I'm building a service which can be used anonymously, however the user has the ability to share content on his\her Facebook and\or Twitter profiles. Upon authorizing the applications I wish to store basic information about the users and link it to the content they are sharing.
Usually services require authentication prior to usage, which solves this problem, however in my case authentication comes at the very last stage and it's split into 4 paths:
[Facebook + Twitter]
[Facebook alone]
[Twitter alone]
[Nothing]
However doing the above will create redundant data in the database i.e. I will have the Facebook information and Twitter information in separate tables with no linkage between them and no relation to the post.
What's the best approach to prevent this? The solution is on the data modeling level? Or on the code level? Or both?
Has this been done before?
I have created a flow chart of how the merging of account data can be done, however this process might create overhead on the database level as it will require searching for entries using the very long FacebookID \ TwitterID.
If extra information is required please state it in a comment.
Thank you
The way I would handle this is to separate the concept of user identity from the concept of authentication used by your application. For example, at the data model level, have Users table store basic user information and have Authentications table that stores user credentials/tokens associated with a particular Authentication Provider.
At the code level, if you are planning to stick with third-party authentication, I would recommend looking into building a layer that can shield your application from having to deal directly with various OAuth providers.
In Ruby/Rails world, this is accomplished by a combination of Devise that manages user identities (it also allows to have built-in username/password authentication, but it does not sound like you are interested in that) and OmniAuth that delivers authentication against multiple providers.
An example application incorporating both is available here: Devise + OmniAuth.
Finally, RailsCast on the subject is here: OmniAuth Part 1
I realize that you may not be working in Ruby/Rails, but these materials may provide you with inspiration for the architecture you are trying to achieve.
Related
Here is my scenario. Imagine there is a Yoga studio that uses a professional booking and reservation system that exposes an API. Through this API an application can make a reservation for a client. The API takes the client's userid and password to make the reservation. The booking API doesn't use OAuth or any social media sign-ins.
My desire is to create an Assistant Action that would retrieve the list of classes and allow the client to make a booking.
My puzzle is what design/architecture to look towards to supply the userid/password pair required by the booking API.
How have others solved this puzzle?
Should I store the userid/password as "user state" associated with the action?
First, you should have a conversation with the API provider about why they don't provide an OAuth-based solution. This is a security vulnerability waiting to happen, if it hasn't already.
Second, you need to think very carefully about your own risk profile in this case:
Google does not allow you to collect credential information (ie - passwords) through your Action.
Because of this, you must use Account Linking to authenticate them.
This means that you will need something (ie - a database or data store) to manage their account on your side.
This database would be a good place to keep the username/password you need to use for them for the API...
...but it now means that you need to take extreme care about protecting this database.
You don't really say how this API allows for accounts to be created and managed. If these accounts are just used for you (ie - the user doesn't necessarily see them), then you can mitigate some of that risk by treating the username/password as an opaque token that you manage and generate and that the user never sees.
If this is something that the user is aware of, then you'll need to approach the account linking in one of two ways:
Have them log into your service via an app or webapp using this credential info that you will need to save (ack!) and then link to the Assistant using OAuth.
Have them log into your service via an app or webapp using Google Sign-In, which will carry over to your Action. Then have them provide the credential info for the API, which you will need to save (ack!).
I am working on a news media website, and I am looking to add feature to allow users to register, login and make comments.
For example (New York Times login/register screen)
May I know what options are available, what are the common approaches publishers would choose ?
So far I have been looking at:
AWS Cognito: Allows to create own user directory, and authenticate.
Disquss SSO: also implemented commenting.
In house development: Code a new microservice to manage user directory and store/serve comments, alternatively using AWS Lambda. I am very keen to go down that path, example, but this might costs a lot to develop + maintain.
User data security is my top consideration, I would prefer to use a separate system to store user data. Either a robust third party service or complete in house development of a new system.
Any suggestions?
Thank you.
These are web-standards for single sign on:
OpenID
OpenID Connect
Companies like Google and Facebook provide authentication using Google-/Facebook-accounts. As far as I know, Google uses OpenID Connect which is based on OAuth. However, I don't know if you don't have to store user data any more at all when using this.
I believe it's worth checking again if authentication and commenting should be combined, especially when using a third-party-solution. It makes it harder to change one of the two.
This could give you some more ideas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_single_sign-on_implementations.
The basic architecture of my application is React front-end consuming a RESTful API sitting on top of a polyglot storage layer.
