I would like to have some guidance regarding how to handle authentication for my restful service to be able to support a couple of different scenarios, see included image?
I've been thinking about this problem for a couple of week without finding a solution for all of the cases and even if I'll make trade offs I'll be running into problems
If we skip the Mobile application and the use of Curl, there's no need to expose the service to the public and it would be possible to use basic authentication for the server to server communication. But we'll still need to put some responsibility at the "Web site for ninjas only" to pass the (openid authenticated user) as part for the http header?
In this case we're using Google apps to manage credentials for our co-workers and I don't like the idea to manage another username/password within the service if it's possible to avoid.
Is there any sustainable solution for my dreams, so that I can build awesome features for the client and implement a tight api that manages the authorization for different resources for a specific user?
Another possible to solution might be to integrate the service with the openid provider, but then I'll have problem with passing the user from "Web site for ninjas only"
Related
I'm building an application where I need to make a request in the client-side frontend app to an external API, and I'm at a bit of a loss for how to make this maximally secure so that only valid requests can be forwarded to this external API and not whatever anyone wants.
As a first step in security, I've made it so that the client-side app can't speak to the external API directly, but must instead hit our own server-side API, which then proxies the request to the external API, so that the credentials for hitting the external API are at least stored solely server side and not client side.
This, however, has led to the same fundamental issue - how do I secure whatever credential/authentication system I use to authenticate requests I make from the client-side app to our own server-side app?
The issue is this is an online restaurant ordering service, and so we don't expect users to authenticate themselves with say, usernames and passwords before being able to place orders necessarily, and so order placement, which triggers the external API call, isn't gated behind any username/password scheme, and must be available to all consumers of the frontend app.
What's the best practice for security here? I've enabled CORS whitelisting as a minimum practice, such that only requests from our own domain are theoretically allowed by our server side API endpoint, but CORS is trivially bypassed if someone chooses to just spoof the origin URL.
What other options are available? I'm sure I must just be missing something trivial, since this must be an extraordinarily common issue with an established best practice, but I'm just somehow failing to find it.
Thank you!
As a Developer Advocate for API and Mobile security, seeing a developer that really cares about their app security always makes me smile, especially when they already show some effort was made to secure it, therefore accept my congratulations for your efforts.
My Answer Context
I'm building an application where I need to make a request in the client-side frontend app to an external API, and I'm at a bit of a loss for how to make this maximally secure so that only valid requests can be forwarded to this external API and not whatever anyone wants.
So, you have not detailed if it's a web app or a mobile app, and once my expertise relies on mobile and API security I will be answering with the assumption that is a mobile app.
The Challenge
The issue is this is an online restaurant ordering service, and so we don't expect users to authenticate themselves with say, usernames and passwords before being able to place orders necessarily, and so order placement, which triggers the external API call, isn't gated behind any username/password scheme, and must be available to all consumers of the frontend app.
You have here a complicated challenge to solve, because you have an app that is open to the public, no user authentication/identification of any sort, but that requires rules of access to the underline resources as if it was behind user authentication and authorization, but even if it was, it would still be vulnerable to being abused.
To understand why I need to clear a misconception that usually I find among developers of any seniority, that is about the difference between who and what is accessing an API server.
The Difference Between WHO and WHAT is Accessing the API Server
I wrote a series of articles around API and Mobile security, and in the article Why Does Your Mobile App Need An Api Key? you can read in detail the difference between who and what is accessing your API server, but I will extract here the main takes from it:
The what is the thing making the request to the API server. Is it really a genuine instance of your mobile app, or is it a bot, an automated script or an attacker manually poking around your API server with a tool like Postman?
The who is the user of the mobile app that we can authenticate, authorize and identify in several ways, like using OpenID Connect or OAUTH2 flows.
Think about the who as the user your API server will be able to Authenticate and Authorize access to the data, and think about the what as the software making that request in behalf of the user.
So, in your case you cannot identify who is in the request, thus you need a solution that is able to give a very high degree of confidence to the API backend that the request is indeed from what it expects, a genuine and unmodified instance of your app.
Possible Solutions
I'm building an application where I need to make a request in the client-side frontend app to an external API, and I'm at a bit of a loss for how to make this maximally secure so that only valid requests can be forwarded to this external API and not whatever anyone wants.
