Spring Boot Rest API with Microsoft Azure AD - spring

I have a Rest API developed with Spring Boot and neo4j as a database. There is no Frontend in the Spring Boot App. It only serves as a Backend. The Frontend is developed in Flutter.
In my app, the end user has to sign up and login with theis user credentials. The user management is currently handled with Spring Security and JWT, generating and storing the tokens with AuthenticationProvider, UserDetailsService and so on.
Now, we are migrating our whole infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. We already managed to get the DB, the Backend (as the Spring Boot App) and the Frontend there.
The question now is whether it makes sense to migrate the User Management to Azure Active Directory. Is this the right use case for that, or is Azure Active Directory actually there for other use cases?
Also, I want to use my Login and Signup Forms built with Flutter. I only found solutions so far where you get redirected to this Microsoft Login Form. I want to signup/login directly from my Flutter App, and then use the token for my requests in the Spring Boot App.
Does this even make sense? If yes, how can I realize that? I was searching for hours but I didn't find any proper solutions.

If you use AAD you will have to use the OAuth redirect based Microsoft login experience. There is no way around that.
If you can't think of any way you or your users will benefit by migrating to AAD, then there's no reason to do that. You're doing a bunch of work, and incurring risk, for no real benefit.

Related

Spring RESTful web service auth

I am learning Spring and have written a simple RESTful web service that is not intended for browsers but for native mobile apps only. When trying to implement basic authentication for users. I've hit a wall, because the sources (even official tutorials) assume (and recommend) using OAuth2 through a browser with SSO and\or social logins.
All I want is to create an API RESTful endpoint that will take an email address and a password and return a token (possibly JWT). I do not need extended support for roles (but am not against it) and dynamic token revokation if that matters.
Is there any easy library/solution/tutorial that focuses on something similar?
Edit:
Thanks for the answers — all of them shed more light on the auth process and are quite useful and on point!
Please check here, I have a working example for the spring security on my github. You may need to change the spring.active.profiles=jwt, to enable the jwt configurations on this project.
There are many tutorials available on internet for implementing JWT token based authentication using Spring Boot. Please find below some of them
https://dzone.com/articles/spring-boot-security-json-web-tokenjwt-hello-world
https://www.javainuse.com/spring/boot-jwt
Please go through them and try to implement. If you need a working code for reference, you can search GitHub for code. This is one of them https://github.com/murraco/spring-boot-jwt

Mobile sign up with spring social

I am trying to use spring social for my REST services and my mobile app.
I wonder what the best approach is.
I am planning to use linkedin, google login and password authentication inside my mobile app. This social login should be connected to users in my database.
My spring application will act as an API which should be secured with a JWT token. The mobile app will afterwards use this JWT token to consume the API.
On my mobile I would like to have the possibility to sign up/sign in with linkedin, facebook or password.
As far as I understood mobile requires a different oauth flow than described in https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-oauth2/
Seems like it required the "Proof Key for Code Exchange" flow as stated in:
https://auth0.com/docs/api-auth/grant/authorization-code-pkce
Is this correct? I didn't find any information how to best do this with spring social and if spring social supports this use case.
Could someone point me in the right direction? I just found information how to do this with single page application and not with mobile applications. Thanks a lot in advance!
One possible way would be
The mobile app uses LinkedIn or Google's SDK to do SSO to retrieve an authN token.
The mobile app passes it to the backend service, which uses it to retrieve user details (e.g email) from the oauth service.
The backend service could do additional work about the user details (for example, link with existing users).
The backend service returns a JWT token to the mobile app, which ends the SSO.
The SSO should be able to return an email address for you to link users. Sometimes you need to apply for the permission explicitly (which Facebook requires).
The key point of this approach is that it avoids using the OAuth2 library completely in your backend services because it is now handled in the mobile app by using SSO provider's SDK.
The flow is summarized in the following drawing:
========
Edited:
We used this approach to do Facebook SSO with one mobile app and it worked very well. The mobile app was in iOS, and the backend service Spring Boot.
Discussion is welcomed.

