Context:
When performing authentication using braintree lookup api there are two possible outcomes for making a transaction request :
Frictionless approval
Perform a successful 3DS challenge
In both the cases we get a nonce in the response for using it in subsequent transaction request
Question:
Is this nonce used to identify whether the transaction is 3DS authenticated or not ? If not then how do braintree & issuer know whether a transaction has been authenticated
If we don't send the nonce after authentication, would we get a 2099 soft decline error ?
Related
There is a ecommerce application in which I have to add product and make payment for checkout. Payment mode is sandbox for now.
So, Payment.sandbox.api http request url is having session id in the payload and auth bearer token in http request header, but these are not available in any of the previous response ,so that I can fetch it from the response but that is not available
So further it is giving me authentication issue,that credentials are invalid, that may be because of session id and auth token. So how to handle them or how to populate them automatically as I am not getting in any of the previous request?
Looking into BrainTree Documentation there are 2 ways of authenticating the client:
Tokenization Keys - can be obtained from production or sandbox control panel
Client Token - you need to replicate client authentication flow, JMeter is Java-based application so I believe the easiest would be using Braintree Java SDK from the JSR223 Preprocessor
I have implemented google-signin using the oauth2 from Angular Application.
Once authentication is successful and the token is generated, I am storing it in the LocalStorage/IndexedDB and also trying to send this Token, UserProfile info etc, to my flask-backend.
I would validate the token and continue the flow
Now, I want to use the user bearer token as my Session-ID, i.e, each API call I am doing, I will be doing by validating against this bearer token.
I believe by doing so, I will be able to avoid 'creating sessions' and also leverage the google-generated tokens for uniquely identifying users and the calls to backend.
Please let me know what security flaws this would give rise to and also what are the alternatives for the same
Although at the point of time I was making the question, it was a bit unclear on how to proceed, heres a summary of what I have accomplished -
1 - I have used Angular for frontend and I have refered this page
2 - While doing so, my doubt was how would I proceed with user authentication and how I would continue to register the user and get the required details like profile, contact, address etc.
What I have done ->
Once a bearer was issued, I was passing this info to backend and then, from the backend, I was reaching out to various google api's and getting relevant info with the bearer.
Also this bearer was being stored on client end so as to ensure UNTIL the token expires, I would continue to not issue another token and meanwhile, as and when the user session times out, I would read the locally stored(client side) token and validate it on backend,
should the token be valid, backend server would go and all the info for all the scopes, and deal the other flows accordingly.
I have implemented a spring boot application which does authentication and authorization using Spring OAuth2.
I am using JDBC token store to main the token issued to the client for performing Custom claim verification and some other user status verification during application run-time.
The question is, since i had used traditional JSESSIONID with CSRF token, i cannot find any advantage with the new OAuth standards because after login i would store the user details in the session and retrieve it whenever needed similarly for OAuth i store the User details in the JWT token itself and decode the token every time to get the user information, also i need to hit the database anyway for custom claim verification such as JTI verification .
Everyone says JWT is for stateless application but with JDBC token store i'm holding all the token that is issued to each client. Also there is an additional overhead to purge the expired token which will be done automatically with Session. Also i'm using refresh token as the way to implement session timeout.
Therefore can anyone explain me, when should i use JSESSIONID and when to use JWT ? My application is running on AWS architecture.
From my experience, cookie-based authentication sufficiently complicates scaling and load-balancing. If you have authenticated via the first service replica, your cookie will be not appliable to another replica, cause all sessions are stored in memory. So, if you want to scale your service in the future, session-based authentication can make things much more complex.
I am quite new to JWT based authentication. And im quite confused about the refresh token mechanism. In my case, I have designed my application as,
1. User will login to the application, and when the login is successful then it will go to the authentication server and sign a jwt and will pass it to the client.
2. And then the client will store the refresh token and the short lived token in the local storage
3. Once the resource server is called the token will be sent through the header. and will get validated.
My question is, in which point should we request another token using the refresh token mechanism. Should we check whether the short lived token is invlaid before sending the request to the resource server. or should we get a new token once the validation fails in resource server? or is there any better way to handle this?
A Refresh Token is a special kind of token that can be used to obtain a renewed access token —that allows accessing a protected resource— at any time.
Although Access Tokens can be renewed at any time using Refresh Tokens, they should be renewed when old ones have expired, or when getting access to a new resource for the first time. Refresh Tokens never expire OR have very long expiration time.
I trying to implement a token based authentication approach:
Every successful login creates new token.
If user selects "keep me logged in" or the user is using a mobile device, the token is persisted in a Redis database without an expiration date. Otherwise, the token will expire in 20 minutes.
Once user is authenticated, the token is checked from each subsequent request in my Redis database.
I'm wondering how I can identify devices. In case of mobile devices, I can use a device identifier. But how can I identify a browser?
