I need to develop set of microservices (rest APIs) which is to be used by web and mobile client, the microservices are sitting behind API gateway, I've to integrate with SSO (using SAML) for user's authentication, I understand that SAML token to oAuth2 token conversion has to be done so that I can verify auth token at API gateway and handle authorization there itself, but the piece which is not clear to me is that who will take care of conversion of SAML token to oAuth2 token, is it IDP who provide this functionality out of box or do I need to built up something of my own?
One possible solution which I'm thinking of is
User (from web/mobile) sign in via SSO
Gets SAML response from IDP
Send that SAML response to server to generate Auth Token
Server gets request to generate auth token, looks for SAML response and validate it against IDP
If SAML response is valid then generate auth token and send it back to client
On subsequent API request from client the token is passed as header which API gateway validates
The thing is I'm bit reluctant to implement SAML and oAuth thingy myself and looking for some ready made solution but couldn't find any, can someone please suggest of any library solving this problem, thanks in advance.
It feels like your approach is correct - it is the role of the Authorization Server (AS) to deal with SAML login integration for you. Only configuration changes should be needed, though of course you need to use an AS that supports SAML integration.
Your UIs and APIs will not need to know anything about SAML and will just use OAuth tokens. There should be zero code changes needed.
Most companies use an off the shelf AS - eg from a low cost cloud provider. My Federated Logins Blog Post summarises the process of integrating an IDP. The walkthrough uses AWS Cognito as the AS - and the IDP could be a SAML one.
I maintain a microservice that sounds like it could help you - https://github.com/enterprise-oss/osso
Osso handles SAML configuration against a handful of IDP providers, normalizes payloads, and makes user resources available to you in an oauth 2.0 authorization code grant flow.
Osso mainly acts as an authentication server though - we don't currently have a way for your API gateway to verify an access token is (still) valid, but that would be pretty trivial for us to add, we'd be happy to consider it.
Related
I'm having a hard time figuring a good way to implement Oauth 2.0 and OpenID Connect authentication alongside an existing internal email+password authentication for a B2B Web app's API using Spring security.
We have a backend REST API that is a Spring Boot servlet application which currently authenticates users with OAuth 1.0 and the password grant. The front-end is an Angular single-page app through which users must log in with their username and password. The API's /oauth/token endpoint then delivers an opaque access token to be used for fetching secured resources that are then displayed within the app.
We'd like to add the possibility to log in using external authentication with OpenID connect, which is a perfect opportunity for switching to OAuth 2.0 and JWT tokens. Our API would then accept JWT tokens it delivered as well as external JWT tokens emitted by accepted issuers.
Reading and validating JWT tokens won't be a problem using Spring security's OAuth Resource Server. However things get complicated with how to make the classic username+password login flow work with JWT tokens.
We thought about delivering JWT access tokens the same way we used to with our old OAuth 1.0 tokens. The thing is, newer OAuth specifications advise against using the password grant, plus it simply isn't supported in the Spring authorization server project we're planning to use. The authorization-code flow w/ PKCE seems like too much for this case as we do not want the back-end API to render a login form but use credentials entered in the existing login form that is part of the single-page app.
I've read a lot about not using OAuth for 1st party login since its primary use is for external authentication, but again, that doesn't apply since we also want 3rd party authentication.
What would be a secure way to implement a Spring boot authorization server that can deliver JWT access tokens to a 1st party client in exchange for a user's credentials, all this using the existing log in page, and given the password grant type no longer being supported?
I thought about implementing a preliminary step that would be a POST request with Basic authentication to a /login endpoint that just returns a 200 HTTP status, then proceeding to the /oauth2/authorize request that would deliver the authorization code immediately without redirecting since my session is authenticated.
I'll be happy to provide more details if needed. Here are the resources I'm using for this project.
What about setting up an authorization-server capable of identity federation?
In such configuration, the authorization-server is responsible for providing with identities, proxying one or more sources (your existing user database for instance, plus maybe Google, Facebook, Github, etc.)
Keycloak does it for instance.
From the client point of view (your Angular app), the authorization-server is used to get:
access-token: put in Authorization header of requests to secured resource-server(s) (can be a JWT or an opaque string, doesn't matter, clients should not try to extract data from access-tokens)
refresh-token: send to authorization-server to renew access-token before it expires
id-token: get user-profile data (email, username, profile picture, etc.)