Front-end:
React consuming APIs
Back-end:
Python
Flask
Authentication
Auth0+OKTA
Everything is working great. However, I need to have different roles for the users. In other words, I need to control the actions that a user can perform on a resource based on the role.
Example:
-User A wants to add a new user
-He has a token in his request, so I know User A is Authenticated
-Now I need to make sure he can in fact add users base on his role.
I don't want to hard-code the user roles as suggested in other solutions, and I would like to allow for custom roles to be added.
Also, I want to be respectful of people's time, so if there is a resource that addresses my concern, please feel free to point me to it.
These are my questions:
1. Are there any best practices for implementing what I am trying to accomplish?
2. Could you point me to examples or tutorials discussing authorization(not authentication)?
3. Do I check at each service call if the authenticated user can also perform the action or do I provide the roles in some form after authorization, so a service request contains both the authentication and authorization token?(this seems pretty easy to hack so I am guessing no...)
If I sound confused on the topic of authorization, it is because I am. Please feel free to point me to any resource that have been helpful to you.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to help! I really appreciate it.
You can use a framework like Yosai that is based on Apache Shiro.
These are some features:
Enables Role-Based Access Control policies through permission-level and role-level access control
Two-Factor Authentication, featuring Time-based One-Time Passwords
Native Support for Caching and Serialization
Event-driven Processing
Ready for Web Integration
I'm new to OAuth and I would really appreciate if someone could give me a hand with my problem. I need to create a simple web application for track expenses, with some basic actions (user must be able to create an account and log in, list expenses, edit them, etc) with a REST API for each one, and the trick is that I need to be able to pass credentials to both the webpage and the API. So, after some research I've found some examples using Digest Authentication and HMAC Authentication but lot of posts also mentioned OAuth as an alternative approach, so my question is, given this scenario, would be proper to use OAuth? I mean, as far as I understand OAuth is suitable when you want to share resources with other application, which I'm not doing for this project; besides that, when you try to access the shared resource it appears a page requesting permission for the foreign application, would that page appear at some point in my application? (maybe after the login?)
Thanks in advance guys
In your current scenario it does not make sense to use OAuth. It's not what OAuth is designed for.
If your application ecosystem is going to have multiple webapps running on a single SSO (like google) then it is very helpful to have OAuth.
Suggestion: Decide based on your business/operation plan and implement accordingly.
Note: If you plan to have 10 apps in the span of the next 5 years but only have one app now it does not make sense to spend time to implement complex protocols like OAuth right now. Scale as you grow.
i'm in the early stages of developing an API for my site so that third party developers can build an iPhone application for it. The API would have a limited subset of the functionality of the full site. The trouble i have is around security and authentication for the user who downloads the application. I have come up with the following options:
The user enters the same credentials they use on the site to authenticate themselves. My API would then take the credentials when accessing information specific to the user. This is my least preferred solution as the third party application could log these details and use them maliciously on the full site.
Each user generates a unique key on the site which they can then use on the app to login. My API would take the api key as an argument when accessing information specific to the user. The main problem though is that any application can do what they like to the user once they gain access to their key even if the user has not given the application permission to do so.
To overcome the above problem the third party developer would have to register their application with the site and then the user would need to generate a unique key per application they wish to use. This would then be used to login. This is my preferred solution as each key is unique per application and user i can tell which application called the api and whether the user approved it.
My final option is to implement oAuth. We are currently waiting for the 2.0 version to be finalized and do not have the time to keep updating our code as the spec may change.
This is the first API i have had to build and i was wondering if i have understood this correctly? I'm assuming in option 1 the application could log the user credentials and use them maliciously but how does twitter overcome this issue with their third party applications? Or is it simply up to the user to trust the application they are using? If this is the case then would option 2 and/or 3 be feasible in the meantime until i switch to option 4.
I'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks
OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 are both viable options. But you will come a long way with basic authentication aswell (as long as it is over SSL). Don't be scared :)
I've implemented an API provider over OAuth 1.0. And since there are so many ready made libraries for OAuth1.0 for many platforms I would not be scared of using that either, much of the work has been done already, both for you as a provider and for third party implementors.
Anyway: you can always couple basic authentication with some very simple signing of the request using an application key and secret, say for example that as a third party developer you have to call.
https://yourapi.com/?user=11111&password=232123&random_string=23123&api_key=THIRD_PARTY_KEY×tamp=1212121212signature=efefefefefef
where the API implementor has to sign perhaps the random_string, timestamp and api_key with the secret. Then you would at least have a way of shutting down malicious apps.