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.
Related
I'm using adjust and firebase in my ionic app but the app secrets for these integrations and others all show up in my app's js code if I extract the APK/IPA.
How do I keep credentials secure and package them with the app's APK/IPA for such hybrid apps?
This is an interesting question and it's good that you are asking it :)
For the Firebase settings, they are secret, but not secret-secret. They are just a starting point. Nothing can be done with those unless the user also logs in with their password which is hashed using the secret key and then sent over.
This proves that the person knows enough to identify themselves as a user.
Then on the server side, you have your rules that say "for the person that has identified themselves as user X they have permission to do Y"
If somebody has got your password then you are exposed just the same as you are always exposed.
You can also restrict your Firebase account by apps package id, hostname, IP address, in the Google Cloud admin panels.
As for your other things, like Adjust, they have their own solutions along the same lines. Either the API key is just enough for you to read the information, or if its a powerful level of access then normally there is some kind of authentication/account linking process so you can prove yourself to the other API.
If not, then you cannot just put it out there, you need to create your own proxy. Firebase supports cloud functions (aka serverless) so you can run snippets of code which are only accessible by users that have logged in, and then return that information back to the client as a proxy.
I need to store my service data in Google Storage and let my users download files depending on their (users) access rights.
I've already made service that connects to Google Storage using server-centric mechanism, and transfers them to client-side, but I need client-side to go to Storage and download file without server-side.
I've tried to use temporary links for files, but I can't check, if user downloaded file or not to properly delete temporary link.
I've tried to look for oauth2 support, but it seems Google doesn't support oauth in such way (When my service decides to allow access or no).
The best solution is to generate tokens for users and if Google Storage would call my service before every file download.
How can I achieve that?
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.
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.
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.