If you have a web application that will allow the users to opt-in to sharing their activity on Facebook and Twitter I'm wondering what is the right way to architect that social authentication into your application (and what is inline with Facebook and Twitter policies) so that you can tweet and post on your wall.
Do you store the users username and password in your database?
And then call the social APIs with these credentials. From what I have learned so far both these APIs make you do an OAuth redirect thing. Is their a way to do that without the dialog interaction since you now have stored the username and password anyways.
Not sure if this is an issue, but do you have to do two OAuth handshakes one right after the next to post to Facebook and then Twitter for those users that want to share on both.
And would you have to do this each and every time the user shares something?
I just launched TweetDeck and I wasn't required to get redirected through some exchange with Twitter. Confused.
Just need some help and guidance with "how most people do it" for web-based applications.
The less prompting and less redirects the better.
I don't think storing the username and password would be a good way to go since I think most users would object to you keeping thiere usernames and passwords on file. I have not done any work with Twitter, but on Facebook you need to create an App and then ask the user to grant your app rights. These rights require the user to be loged in to Facebook in order to work, unless you request the offline_access permmission. From my experience, the fewer permmissions you request, the more users will be willing to grant you these permmissions. My approach is to always request the minimal permmissions I need to get the App to work. After granting your App permmissions, you need to get an OAuth token each time you want to interact with the user's Facebook account. (These tokens are good for about 60 minutes, as far as I remember) Storing these tokens will not help, since they expire. Hope this points you in the right direction.
Related
I am trying to have a custom facebook login page in my react meteor app. For example, I have my custom input fields (username and password) and I am trying to pass username/password values to facebook and validate. I do not want to use meteor account-ui. I found Meteor.loginWithFacebook which only checks to see if user is ALREADY logged in. Can someone help me to understand how I can use my custom username/password fields to get facebook user data?
Answer: That is not doable (or at least, should not be done, even if some workaround or hack exists, which I am unaware of).
What you can do is create your own authentication system, and give the user the option of either filling in the user details themselves, or using facebook login to fetch it from facebook. That ways, you have your own authentication, and also user's facebook profile.
Explanation:
The whole point of having openid (facebook, twitter, gmail, etc authentication) is to make signing up for a website/app convenient and SECURE.
If you use your custom user name and password field, then you can even store them, and that can give you access to user's facebook account. Even if you were not to do that, someone can easily hack into your website and steal the data to get access to your user's facebook account (your application would be way easier to hack into compared to facebook).
Hence, the facebook login api is such that the very sensitive task of accepting user name, password (facebook would never trust anyone else to do that for it), and validation of user is done by facebook, and you are given a token which tells you the user is logged in, and his basic profile (if you ask for it), and you do not have to worry about security, and the user himself feels safe, because he knows he is typing his user name and password in facebook.com, and not in somexyz.com
Update: It appears that when there's no API or token, software seems to simply ask the user for their account credentials, and probably has to store this information. I guess it can't be a huge security risk, since people are willing to share this information with apps like Mint:
So, my conclusion is that it is OK to ask users for credentials to other services if they can be secured safely and the user desires the service provided.
Many, many apps use others apps such as Facebook in order to get data from it, usually to verify the user is real and to get relevant profile data (e.g. a dating app would want age, gender, etc.).
When using such an app, I do not have to enter in my Facebook credentials. The app simply opens up my Facebook/asks for permission to access it, and voila it's done.
There seems to be a lot of documentation for well known companies like Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal on how to do this.
But how is it done for an arbitrary website that requires a user/profile, e.g. this website: http://ae.com/web/index.jsp
Unsurprisingly, if I google for FaceBook, there's a heap of resources, and even it's own dedicated tag (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens).
However, if I start googling for American Eagle, e.g. "https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=american+eagle+access+token&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8", I get nothing relevant at all.
If I understand your question right, that you want to enable facebook login for your website,
you still need to create a facebook app. then use the access tokens in your website. so when user clicks on login with facebook, the app will be asking for permissions and finally you will get the access token and you can use that in your site to log in.
Am I allowed to create an app that only invited people can join?
Or do all apps have to be open to everyone?
You can have a white list for people who are allowed to use your app in your database and ignore any request for other people.