Okta integration possible with existing system?

We have a custom built web app backed by a REST API. We already have existing user accounts that are created via our system. We've just recently integrated Domo to do reporting and they recommend Okta.
Is it possible to get have users sign in on our site and in the background also sign them into Okta via an API call/OAUTH request etc?
Yes it is. The methods are available via the API, and I just created app that demos exactly this in Python. Check out http://developer.okta.com/docs/api/resources/authn.html for links to test stuff in Postman. My basic approach was to have Okta be the system of record, but it can certainly be the other way :)

Login to my own webapplication with another website's credentials(eg: login with google)

I have developed a web application (spring mvc, spring security) which has a its own login.
Now I want to change the application to login with an another web site's (2nd web) credentials and also need to get some user details from 2nd website.eg: username, user role list for create authentication object.
Please help me to choose best way to do this.
Is openID or oauth2 better for my client application?
OpenID and oAuth are 2 different things.
Lately, Google announced it stops supporting OpenID, so maybe oAuth2.0 is a better option for you.
Note that if you choose oAuth of 3rd-party, you force your users to have account there. for example, if your application (the resource server) uses Facebook for authentication/authorization, your users will HAVE TO have account on Facebook (you want that?!).
If you work with OpenID, your users have several options of where to hold their account...
If you have another 3rd party (or in-house, it does not really matter) authentication server and you want to authenticate your users with it - you have to know what specifications it supports. For example, if it supports oAuth2.0, you can pretty easily configure your app to work with it.
Hope that helps...
If I understand you correctly, you are talking about using Social Networks like Google+, Facebook, to be able to login to your application (This is identity services, where you don't have actual password, but rather access token with limited scope).
For that there is a Spring Social, project, that provides set of abstractions, for such kind of integration, including additional Spring MVC Controllers, needed for proper authentication in this Social Networks.

Implement Web API with OAuth and a Single Page Application

We're developing an API and a single page application (that is one of more possible future consumers of it).
We already started on the web API, and basically implemented a system very similar to the one John Papa made in his course on pluralsight, named "Building Single Page Apps (SPA) with HTML5, ASP.NET Web API, Knockout and jQuery".
We now need to implement authentication and user managing in this application and need to find the easy way out to implement this in as little time as possible as we are in a hurry.
We realized the SPA template included in the ASP.NET update had very similar features to our needs, but we wonder what the best approach to implement a similar feature in our existing code.
We are novice developers, as you might figure.
Is it possible nstall some packages using the package manager, and voila, a simple membership and OAuth auth option be readily available?
Our use case is that we need to protect some resources on our API based on roles, and that one should be able to log in using a username and password, but also log in using ones facebook, google, or twitter account.
Found an interesting talk regarding the subject here: https://vimeo.com/43603474 named Dominick Baier - Securing ASP.NET Web APIs.
Synopsis: Microsoft’s new framework for writing RESTful web services and web APIs is appropriately enough called ASP.NET Web API. As the name applies, this technology is part of ASP.NET and also inherits its well-known security architecture. But in addition it also supports a number of new extensibility points and a flexible hosting infrastructure outside of IIS. There are a number of ways how to do authentication and authorization in Web API - from Windows to usernames and passwords up to token based authentication and everything in between. This talk explores the various options, and puts special focus on technologies like claims, SAML, OAuth2, Simple Web Tokens and delegation.
We eventually went with the SPA template, doing authentication on the API (separate MVC part).
Then the API would generate a unique token and redirect the user to the front-end with the token in url parameters.
The front-end then needs to send this token on every subsequent request.
Have a look here - Identity Server done by the security experts. This is all you need in one package.
In terms of OAuth, you would need to use Client-Side Web Application flow which the access token is issue immediately to the client and can be used.

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