I'm new here and posting the first question ever, and coming straight to the point.
I have a N Tier Application, Front UI on AngularJS, backend on Spring Boot and a NoSQL DB with some caching attached to it.
I'm struggling in getting the SSO configured using PING Identity for my Home grown application for following reason.
Lack of knowledge on PING SSO.
The knowledge that i have gained so far only gives me limited visibility on how i can achieve the solution for having a successful SSO configured.
Summarized Solution:
Front End UI -- Speaks to Middleware Service for Auth(current design) -- Middleware Service acts as a Interceptor for my backend services(also known as BFF) which handles all my tokens for necessary handshaking. --- Backend Services performs logics & functions
Problem: Trying to bring in PING for SSO is confusing:
as far as i know PING can be configured in 2 ways.
OAUTH2.0
SAML Based Auth.
in Oauth, User would access, Ping URL with context path which will internally speak to PING federate and AD and return a Token.. i might be wrong here. hence need clarification! as im not an expert on PING.
the confusion in case of OAUTH is, its totally confusing.. i have used oauth before, but via PING using it for the first time.
in SAML based Auth, again a PING URL with context path which will internally perform its work and then add some Assertion and then return the SAML token to a POST endpoint.
the confusion in case of SAML is as following:
if i configure my middleware to receive the SAML Token, how can i redirect the user to welcome page?
PS the middleware has some encryption logic that cannot be by passed!
any help in this matter would be highly appreciated. as im looking to see what options do i have on PING or even on my Springboot app.
Related
We are using Okta Customer Identity with our application. The challenge with our architecture is that each user gets their own server and subdomain, which is a little weird for Okta, because each redirect URL needs to be provided as part of the application configuration. As we add new users, the list of redirect URLs continues to grow, one per user machine. Their API is not really designed for this, so we have to write the complete list of redirect URLs with every change.
We would like to find a way to use a proxy for the Okta authentication, so that we can just have a single redirect URL for the Okta application configuration. But we're using https://github.com/okta/okta-spring-boot, and we're not really sure how to make it work with a proxy.
If we set up an HTTP proxy using -Dhttp.proxyHost=my.proxy.host -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080, that's going to affect all HTTP traffic, which is not acceptable.
Is there a way we can use an HTTP proxy purely for the Okta auth only, leaving all other HTTP traffic unproxied?
Is there something we can do with the Okta Spring Boot library that would make it possible for all user machines to share a common proxy machine?
The final alternative would be to write some "active" proxy code that runs on the proxy which handles the requests and forwards them on to Okta. It would have to introspect the Okta response and pass it back to the right user machine.
Is there a way to do #1?
Failing that, is there a way to do #2?
If neither of those are possible, are you aware of an existing implementation of #3?
I have a SpringBoot Micro-Service based backend API that uses Zuul as a gateway proxy between a JavaFX Desktop Application. Right now there is no security in place, but I am looking to secure the backend with Spring Security, however, every tutorial I seem to run across seems to be based on web-apps and I haven't seen anything for my particular use case. I don't know much about spring security but would like to know if I can accomplish my goals with it, and if so, what modules or examples should I be looking for.
Goals:
Provide a way for my API to know that requests are coming from the desktop app itself, I think the technical term for this is assigning the desktop app a client id and then having the Zuul Server validate that the client id is that off the desktop app before accepting the request. This should be the case for all requests
Only allow API traffic through the Zuul Proxy, all of the downstream requests to the micro-services behind the Zuul gateway should only be accepted if they are coming from the Zuul Server itself.
Allow requests for logging in and registering as a new user without any type of security other than the desktop client id discussed in 1.
When a user provides a successful username/password on login, they are returned a JWT which is then stored in the JavaFX application and used for all of the other requests to the backend.
Configure the token to expire after a specific time frame, say like 90 minutes and provide a method for automatically refreshing an expired token as long as the users account is still valid. For this, I don't want the user to have to re-login, I just want it to check behind the scenes to make sure their account is still valid and then issue a new token if needed.
Have user based roles so certain features, methods, endpoints, etc. are only accessible to users with the valid role. Within the GUI these features will be hidden or disabled, but I would still like a layer of security on the server side to protect against unwanted access in case someone was able to modify the app.
