I'm building the backend with laravel and then using Vue as front-end. Data is accessed over api calls using axios. Now I have this relatively simple task but I can't seem to find the proper solution. I want one of the routes to be easily consumable by Vue compoenents without the need to log in, however I don't want that route to be publicly available for anyone to use.
Things I have tried:
Using passport to protect my routes and then use passport's CreateFreshApiToken middleware. Protection works fine, unauthorized users are not able to access the routes, however I don't get laravel_token in my cookies and therefore I can't get access to that route if I'm not logged in.
Use passport's client credentials grant access. Works fine and the way I want it to work but doesn't really make sense because if I hardcode the client_secret - anyone can access it and then use it to access protected routes. If I make a proxy-like solution, to call a controller method, which would issue a valid token and thus not exposing client_secret to front-end but then anyone could just call that route which issues the token and it would be pointless once again.
Apparently the answer is pretty simple and I was overcomplicating things. I don't know if this is the right/elegant way to do this but basically. If you don't need your api to be accessible from other applications (which I didn't) we can just put routes in web.php instead of api.php. This will ensure that web middleware is used and so it will use the basic csrf token validation, which is totally sufficient for protection against outside requests. You can also leave the route in api.php and just use web middleware on that route. The outcome is exactly what I needed - application is getting data over a route without any need to login AND that route is not available over postman or anything else.
Related
I've created a web application that uses the built-in authentication method for the web, once the user is authenticated he/she is presented with a dashboard page. At this moment Ajax calls to an API need to be made to fetch data for the logged-in user. What would be the correct approach to this to make it is secure?
As a next step, I would like to be able to use the API "stand-alone" as well, so a 3rd party could access the dataset through the API as well.
Right now I am looking into Laravel Passport as well as Spatie Permission package to help me with access control.
If you are using ajax calls in same domain it won't be problem with built-in authentication to give access to authorized users only, because tokens & sessions are accessible for laravel and you can get authenticated users by default.
If you want to make external api as well the best approach will be to use Laravel Passport and pass token in Authorization header as usual.
Hope this helps you
I have a website which is based on a Laravel backend api and a Nuxt.js frontend app.
The laravel app is served at api.website.com. Till now the api was open, meaning everyone can make a get request. There are almost no post requests.
I know need to implement a login mechanism for the users (Usual login+register and facebook login).
My question is about how would I go to make this process secure. Do I need Laravel Passport (or other similar mechanism)?
My thought is that, say I have an endpoint api.website.com/register (POST), I do not want anyone to be able to just make a post request and create an account. I need to have some sort of security like a csrf token. I know I can use CORS but that doesn't really provide much of security in this case.
You can use jwt like this or laravel passport.
I have a Laravel 5.5 Application that's using the session based auth out of the box. On some of these pages I have react components that need to get/post data from/to an API.
What is the best practice for handling this? Do I simply hide the API endpoints behind the auth? This would work but should I be using Laravel Passport for this instead?
I've had a play with Passport and it seems that this would work but I don't need users to be able to create clients and grant 3rd party applications permission etc. There is just the first party react app consuming the data from inside the laravel application (view).
From my initial experimenting with it, it seems I'd need to have the login call made first to receive an access token to then make further calls. As the user will already be authenticated in the session is there an easier way?
I'm not sure if Passport is intended to be used for this purpose or not. I'd rather take the time to get it right now as I'd like to get the foundations right now if the app scales.
You can proxy authentication with Passport. Using the password grant type users would still log in with their username/password, then behind the scenes make an internal request to Passport to obtain an access token.
Restrict what routes are available when registering in a service provider by passing in:
Passport::routes(function ($router) {
$router->forAccessTokens();
$router->forTransientTokens();
});
That limits access to personal tokens and refresh tokens only. A client will be created when you run php artisan passport:install.
Setup a middleware to merge the password grant client id and secret in with the request, then make a call to the authorization endpoint. Then it's just a matter of returning the encrypted token and observing the Authorization header for requests to your api.
How to make API routes only accessible inside the app?
For example http://host.com/api/products returns the data as intended but it's really insecure since anyone could access it through postman or the browser.
I have a react app that fetch datas from laravel api defined like so in routes/api.php:
// this is default route provided by laravel out of the box
Route::middleware('auth:api')->get('/user', function (Request $request) {
return $request->user();
});
// ItemController provides an index methods that list items with json
Route::resource('items', 'Api\ItemController', array('except' => array('create','edit')));
// this is to store new users
Route::resource('users', 'Api\UserController', array('only' => array('store')));
for example http://example.com/api/items returns the data as intended but it's really insecure since anyone could access it through postman.
How to make those routes only accessible inside the app?
As I'm new to it I don't understand if I need to set up api_token and how?
Do I need to setup Passport?
Is is related to auth:api middleware?
It may sounds really basic but any help or tutorial suggestions would be greatly appreciated
EDIT
End up with a classic session auth. Moved routes inside web.php. Pass csrf token in ajax request. Actually i didn't need a RESTful API. You only need token auth when your API is stateless.
As you are using Laravel 5.4 you can use Passport, but I haven't implemented yet, but i implemented lucadegasperi/oauth2-server-laravel for one of my laravel projects and it was developed in Laravel 5.1
Here is the link to github repository
lucadegasperi/oauth2-server-laravel
Here is the link to the documentation Exrensive Documentation
Just add the package to the composer json and run composer update,the package will get installed to your application , once installed add the providers array class and aliases array class as mentioned in the Laravel 5 installation part of the documentation,
you have to do a small tweak in order to work perfectly cut csrf from $middleware array and paste it into $routeMiddleware array and again run php artisan vendor:publish after publishing the migrations will be created and run the migration php artisan migrate
if you only want to secure api routes for each client like ios, android and web you can implement Client Credentials Grant, or if you need to every user with oauth the you can implement Authorization Server with the Password Grant or some other.,
Never use the client id or other credentials, generating access token in the form, but add it some where in helper and attach it in the request to the api,
Hope this answer helps you.
You could use JWT it's pretty easy to get it to work. You basically generate a token by requesting Username/Password and passing that token in every request that requires authentication, your URL would look like http://example.com/api/items?token=SOME-TOKEN. without a proper token, he doesn't have access do this endpoint.
As for
How to make those routes only accessible inside the app?
If you mean only your app can use these requests, you can't. Basically the API doesn't know who is sending these requests, he can only check if what you are giving is correct and proceed with it if everything is in order. I'd suggest you to have a look at this question