This requires very advanced solutions to properly secure, thus isn't at all trivial to achieve as you may think:
I'm sure I must just be missing something trivial, since this must be an extraordinarily common issue with an established best practice, but I'm just somehow failing to find it.
And yes, it's a common issue that often is neglected or not addressed properly, and the first step to solve it is to have a clear picture about the difference between who vs what is in a request, otherwise the devised solutions will fail to address the issue properly.
For Mobile Apps
Here I recommend you to go through this answer I gave to the question How to secure an API REST for mobile app?, especially the sections Hardening and Shielding the Mobile App, Securing the API Server and A Possible Better Solution.
This answer will show you several solutions, like WAFs and UBAs, but ends with a recommendation to use a Mobile App Attestation concept.
In a nutshell the Mobile App Attestation will allow the API backend to have a very high degree of confidence that the request is indeed from what it expects, a genuine and modified instance of the mobile app.
For Web Apps
You can learn some useful techniques to help your API backend to try to respond only to requests coming from what you expect, your genuine web app, and to do so I invite you to read my answer to the question Secure api data from calls out of the app, especially the section dedicated to Defending the API Server.
Do You Want To Go The Extra Mile?
In any response to a security question I always like to reference the excellent work from the OWASP foundation.
For APIS
OWASP API Security Top 10
The OWASP API Security Project seeks to provide value to software developers and security assessors by underscoring the potential risks in insecure APIs, and illustrating how these risks may be mitigated. In order to facilitate this goal, the OWASP API Security Project will create and maintain a Top 10 API Security Risks document, as well as a documentation portal for best practices when creating or assessing APIs.
For Mobile Apps
OWASP Mobile Security Project - Top 10 risks
The OWASP Mobile Security Project is a centralized resource intended to give developers and security teams the resources they need to build and maintain secure mobile applications. Through the project, our goal is to classify mobile security risks and provide developmental controls to reduce their impact or likelihood of exploitation.
OWASP - Mobile Security Testing Guide:
The Mobile Security Testing Guide (MSTG) is a comprehensive manual for mobile app security development, testing and reverse engineering.
For Web Apps
The Web Security Testing Guide:
The OWASP Web Security Testing Guide includes a "best practice" penetration testing framework which users can implement in their own organizations and a "low level" penetration testing guide that describes techniques for testing most common web application and web service security issues.
Ultimately your client needs to perform some operation on 3rd party API.
So we know that some operations should be allowed, and based on your description we also know that not every operation should be allowed.
So your security should be based on this premise. Don't create a dumb proxy that forwards every single request, but your intermediate API should only specifically allow the operations that you want it to allow, based on the rules you set.
If you don't have a username & password, you probably still have some other kind of rule that identifies a person (email/phone number?), which means you can create an authentication system.
Or maybe your 3rd party service should only be called after a user completed an order with a credit card, that logic needs to exist on your API.
I have actually one SPA in ReactJs + one mobile application in Flutter + one REST API developed with SailsJs running on a separate server. I managed user authentication with a secured session cookie sent back by the API when we are login with valid information (id/password).
So all the endpoints that require users to be authenticated are protected (unless there are others security best practices that I'm not aware of?). The session cookie expiration and validity are checked with each call to one of the protected endpoints.
I really read a massive amount of topics and blog posts talking about securing REST API. And my problem is never or barely represented. So now my main problem is :
How can I restrict my public API endpoints (login & register currently) that does not require users to be authenticated (since there are the endpoints used to achieve this mission...) to be used only in my trusted client apps (web and mobile)?
How can I prevent another app developed by another person to use these endpoints?
I don't want anyone to login via my API unless it is done in the client apps I am developing... I don't want anyone to replicate my applications and successfully use my API that way with 0 protection, without knowing it...
I see a lot of popular services with login API routes (Heroku for example) that can't be accessed in Postman with the same parameters (403 error code). So it is possible. But how they do that? There is nothing in specialized forums that handle this or I missed something!
I tough of a secret token stored in the client to authenticate it but it is literally public with web developer tools for example.
Need some advice.
Thanks
USER AUTHENTICATION IS NOT APP AUTHENTICATION
So all the endpoints that require users to be authenticated are protected...
This endpoints are only protected regarding to identify, authenticate and authorize Who his in the request, but not for What is doing the request, and this is a topic not very well understood among developers, be them juniors or seniors.