I am just writing down answers to each of your goals :
Passing the client Id in every request from desktop application doesnt make sense, instead you client Id and secret can be passed during authenticaiton call, Like we have in Oauth 2.0 framework. Rest https calls should be made from client, So to avoid tampering of request, You can also go for mutual SSL between your client application and Zuul API gateway, It assures that call is coming from Desktop client only.
Yes, Zuul api gateway should be single entry point to your application, Your internal microservices should not be exposed to public.
For user registeration, Client authentication can be achieved using client Id and secret
Correct, You can also create http only cookie at backend, which will include your jwt token only.
Token refresh can be achieved at zuul api gateway, if session is active, make call to refresh token endpoint to get new access token.
On server side, At zuul proxy you can validate the incoming bearer token expiry along with signature validation, with generic claims too. Now at microservices level spring security can be used for role based access control for particular methods.
I'm very new in Spring and never really used java for making web. And I'm making a web with a separated frontend and backend services and I'm trying to make an authentication system using Spring Boot Security. How can I do it? Do I put the security on both the service or just one of them? What's the best way to implement it?
The question is subjective and can have too many interpretations based on context. My understanding is that putting security on both front-end and backend is the best way to implement. After a successful backend authentication you should issue a unique cookie to the browser as it allows users to continue using a site without having to log in to every single page. For each subsequent call, the website recognizes the user from cookie data.
You can use this link for a better understanding of dual authentication mechanism.
Here is my problem:
Context :
-Windows Server 2012 with ActiveDirectory
-Tomcat
-Rest API (Spring)
I'm currently trying to restrict REST request. I want that only specific groups of the AD could access to specific resources. I'm restricted to Kerberos authentication.
System configuration
Create a user in domain "Tomcat"
setspn -a HTTP/apirest.domain#DOMAIN
Generate a tomcat.keytab using ktpass
API rest configuration
I'm using the spring security sample on github that you can find here :
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-security-kerberos/tree/master/spring-security-kerberos-samples/sec-server-win-auth
I know that there is an EntryPoint and this is not needed in my context (API Rest). I've chosen this sample because it seems to use the windows authentication context and use it to automatically authenticate me in the spring security context. Right after, an ldap request is send to extract all information about the user logged. In my case, I need to extract the group.
I'm also using :
https://github.com/GyllingSW/kerberos-demo
To extract the role of the user with the class "RoleStrippingLdapUserDetailsMapper.java" instead of the "ActiveDirectoryLdapAuthoritiesPopulator". This implementation also offers localhost authentication but the issue with the NTLM token seems to be fixed in last commit of spring security.
I'm not really sure if this is the right way to do what I want.
My authentication seems to fail and I only have one things going wrong in my logs..
"Property 'userDn' not set - anonymous context will be used for read-write operations"
Questions
Do I have to run my tomcat service using the tomcat account ? (Seems to be, yes)
Am I doing the right things with Kerberos security ?
How can I get rid of the anonymous context?
The anonymous context seems to be set just right after Tomcat start. I want to get a context just after that my user (For instance, user1) requests the rest API (EntryPoint or whatever)
If there is something unclear let me know, I will try to reformulate!
Thanks,
You do not need to query LDAP to get information about which groups does user belong to. Active Directory already adds this information to the Kerberos ticket which is sent from browser to Tomcat.
You just need to extract this information from the token for example using Kerb4J library. It comes with Spring integration inspired by spring-security-kerberos project so it should be pretty easy to switch to it.
If you still want to query LDAP you need to authenticate in LDAP before you can make any queries. Again there's no need to use end-user accounts for it - you can use the keytab file for Kerberos authentication in LDAP and query groups using "Tomcat" account
I found a way to fix my issue.
In a REST API context, you have no entry point. I tried to set my entry point to an unmapped URL, just to do the negociation. By doing this, you will receive an HTTP response with the error code 404 (Not found) but with the right header was added by spring security (WWW-Authenticate).
The web browser will not send the ticket service if the error code is not 401.
To solve this problem, you have to create a CustomEntryPoint class (implements AuthenticationEntryPoint) and you need to override the "commence" method to return a 401 HTTP code with the right header.
I hope that could help. If there is a better way, let me know !
I am starting a new project where we are planing to build a restful back end and an AJAX font end. I am approaching the problem by focusing on Identifying all the resources that I have and what the various HTTP verbs will do them, their URI and the JSON representations of those resources.