You should have a look at https://github.com/damienbod/angular-auth-oidc-client for connecting an Angular app to an OIDC authorization-server.
From resource-server point of view, access-tokens are the source ofr setting-up security-context, either by decoding and validating a JWT locally or with token introspection on authorization-server.
Have a look at those tutorials for such resource-servers configuration.
I am currently developing using spring security oauth2.
Currently, the frontend is SPA, and it is developed as react that operates with client side redering.
My rest api has the spring security starters libraries. But I don't know how to use oauth2 flow provided by spring.
So my question is: Can I use spring security as IAM to protect my web and api?
Does spring security have the known oauth2 grants and how use them ?
Implicit grant
Client Credentials Grant
Password grant
Don't use implicit grant
It is not recommended to use the implicit flow (and some servers prohibit this flow entirely) due to the inherent risks of returning access tokens in an HTTP redirect without any confirmation that it has been received by the client.
source: https://oauth.net/2/grant-types/implicit/
With implicit grant, access token is returned immediately without an extra authorization code exchange step. This extra step is usually performed in your backend.
Web > token > Api
SPA frontend and its Rest Api is a very common approach, used since simple startups until big companies. The flow summarized is:
Your users will start the web application.
As they were not signed in before, you web app will show them a login screen (a page provided by the authorization server).
After authenticating, a consent form is showed to the user.
After user consent, the authorization server will send you an authorization code.
The web app will exchange this code for a token.
After getting back this token, the web app store it in the client(browser) and send it as a header when apis needs to be consumed.
Your private rest apis must validate if token of the web app (header) is valid by sending it to one endpoint of the authorization server
If token is valid, your api rest is allowed to respond to the web client. For instance a json with products, employes, some update of customer order details, etc
For this flow to work, you will need:
web spa with a hint of backend. Backend is required because you cannot have a proper user session in static solutions like apache or nginx.
authentication and authorization server: Known as identity and access management (IAM) or some third app which provide you the basic oauth2 endpoints to manage a proper security for your apps.
your apis: foo-api , bar-api, baz-api, etc
spring security
In the minimal scenario in which:
you will have only one web + one rest api, and nothing more in the future (mobiles, iot, etc)
you don't have an authentication/authorization server
you have a mix of functional apis (employee, products, etc) and its security (spring-security) in just one artifact
you don't need user session in your web
you don't need a logout feature
Flow could be reduced to:
Your users will start the web application.
As they were not signed in before, you web app will show them a login screen (a page provided by spring-security).
After authenticating, a consent form is showed to the user.
After user consent, the authorization server will send you an authorization code.
The web app will exchange this code for a token. Since your api is using Spring security, the token generation is covered.
After getting back this token, the web app store it in the client(browser) and send it as a header when apis needs to be consumed.
Your private rest apis must validate if token of the web app (header) is valid by sending it to one endpoint of the authorization server I think the spring security chain filters handle this.
If token is valid, your api rest is allowed to respond to the web client. For instance a json with products, employes, some update of customer order details, etc
Here some samples of token generation and protected endpoints with spring security. I will try to upload a ready to use sample:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-setup-jwt-authorization-and-authentication-in-spring/
IAM
If you will have more applications and complex scenarios in the future, I advice you to choose some open-source iam like:
Glewlwyd,Keycloak,OAuth.io,ORY Hydra,SimpleLogin,SSQ signon,
Commercial services like:
Auth0,Curity Identity Server,FusionAuth,Okta,Red Hat Single Sign-On,cidaas.
Or try to develop a new one using pure spring-security
Lectures
Some recommended answers with more oauth2 details:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/62123945/3957754
https://stackoverflow.com/a/62049409/3957754
https://stackoverflow.com/a/57351168/3957754
https://stackoverflow.com/a/63093136/3957754
https://stackoverflow.com/a/54621986/3957754
https://stackoverflow.com/a/63211493/3957754
Could anyone explain what would be the best approach for this scenario?: There are 2 separate Service Providers:
System A is a server that works as a rest API for a mobile application.
System B is a website which login is handled with simple and plain cookies.
