I'm building a iPhone App, that communicates with a webserver (Java webapp) using REST (XML over http). In my prototype I used http's basic-authentication to allow access and identify the user, using username and password. Since there should be friendships and profiles in my app, I want to use facebook-connect so I don't have to implement it and the users don't have to manage there friends and profiles twice. When I use fb-connect, I may even go without all the basic user management stuff, like create a new user, change password and so on.
So here is my question: Is it possible to use facebook-connect as my one and only user authentication? And more importantly: How can I authenticate the user while communicating with the webserver?
To clarify: I don't want to link the facebook account to my user accounts, I want to use it instead.
You can use the Facebook Graph API to do this. Here are some links to get started
A tutorial on the subject:
http://www.capturetheconversation.com/technology/iphone-facebook-oauth2-graph-api
Some objective-C work someone did to make life easier:
https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk
The official graph API:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
Related
I'm running a Classic ASP website, that has its own user authentication and login mechanism. For example, In order to remember a logged-in user, ASP creates an encrypted cookie and a 20-minute session for each connected user. If the 20 minute session is elapsed, the server revives the session from the cookie saved previously, and saves some data regarding the user to the database.
I want to to be able to allow users to connect with their Facebook or Google identity, but the mechanism used by Facebook or Google is based mainly on Javascript and on client-side code.
How Facebook or Google login can be used while maintaining server side code in ASP? (So that the ASP server can still manage the session and save data regarding it, for example whenever a session is revived)
For me somehow it seems that it may become less secure to use client-side authentication as the code may be altered easily. Isn't this the case?
If I use client-side javascript and log in with Facebook, how would I update the user data retrieved from facebook back into my database, for example the user's first and last name?
For me it sounds that it should be a "server-to-server" communication (between my ASP server and Facebook's or Google's servers) and what they propose is a "client-to-server" communication ... Any ideas how this can be done?
Any help or explanation would be very much appreciated! Thanks.
I'll try to address your Facebook-related questions one by one. However, I will not give you an implementation or any ASP-specific feedback, but only a rough approach. Additionally, I recommend that you study Facebook's documentation on Facebook Login extensively to further your understanding of the matter.
1. Facebook documents the server-side OAuth 2.0 flow in their Manually Build a Login Flow guide. Basically you redirect the user to a specific FB URL that (in the parameters) tells FB to render the "Login with Facebook" dialog, and which permission scopes to ask for. Once the user approves the Facebook Login for your webapp, they will be redirected back to your web app, e.g. with an OAuth token in the query string, that your webserver can then exchange for a user access token.
Once you obtained a user access token, you could e.g. store it in your web app user's session.
2. I don't know what you mean. Client side apps are fairly secure. Perhaps you can convince yourself about how secure JS apps are when reading about things like CORS.
3. If you only use JavaScript (e.g. Facebook's JS SDK) and you want to store e.g. app-scoped user IDs on your server, you need to expose an endpoint on your server that your JS application can submit that kind of information to.
4. You state
what they propose is a "client-to-server" communication
Who are "they", and where are the proposing this? The resources I linked to in 1. should explain how you can use Facebook login in a pure server-to-server way.
I'm writing an API for our product and I'm trying to understand how some basic OAuth works with regards to mobile apps that might leverage our (to be created) api.
Lets imagine that our website currently allows a person to LogIn to our site via Twitter OAuth.
On the callback from Twitter, our server retrieves the twitter OAuth result and if all good, then checks to see
if this user already exists in our DB (eg. lets assume the Email is the unique key). If they don't exist, we
create a new user.
Of course, we then log the user 'in', which means we create a cookie for them, for their browser.
So far - nothing new here. All normal stuff.
Now .. if we want to do this via an iPhone or Windows phone using their native language and the app's use our API, i'm not sure of the point where OAuth ends and our API takes over?
For example, lets pretend it's an iPhone app that takes advantage of our API.