I am looking for the best design for securing the backend. Here is the list of designs I have considered. I am looking for alternative designs not listed below, and pros, cons recommendations. The system will be implemented with Spring 3.0 and possibly Spring Security 3.0, SSL will be used for many parts of the system but not for all of them, so some requests may come on SSL and some might not.
Option 1: Use the HTTP session
Show a standard login screen, create a server side session and let tomcat send back a jsessionid cookie and have the ajax client include the JSESSIONID cookie on every XHR request. This options just feels like it's the wrong approach for the following reasons.
The connection becomes statefull which is against the rules of REST
I want to be able to split the bakcend into multiple seperate WAR files which means i could have multiple HTTP sessions on the backend, if that is the case then this approach does not work. While I don't need the ability to split the backend into multiple apps today, I would prefer a design that allows for that possibility.
Option 2: Find an open source Java based security library that does this
Other than Spring security I have not found any other Java libraries, any recommendations are highly appreciated.
Option 3: Try to use an existing protocol like OAuth
In my very brief look at OAuth it seems that it is designed for authentication across sites where each site has it's own user database. In this system i want a global user database shared across all the backend ajax services.
Option 4: Use SAML and Shiboleth
This options seems over kill and hugely complex to setup and maintain.
Option 5: Send the username and password with every request
This requires that user sends their username and password with every request, which means that the front end AJAX app must store the username and password as a JavaScript object and if the user navigates away from the page then back the username/password combo will be gone and the user might be forced to log in again. I don't want the front end to try and put the username and password into cookie as that would comprise security.
Option 6: Implement my own authentication / Authorization protocol
Create a REST service that users can present their username/password combination to and then get back and security token, which they must send back to the service with every request. The security token would be digitally signed by the service and would have an expiry time. The token would be only good for most operations high security operations would require a new login screen as port of confirming the operation.
Problem with this approach is I have to invent yet another security protocol which seems like a total waste of time.
I am sure I am not the only person up against this problem, I hope the stack overflow community can point to some options and tools that I have not found yet.
Take a look at Apache Shiro. It is an authentication system that has a session management feature that can be used to share sessions across applications. This may be the easiest thing to do.
Or you could use Spring Security (or Shiro) with a Remember Me cookie that is shared across the webapps (as long as they are in the same HTTP domain). The remember me cookie would be analogous to your token in option 6. You can set the expiration on the cookie that so it is short lived like a session cookie or long lived like a regular remember me.
You might also want to take a look at Jasig CAS - Single Sign-On for the Web. It has a REST API and a protocol (Proxy Tickets) that allows services to proxy user AuthN to backend services like you described in option 6. http://www.jasig.org/cas
Briefly...the application that serves up the AJAX client is protected with Spring Security (supports CAS out of the box) and gets a Proxy Granting Ticket that you embed in the AJAX client. The AJAX client uses the PGT to get Proxy Tickets for your REST services...protected with Spring Security too. The REST services get an authenticated userId without every touching primary credentials.
Alternative, you could keep the PGT on the server and use AJAX calls to retrieve Proxy Tickets that are then used by the AJAX client to call you REST services.
As I understood you are going to secure a rest application, to preface you must know that a security provider consisd of three concepts (3A):
-Authentication
-Authorization
-Auditing
to implement these three together you must provide bunch of tools such as :
-SSO provider
-Session Store
-Open Id pattern
-user credentials integration
....
I have used ACL(Spring ACL) to provide authorization services and oauth2 for authentication.
there is one channel to connect these two together and its scopes(oauth2 scopes) but the problem is scopes are not flexible(pure strings) enough to implement authorization modules such as role_voter, cache_strategy, black_list or,Role_base strategy, exceptional permissions, white_list... (but you can use #EnableGlobalMethodSecurity)
In my case I used authorization server as a resource for oauth2 authentication server(take a look at http://projects.spring.io/spring-security-oauth/docs/oauth2.html), then I considered two spots to check authorization, the first I issued ACL to front-end and forced programmer to design her page dynamically up to ACL concept, the second is in back-end on service layer(BLL) using Aspect when one rest is going to be called. I sent the service key as an actee to check if current user has enough access control to do that. and for auditing you must monitor all requests I mean you must use an listener in your gateway or broker...