I use the Dropbox Datastore in an app that uses both the iOS and JavaScript SDKs. Aside from the 10MB datastore limit, it works pretty well.
But nearly every support request I get makes me wish I could have access to the user's data for debugging. Being able to see exactly what the user sees helps me to find and fix bugs very quickly.
Is there any way for me to access a user's data without logging into their account? Can I maybe store their access token and gain access to just their Dropbox Datastore data?
This is one of the attractive things about Parse: you can see all user data. While there is a lot of wisdom in sharding user data across Dropbox user accounts, it makes app debugging crazy-hard.
Any ideas? What do you do to get around this?
Dropbox datastores, like files, are considered the user's private data, and as such there isn't a way for an arbitrary party to gain access to said data without some sort of authorization (e.g., access to the account, having the data explicitly shared with them, etc.) Likewise, even the developer of an API app that a user happens to be using doesn't automatically get access to the data.
That said, if, as the developer of the app, you want to troubleshoot using your user's data, the most straightforward method would probably be to get an access token for that app/user pair from the user. That would replicate their setup most accurately. (Unfortunately, the Sync/Datastore SDK doesn't make it easy to extract/insert arbitrary access tokens like that though. So, in that case, this would be a bit of work to build some flow to get an access token, e.g., a small web app, and then some work to read data directly from the API.)
Alternatively, you may want to make it possible for the user to share the datastore with your own account.
In any case, it's very important that the user not be misled or confused as to what is happening or what the developer is requesting. That means being clear with user with regards to what the developer is requesting and what will be done with the data. In addition, apps should provide privacy policies in general.
Related
I'm quite new to Cloud Storage solutions, and I'm currently researching options to upgrade our current solution (we currently just upload on a SVN server).
What I have is a native application running on client computers, which will upload data to the Cloud Storage. Afterwards, client should be able to download and browse their data (source is not set in stone, could be a website or from other applications). They should not be able to access other user's data.
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to proceed. As far as I understand, the native application will upload using a Native Application Credential, using JSON.
Do I need multiple credentials to track multiple users? That seems wrong to me. Besides when they come back as 'users' through the web interface, they wouldn't be using that authentification, would they?
Do I need to change the ACL of the uploaded files afterwards?
Should I just not give write/read access to any particular users and handle read requests through Signed URLs, dealing with permission details by myself using something else on the side? (not forcing a Google Account is probably a requirement)
Sorry if this is too many questions, and thanks!
Benjamin
The "individual credentials per instance of an app" question has come up before, and unfortunately there's not a great answer. If you want every user to have different permissions, you need every user to be associated with a different account.
Like you point out, the best current answer, other than requiring users to have Google accounts, is to have a centralized service that vends signed URLs to the end applications. That service would be the only owner of all of the objects and would give out permission to read or upload as needed.
I have a newbie question regarding google cloud storage. I'm looking to create a website where people can upload files (similar to Flickr in concept) and view them. I was looking at google's cloud storage option and it seemed interesting. I got a little hung up on the authentication process. Do all users need a Google account or did I just misread it? I guess my question is can I create a site where everyone doesn't have to sign up for a google account?
Thank you for your patience and help
Nope, there's no need for customers to have their own Google accounts. Google Cloud Storage supports that, in case you want to say "these accounts have access to this data", but you can also let your app grant access on a per-request basis using whatever logic or authentication scheme you like.
This is usually accomplished with signed URLs. Basically, you'd use your credentials to sign a very specific request (download object X, upload an object with name Y) and pass that URL to the user for them to use. Signed URLs are only valid for as long as you like (one of the parameters is how long the URL is good for).
Documentation on signed URLs are here: https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/accesscontrol#Signed-URLs
It's not strictly necessary to require a user to be logged in in order to write to your bucket (e.g., we have a public-read-write canned ACL for buckets), but it's generally a bad idea. Any data stored in your bucket will ultimately be charged to you, so allowing anyone to write without authentication opens you up to a great deal of abuse.