The Difference Between WHO and WHAT is Accessing the API Server
In an article I wrote, entitled Why Does Your Mobile App Need An Api Key? you can read with more detail the difference between Who and What is accessing your API server, from where I quote the following:
The what is the thing making the request to the API server. Is it really a genuine instance of your mobile app, or is it a bot, an automated script or an attacker manually poking around your API server with a tool like Postman?
The who is the user of the mobile app that we can authenticate, authorize and identify in several ways, like using OpenID Connect or OAUTH2 flows.
So the Who is the user of your API server that you will be able to Authenticate and Authorize access to the data, and the What is the software making that request in behalf of the user, your genuine app, a tampered one, an automated script or someone manually poking around with your API via cURL, Postman or similar tools.
By now I hope that you have enough knowledge to understand why user(who) authentication is not the same as app(what) authentication.
LOCK THE API SERVER TO THE APPS
How can I restrict my public API endpoints (login & register currently) that does not require users to be authenticated (since there are the endpoints used to achieve this mission...) to be used only in my trusted client apps (web and mobile)?
I think that by now it may be clear to you that it's not only the login and registration endpoints that need to be protected from What is doing the request.
How can I prevent another app developed by another person to use these endpoints?
I don't want anyone to login via my API unless it is done in the client apps I am developing... I don't want anyone to replicate my applications and successfully use my API that way with 0 protection, without knowing it...
This is extremely hard to achieve for web apps, but possible with an high degree of confidence for mobile apps when the Mobile App Attestation concept is implemented.
For web apps
Due to the nature of how the web was built, all it's necessary to inspect a web app is to hit F12 or inspect the page source, and then search for whatever you need to access the API server from another tool.
You can learn some useful techniques to help your API server to try to respond only to requests coming from What you expect, your genuine web app, and to do so I invite you to read my answer to the question Secure api data from calls out of the app, specially the section dedicated to Defending the API Server.
For mobile apps
To learn how you can lock your API server to your mobile app I recommend you to read my answer to
the question How to secure an API REST for mobile app? for the sections on Securing the API Server and A Possible Better Solution.
Endpoints to Secure
So all the endpoints that require users to be authenticated are protected (unless there are others security best practices that I'm not aware of?).
It's up to you if you only want to enhance the security of your login and register endpoints, but my advice is that you enhance the security of all them regarding the detection for What is accessing them.
POSTMAN WITH HEROKU AND OTHERS
I see a lot of popular services with login API routes (Heroku for example) that can't be accessed in Postman with the same parameters (403 error code). So it is possible. But how they do that? There is nothing in specialized forums that handle this or I missed something!
I never used Heroku, but when I am using an API that doesn't work in Postman, but works in other clients, let's say from cURL, then I disable Postman from sending it's own user-agent and normally the API will start accepting the requests.
If doesn't then they may be doing device fingerprinting:
A device fingerprint or machine fingerprint is information collected about the software and hardware of a remote computing device for the purpose of identification. The information is usually assimilated into a brief identifier using a fingerprinting algorithm. A browser fingerprint is information collected specifically by interaction with the web browser of the device.
The fingerprinting can be done in active or passive mode. In active mode some Javascript runs on the client to collect some data to send back to the API server, while in passive mode it uses the information available from the request in the server, like the http headers and request parameters.
While this raises the bar to fake What is doing the request, it can be bypassed by observing how a trusted client sends the request and mimic it. For an attacker it's just a little more work to enumerate all variants and then automate them.
DO YOU WANT TO GO THE EXTRA MILE?
I really read a massive amount of topics and blog posts talking about securing REST API.
First and foremost my congratulations for putting such effort in educating yourself about securing your API.
I don't know if you already read some of the OWASP resources I am about to link, but in any response to a security question I always like to reference the excellent work from the OWASP foundation ;)
For Web Apps
OWASP Web Top 10 Risks
The OWASP Top 10 is a powerful awareness document for web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications. Project members include a variety of security experts from around the world who have shared their expertise to produce this list.
The Web Security Testing Guide:
The OWASP Web Security Testing Guide includes a "best practice" penetration testing framework which users can implement in their own organizations and a "low level" penetration testing guide that describes techniques for testing most common web application and web service security issues.