The iPhone app will try to authenticate the user against their Twitter cred's. Ok, fine. But when it callsback, it's back in the phone, right? Not our servers. So then the app needs to try and create a new user? So then the iPhone might try and call /api/CreateAccount. But this means -anyone- can call this api? And how does the website really know they have authenticated? Only because the app says so? What's to stop the person from creating a malicious app and calling our API by flooding it with new account creations? And what about authentication to api resources? Forms Authentication isn't available here. So do people use querystring authentication over SSL for api calls? How does the iphone authenticate with -our- server?
I'm so confused.
Can anyone please explain the differences and common practices people are doing these days when they have a website and an api .. and use OAuth as the authentication mechanism, please?
The naive app would call not CreateAccount, but VerifyAccount with twitter's oauth set of data so you site and API could verify it. The site would respond with a unique userID and your iOS app would use that as it's internal user id. More info.
Im starting to implement the Facebook apis into my website..
Where i am having trouble is understanding the oauth api. Maybe this inst the correct api?
Basically what i am trying to do is allow the user to sign in / register with Facebook and and storing that information in my database as a new user as i will be creating a profile from this. I would also like the user to be able to login with or without Facebook using his credentials. I understand he would have to create a password on my site. Is it practical to store his information .. Name Address email and other information.
I am very confused with the api and need help. reading through the documentation i cannot find where this explained.
Look at how to authenticate user using facebook login system on your website
About your question on storing emails, check facebook policies are mentioned here
Use graph api for accessing user details and other stuff
Hope this helps
I am working on a mac application which involves Facebook support so that they can share to Facebook via our app.
For this, I am using Facebook Graph API's which internally uses oAuth protocol to access user resources. In this process, it uses webview to enter users credentials(username and password) which provides the "Access_token".
But my requirement of the application is that it should not use webview to enter user credentials rather it should use other view controller to provide user credentials. So I need to go for xAuth protocol as in twitter uses.
Can anyone help me in this issue? If facebook supports xAuth, please make suggestions.
Facebook doesn't offer "desktop" application authentication support as detailed here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
What you would have to do, is get them to authorize your app on a website, then use the access token for the desktop app and that is if your app is connected to some kind of server.
Otherwise you will have to follow their suggestion of embedding a browser and reading the access token once it is received.
Firstly I understand OpenId is for authentication and OAuth is for authorisation and unlike other questions on the site I am not asking which should be used for which but whether anyone can advise a solution for my issue.
I want to allow users to login to my site via their LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook account once logged in say via LinkedIn they could also then authorise their Twitter and Facebook account as a optional login method. This would allow the user to authenticate via any of the three but end up with their user account on my site as the end result.
I also want to use the authorisation they have provided to get basic user details (profile pic/name etc) and post status updates.
I don't want to ask a user to login with their account via openId then have to authorise the same account again via oauth to allow my site to publish to their service feed and have to do this for each of the 3 services.
Any ideas or issues to this issue?
If you are using ASP.NET MVC, DotNetOpenAuth is an excellent solution for supporting OpenID/OAuth sites. StackOverflow is using it, and they are quite picky for the code they use in the site.
The integration if OpenID with DotNetOpenAuth is quite straightforward. I have not tried OAuth, but I don't expect it to be of any less quality.
Unfortunately, Facebook does not support OpenID/OAuth, so you need to use a different solution for it. The one I use is Clarity Consulting's Facebook Developer Toolkit. It works, although I do have certain complaints about the quality of the code; unfortunately I haven't found anything better yet. (Note: If anyone knows a better alternative, by all means let me know)
The basic integration of Facebook Connect with the Facebook Developer Toolkit is also relatively straightforward. However, their object model is somewhat messed up, due to their attempt to stay as close to the Facebook APIs, so the HTTP API patterns are bleeding through a lot. Still, it does the work.
Update: Now that Facebook announced that they'll be supporting OAuth 2.0, DotNetOpenAuth might turn out to be the best solution.
Have you looked into RPX?
https://rpxnow.com/
I don't want to ask a user to login with their account via openId then have to authorise the same account again via oauth to allow my site to publish to their service feed and have to do this for each of the 3 services.
I'm afraid you'll have to connect the user's account to each of the 3 services individually. What platform are you using to build your app? If it's Ruby, then a gem like OmniAuth looks promising.