Likewise, you could make all of your objects public-read, but then you get charged for the bandwidth costs and have no control over it (though this is a much more reasonable thing to do than public-write).
A safer option would be to proxy bytes for your users - i.e., only you/your app can write to your bucket, and your users hand their bytes to you.
Generally speaking, though, the only types of authentication we support are Google accounts, signed URLs, and anonymous users.
I'm developing an iPhone app that lets users upload photos to a Google App Engine backend written in Python.
Data is transferred between the device and server via HTTP POST and GET. What is the simplest, most secure way to ensure only iPhones with my app can get data? Also, I don't want the user to enter in credentials, it should be invisible to her.
I could embed a key in the device and send that with every request which the server would check against. But a malicious user could potentially decompile the app and obtain the key. Any suggestions?
With your requirement that the user not enter any form of password, your options are severely limited. As you note, any shared secret key in the app can be pulled out by someone via binary extraction etc. -- in effect, you can't stop a really dedicated cracker finding out the secret and then just submitting that to the server.
There are approaches that are not watertight, but which might make it harder for wholesale abuse of your service. One example might be to release updates for your app every month (or two weeks, or whatever) that contain a new shared secret. Then obviously your web service has to expect the new shared secret, as well as accepting the exising secret, for each time period.
If your data is very sensitive, you might want to stop eavesdropping by using HTTPS; but as Nick says, if you use HTTPS for anything except authentication, you have extra hoops to jump through at App submission time.
Whenever you have a key stored on a device or in software that is accessible by someone it is subject to attack. iOS's keychain is generally a helpful way to store things you want to secure. However, it is still subject to attack. As with all security you need come up with a model that is appropriate for your application.
Also note that there are encryption export restrictions that you should familiarize yourself with if you be intending to use encryption for more than authorization.
I'm making a application for facebook that will be used for academic research. Right now when the user goes to install the application I'll request additional information which is stated in the extended permissions.
I would perfectly understand someone not wanting to give out certain aspects of this information (It's just used to gather statistics about people taking part , education, religion etc.)
Does anyone know the best way to filter the permissions? For instance maybe someone is willing to give their age but not education. Therefore can I remove the education request from my application install request dynamically?
If you want to ask the user for only those permissions that he wants to give, you can take input from him before redirecting to Facebook login. You can generate the url for requesting permissions based on this custom set of permissions using the 'perms' attribute of the <fb:loginbutton /> tag or pass the list of permissions you want to the $facebook->getLoginUrl(array('req_perms' => $perms)) call.
To keep track of permission changes, you can use the realtime updates offered. You can know more about it here.
You certainly could build an up-front permissions matrix that the user could cherry-pick from. And that would probably be the way to do it, since you can't do anything to customize the permission challenge that the Facebook Platform generates.
The trick would be keeping track of which permissions the user granted in the given access token you'll receive from back from the Platform. Especially since users can change the permissions granted to your application w/o visiting the application itself - so you'll want to be hooked in to that info via the Real Time Updates.
Question
Is there a usable facebook entry point to the Data Storage API that facebook lists on their app admin page for developers, or should I consider an alternate mechanism? What alternative mechanisms exist to simply persist my information offsite (away from my server app) without stuffing it into a cookie that's prone to expire?
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Background
The facebook Data Store Admin tool is made available in a facebook App's Settings as seen here: (continue reading below)
However when I visit the DataStoreAdmin link nothing works (i.e. clicking the buttons to define the data store types and objects does nothing - I have tried different browsers).
The Wiki page for Data Store API hasn't been updated recently and the second last update says the beta Data Store was taken offline.
It seems odd the link would be readily available and highly visible at the top of the App configuration area if indeed it's defunct. I was hoping some kind of key/value pair solution to remove the data calls from my own server.
DataStore API is being deprecated, don't use it! You can see this here. You are advised to store the data yourself on your server.