For Mobile Apps
OWASP Mobile Security Project - Top 10 risks
The OWASP Mobile Security Project is a centralized resource intended to give developers and security teams the resources they need to build and maintain secure mobile applications. Through the project, our goal is to classify mobile security risks and provide developmental controls to reduce their impact or likelihood of exploitation.
OWASP - Mobile Security Testing Guide:
The Mobile Security Testing Guide (MSTG) is a comprehensive manual for mobile app security development, testing and reverse engineering.
For APIS
OWASP API Security Top 10
The OWASP API Security Project seeks to provide value to software developers and security assessors by underscoring the potential risks in insecure APIs, and illustrating how these risks may be mitigated. In order to facilitate this goal, the OWASP API Security Project will create and maintain a Top 10 API Security Risks document, as well as a documentation portal for best practices when creating or assessing APIs.
I have generated JAX-RS stubs for a REST service using Swagger and want to set up the security.
The security side is very new to me and I would like to use standards as far as possible. (In the past, for other J2EE applications, I have used Filters to handle Authentication which put User objects into a Session. As I understand it, Sessions should be avoided for REST.)
There are 4 types of user who will access the services
Customers and business partners (Authentication via oAuth or similar)
Employees (Authentication via NTLM & LDAP)
Developers (Mock authentication/authorisation of some kind)
Integration test (JUnit with pre-defined users and roles)
Is it possible to define a security mechanism which would handle all of these users?
How would I use the Swagger security directives?
Am I making this more complicated than it needs to be?
You could use an open source API gateway like Tyk? Here’s a link to some handy info on API Security in the tyk docs.
And here is a blog post that describes taking a layered approach to API Security that goes beyond the gateway.
Disclosure: I work for Tyk!
I'm just starting a new project. The result will be an API server and a progressive web app. The API server is implemented with TypeScript and the NestJS framework, the client with Angular 6.
I've been flirting with keycloak for some time. Still, I'm not quite sure it's right for me yet. But I don't want to worry about things like token renewal anymore and find it sexy that Keycloak tells me how to create user roles.
What bothers me, is the following - integration. For my use case it is necessary that the login and all features like password reset and so on are part of my application. That means I want to create forms myself in order to be able to do this perfectly in my own design and not have a second translation process, etc. Keycloak themes are not an option. So is it possible to hide keycloak in such a way, or is it so complex that I shouldn't use Keyloak in the first place? Afaik there is already an issue with password resets - I can't request it from the user side but have to make an REST call to the admin endpoint - which is okay but not ideal since it requires me to do more server side logic ( and that is not why I want to use Keycloak).
In addition, Keycloak is too much about the GUI - which makes it difficult for me, especially during development. Because I also want to provide my team with a local instance of keycloak during development. But what is the concept to import the initial data into realms, apps and also users into Keycloak? I found some JSON imports - but so far only for realms and apps. Is there also a function to import a whole dumb?
So that my team builds on a pre-built setup and has a user for each role. A reproducible setup with Vagrant or Docker which contains the import of initial data - that would be the goal.
So in short my questions:
Is it still worth the effort using Keycloak if I want to use everything via the API or should I simply use Passport and JWT?
Can I have a reproducible setup during my development that includes realms, apps, users, user roles, etc?
So, the question asked few months ago, but I also faces with that question, and I want to answer on it.
I think that you don't need Keycloak, it is fairly enough for you to use OAuth2 and JWT.
Let's justify my answer:
You have just one client - Angular application. Keycloak useful, when you have many clients (web-js, mobile platforms) and you want to create and manage them dynamically. But, I think that, in your case, you create your client once without modification in the future.
Also, Keycloak very useful, when you have a lot of integration with third part systems (Google, Fb, Twitter and etc) because Keycloak has them out-of-box. Or you need to integrate with some SAML or LDAP provider.
You may use Keycloak, if you need some Identity and User management platform, and when you have complicated user access flow.
In the end, you could consider Keycloak, if you need SSO (Single Sign On) feature. Once logged-in to Keycloak, users don't have to login again to access a different application. But, by your description, you have just one application.
Keycloak offers features such as Single-Sign-On (SSO), Identity Brokering and Social Login, User Federation, Client Adapters, an Admin Console, and an Account Management Console.
It's an out of box solution for rapid security layer development of application.You could have single common security layer for multiple application .
You can implement you security mechanism without using keycloak.
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.