Example: The user logs in using Chrome and selects "keep me logged in". A token is generated and persisted with the browser name in Redis. If the user logs in from Firefox, saves the token and "Firefox" in the database. I save the token in Redis whereas token is created on successful authentication. Is it fine to persist only the token and the browser where the token is being used? Or do I need to persist the IP as well?
Additional question: How to avoid attackers to steal the token from a cookie?
How token-based authentication works
In a few words, an authentication scheme based on tokens follow these steps:
The client sends their credentials (username and password) to the server.
The server authenticates the credentials and generates a token.
The server stores the previously generated token in some storage along with the user identifier and an expiration date.
The server sends the generated token to the client.
In every request, the client sends the token to the server.
The server, in each request, extracts the token from the incoming request. With the token, the server looks up the user details to perform authentication and authorization.
If the token is valid, the server accepts the request.
If the token is invalid, the server refuses the request.
The server can provide an endpoint to refresh tokens.
How to send credentials to the server
In a REST applications, each request from client to server must contain all the necessary information to be understood by the server. With it, you are not depending on any session context stored on the server and you do not break the stateless constraint of the REST architecture defined by Roy T. Fielding in his dissertation:
5.1.3 Stateless
[...] each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client. [...]
When accessing protected resources that require authentication, each request must contain all necessary data to be properly authenticated/authorized. It means the authentication will be performed for each request.
Have a look at this quote from the RFC 7235 regarding considerations for new authentication schemes:
5.1.2. Considerations for New Authentication Schemes
There are certain aspects of the HTTP Authentication Framework that
put constraints on how new authentication schemes can work:
HTTP authentication is presumed to be stateless: all of the
information necessary to authenticate a request MUST be provided
in the request, rather than be dependent on the server remembering
prior requests. [...]
And authentication data (credentials) should belong to the standard HTTP Authorization header. From the RFC 7235:
4.2. Authorization
The Authorization header field allows a user agent to authenticate
itself with an origin server -- usually, but not necessarily, after
receiving a 401 (Unauthorized) response. Its value consists of
credentials containing the authentication information of the user
agent for the realm of the resource being requested.
Authorization = credentials
[...]
Please note that the name of this HTTP header is unfortunate because it carries authentication data instead of authorization. Anyways, this is the standard header for sending credentials.
When performing a token based authentication, tokens are your credentials. In this approach, your hard credentials (username and password) are exchanged for a token that is sent in each request.
What a token looks like
An authentication token is a piece of data generated by the server which identifies a user. Basically, tokens can be opaque (which reveals no details other than the value itself, like a random string) or can be self-contained (like JSON Web Token):
Random string: A token can be issued by generating a random string and persisting it to a database with an expiration date and with a user identifier associated to it.
JSON Web Token (JWT): Defined by the RFC 7519, it's a standard method for representing claims securely between two parties. JWT is a self-contained token and enables you to store a user identifier, an expiration date and whatever you want (but don't store passwords) in a payload, which is a JSON encoded as Base64. The payload can be read by the client and the integrity of the token can be easily checked by verifying its signature on the server. You won't need to persist JWT tokens if you don't need to track them. Althought, by persisting the tokens, you will have the possibility of invalidating and revoking the access of them. To keep the track of JWT tokens, instead of persisting the whole token, you could persist the token identifier (the jti claim) and some metadata (the user you issued the token for, the expiration date, etc) if you need. To find some great resources to work with JWT, have a look at http://jwt.io.
Tip: Always consider removing old tokens in order to prevent your database from growing indefinitely.
How to accept a token
You should never accept expired tokens or tokens which were not issued by your application. If you are using JWT, you must check the token signature.
Please note, once you issue a token and give it to your client, you have no control over what the client will do with the token. No control. Seriously.
It's a common practice to check the User-Agent header field to tell which browser is being used to access your API. However, it's worth mention that HTTP headers can be easily spoofed and you should never trust your client. Browsers don't have unique identifier, but you can get a good level of fingerprinting if you want.
I don't know about your security requirements, but you always can try the following in your server to enhance the security of your API:
Check which browser the user was using when the token was issued. If the browser is different in the following requests, just refuse the token.
Get the client remote address (that is, the client IP address) when the token was issued and use a third party API to lookup the client location. If the following requests comes an address from other country, for example, refuse the token. To lookup the location by IP address, you can try free APIs such as MaxMind GeoLite2 or IPInfoDB. Mind that hitting a third party API for each request your API receives is not a good idea and can cause a severe damage to the performance. But you can minimize the impact with a cache, by storing the client remote address and its location. There are a few cache engines available nowadays. To mention a few: Guava, Infinispan, Ehcache and Spring.
When sending sensitive data over the wire, your best friend is HTTPS and it protects your application against the man-in-the-middle attack.
By the way, have I mentioned you should never trust your client?
Once server is receives the request from the client, it contains the User-Agent. This attribute will help us to identify the client.
Please refer this link: How do I detect what browser is used to access my site?