EDIT:
As per the question in the comment section, I will give you more details. I have not quite done exactly this, but I can guarantee you this is possible. I have a website, linked to Facebook and people can log in to the site using Facebook. In my database I am storing the Facebook ID and the Facebook user access token. When a user clicks on the login with Facebook, his Facebook user access token is checked against the database. If the Facebook user access token (which works like a temporary password) expires, it is renewed. However, people are identified by their Facebook ID. I could easily have a white list for Facebook IDs and allow access only for people whose Facebook ID can be found in the database. My project strategy is to get as many users as possible, but I could easily modify this to restrict access for not verified people. Your problem with consistent login probably lies in the fact that the Facebook user access token expires in a few hours. However, that problem is solvable:
if the user has modified his Facebook password, or has not connected to the app, then he will be asked by Facebook for permissions
if the user is no longer logged in, then he will have to log in
if the user's Facebook user access token has expired, then you should generate a new Facebook user access token
finally, you can generate long-term Facebook user access tokens, which last for months.
Read the documentation for details, but keep in mind that things might have been changed at Facebook since the documentation was written, therefore you should not believe everything written there, but should rather test the validity of the most important statements.
I'm trying to better understand Facebook Access tokens. I have a canvas web app in a sandbox. I have used the GUI to say the app seeks permissions for various user fields. The user then sees these listed and clicks the blue Go To App button. (Currently only developers and testers).
My questions are around the Access tokens. I've used the Graph API explorer and the Access Token Tool. In the Access Token Tool - there are User and App tokens listed. What are these for?
A user must have a token to use an app - this token is generated when they click to use the app... can this expire? What is the purpose of an app access token? Is this to be used to view which users are subscribed to the app?
Any explanation or step through of the process of accepting and using an app on facebook would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks :)
Access token is similar to a password in a weaker notion.
Whenever a user tries to access to a resource, your app should authenticate the user. In this context, your app requets to access some or all user data, in return you are given an access token that expires in a short period of time. Something like 1 hour, then once the token expires you need to authenticate the user again. There are ways to extend expiration duration upto 2 months.
Facebook docs are pretty clear and concise about tokens, you can read through them, and depending on the language you are using, there are API's you can benefit from.
Overall pretty easy.
I'm trying to implement facebook connect to my website, and i have couple questions.
1: Is it possible to register user in my website using his current facebook email/password.
Let's say user clicks on link Register via facebook and then he have to give me permisions to access his password, email, etc... and after that is done i put that info in my own database and he will be able to login with that account any time he wants without needing to give me permisions any time in the future.
2: If that kind of registration is not possible, what's other solution would be the best for me? Because i need to somehow keep track of that user who logged in with facebook, because he can upload photos, send messages etc.
Anyways, i'm quite new with facebook and similar things, so i'm really lost here, hope some one can help me :)
EDIT Thank you all for wonderful answers it helped me a lot, now all that's left is to read documentation :)
Yes it is, it is possible to get the information of the user. But it is rather complicated, when you have never dealt with it.
First you need to send the user to the following link:
https://m.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=your-client-id&redirect_uri=xxx&scope=listof-information-you-want
Facebook will then return your client to the uri specified, if the user rejected it will give a reason. If it is not you will get an code in urlencoded format.
This code is needed for the following step, the request of the access token:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?redirect_uri=xxx&client_id=xxx&client_secret=xxx&code=xxxx
This will give back an access token, if the authorization didn't fail.
After that you can ask for the information you want:
https://graph.facebook.com/me?method=GET&metadata=true&format=json&access_token=access_token
This will include a facebook uid, which is unique for all users. Store it and you can discern between a register and login.
This is roughly the process for any oauth2 application.
Facebook will not ask repeatedly for permissions after the user granted them to you. So you can store the access token and reuse it for backend stuff and also use the same procedure you use for register for login.
You can never access the user's password from Facebook even with his/her permission, so the user will always have to authenticate via Facebook and have Facebook pass you the user id of the logged in user once authentication succeeds. You can store all kinds of other data locally, but not enough to authenticate the user yourself.
Once the user is authenticated, you'll have access to the user's Facebook user id via the API, which should be enough to connect all kinds of information to that specific user.
Facebook does not provide access to accounts when passwords are taken from your controls. It provides it own canvas for login information. Therefore you cannot use your first approach to store passwords in your databases. Check this out.
You can however store email addresses once user logins into his account using the facebook sdks. Check this out link for the example of C# SDK sample code.
You can use the Facebook APIs to fetch user email-id, photos, friendslist and other information and then play around accordingly.
You don't get access to the users password - only email if you ask for it.
Best way would be to have a table of users and their Facebook account id's.
If you want to allow users to sign up without Facebook then have a nullable field for their password and facebook id, and also have a field for username - which you could populate from Facebook if they register via that route.