.
5% of invalid address may sounds big, but if I check my facebook friends, I think more than 5% of them never use their account, and I wouldn't be surprised if the address they used when they signed in is now invalid.
Users don't always have to provide an email address in order to use Facebook. They can also sign up via SMS, though it's far less common.
In short, FB won't always have an email address, so can't serve it to your app.
Try:
// Just to make sure email are permitted
//$facebook->getLoginUrl(array('req_perms' => 'email'))
// Request email
FB.api('/me?scope=email', function(response) { /*...*/ });
Or:
$email = $facebook->api('user_id?fields=email');
PROBLEMS:
The user changed the visibility of its email address to "only me" and thus you have no way to get it.
The user registered with SMS instead of email as mentioned in the previous answer.
ALTERNATIVE:
If you absolutely need to contact the user but you cannot get its email address nyou can still get its Facebook email (everybody has this email): "user_name#facebook.com".
If the user uses a POP server he will directly receive the email in GMail or others, if not he will receive your email as a private message. The only drawback if this method is that your email must be "plain/text" and not "HTML".
One thing is Users don't always have to provide an email address in order to use Facebook(could have registered through mobile)- as mentioned by Colm. Apart from this-
Please check that if the user has definitely granted you the email extended permission or it hasn't subsequently been revoked. To have a check on this you could use the permissions api-
/USER/permissions
I had similar problem & I found the cause for this. This problem occurs for users who have not set their Primary Email Address (They have many email address but they haven’t pointed out which is their primary email address) under General Account setting tab.
I tried using such accounts on various famous sites which has Facebook login & even they couldn’t retrieve the email address from such accounts.
So, its not the problem with the code(Assuming u have asked for permissions). We just have to handle such scenarios & let users know that we didn’t receive their email address. Like Klout does.
Thanks
In addition to what #Jigar Jain wrote above, users can actually uncheck the email permission during the sign inflow. If that's the case, his/her email address will not be returned by Facebook.
It's up to you to implement a logic that makes login unsuccessful if user unchecks the email permission, to force your users to choose another login method that will guarantee that a return of user's email address.
It is not mandatory for someone to give their email address while signing up with Facebook. An alternate approach would be to ask the user to link their email id in the Facebook account settings. That way you can fetch the email id, if that's a mandatory field in your DB. Otherwise you can continue with the id provided by FB which is unique.
my question is about the workflow of a web registration.
1) register with email + basic data
2) activate the account with a special secret link <- is this necessary?
3) allow the user to log in to the system
EDIT: I want to make the process as simple as possible without a password to choose/remember.
In more detail:
After a user is registering on a web site I sent out a confirmation with a generated password to login on the site and proceed.
Many sites sent an activation link first and then allow logging in to the system.
Is there any reason to do this additional step when I generate the password and sent it out to the user?
Thanks for your answers.
Is there any reason to do this additional step when I generate the password and sent it out to the user?
To ensure that the provided email address exists, and belongs to the person who registered the account.
I've noticed an increasing number of websites which skip this step. It seems to be a trend.
The purpose of the activation link is to guarentee that the email address provided by the user is one to which they have access. If you are generating a password and sending it via email to the user's email address, then the link is not required (because them logging in means that they read your email).
However, email is generally not a secure way to distribute information over the internet. You are sending them the password in plaintext, and you do not know how many people have access to that email account (e.g. a shared family account). I think you would be better off allowing the user to choose their own password at registration and then send them a link (offer to generate a password for them on the registration page, if you really believe that generating it is better).
The validation of an email account is usually to help prevent someone creating numerous accounts. This helps prevents spammers and various other bad people from attacking your site from different accounts.
In general you're trying to ensure that the person is who they say they are and that you have an outside means of communicating with them.
1 - to ensure that the email is belong to the registerd user.
2 - to make it harder to the people want to create many accounts (like forums where a single person have so many accounts to use them in voting or somthing).
I remembered a funny site that gives you a 10 minutes email , just to skip the process of creating a new email or even spamming your email by the sites you've registered in.
This way you make sure that the email address is valid and it will be more difficult for a spider to generate many users than without this step. Also, you might do a lot of things in your database when a user is registered and you can do these after the user is validated, to save time by not creating extra traffic on your database server for fake users.