I have read a lot and Ive found that the most used protocols in use right now for these kind of systems are SAML and OAuth, where OAuth works specially to give security to API services and SAML for web applications (cookie based).
Ideally, what is being looked for is a single log in, which is right now handled for System B through cookies in the main domain.
Is there a way to use both SAML and OAuth? Or What would be a good way to go?
The answer depends on what IDP you currently have.
Is the IDP SAML based or is that just what you got from researching?
SAML and OAuth don't really play well together.
The ideal would be OpenID Connect where you could use the OpenID Connect token to get a REST API token. But that would involve using the same IDP for authentication for both.
It depends, If you have both app deployed on same server then you can use SSO with tomcat valve or JBOSS with picketLink. If your applications deployed on different domain then you need to use federation server with SAML like OpenId, OpenAM, Spring-saml with ADFS or any other IDP server.
For securing rest API, you have to use Oauth protocol. By implementing OAuth you will get Oauth token by providing userId and password. Then Oauth token can be used to access rest API from mobile or any other third party service.
I currently have a distributed system containing an OpenID Connect server (IdentityServer3) acting as SSO server. The clients using the SSO server are AngularJS SPA:s with WebAPI v2 backends.
I got the basic login flow working, but I need some help with configuring the WebAPI/OWIN pipeline to allow transformation of the received token claims, ie. removing unnessecary claims and adding local claims. I'm assuming I need to create a local JWT instead of using the JWT received from the SSO server.
The question is, what is the best way of doing this? Are there OWIN middlewares that can help with this, or do I need to "manually" generate a new locally signed JWT from the claims received from the SSO server?
Current implementation details:
The AngularJS SPA authenticates against the SSO server using
authorization code flow and receives the authorization code.
The SPA posts the authorization code to the WebAPI.
WebAPI receives the authorization code and requests an AccessToken/JWT from the SSO server using the OAuth2Client class (part of Thinktecture.IdentityModel.Clients). This AccessToken is returned to the SPA to use in any further requests done to the WebAPI.
So my question mostly relates to step 3. How do I best change my current flow to generate a token also containing the local claims?
Also, what kind of authentication middleware should be used with your proposed solution (JwtBearerAuthentication, OpenIdConnectAuthentication or OAuthBearerAuthentication)?
Apoligizes for my probably confused terminology usage, I'm a beginner regarding OAuth and especially the OWIN pipeline. :)
Your WebApi should use BearerTokenAuthentication.
To get access token (access_token) and claims (id_token) in single call you need to set response type as ResponseType="token id_token"
You can checkout various ready to run sample at IdentityServer3 Samples. Specifically checkout implicit flow sample.
I'm considering using authenticated encrypted JWT tokens to authenticate / authorized access to an ASP.NET Web API application.
Based on what I've read so far, it seems to me like it is an option to generate JWT tokens from a token service and pass them to Web API via the http authorization header.
I have found some good code examples on implementing the JWT creation and consumption (Pro ASP.NET Web API Security by Badrinarayanan Lakshmiraghavan).
I'm trying to understand if I need a full OAuth implementation to support this, or if I can simply pass the tokens along in the auth header.
Assuming the tokens are properly encrypted and signed, is there any inherent security flaw in keeping things simple without having to use OAuth?
Trying to keep things as simple as possible for my needs without compromising security.
It is not that you must always OAuth when you use tokens. But given the fact that your application is a JavaScript app, you would be better off implementing a 3-legged authentication. Thinktecture identity server does support implicit grant. But if the client application getting access to the user credential is not a problem for you, your JavaScript app can get the user ID and password from the user and make a token request from a token issuer ensuring the user ID and password are not stored any where in JavaScript app (including DOM). This request for token can be a simple HTTP POST as well and it does not need to be anything related to OAuth. If your end user will not enter the credentials in the client application, OAuth implicit grant is the way. BTW, you don't need to encrypt JWT. TIS issues signed JWT and that will ensure token integrity. But if you are worried about the confidentiality, you can use HTTPS to both obtain the token as well as present the token.
It looks like you don't really need auth delegation as the one provided by OAuth. Isn't HMAC authentication enough for your scenario ?. With HMAC, you will not have to deal with JWT at all. This is an implementation I made for HMAC authentication for .NET
https://github.com/pcibraro/hawknet
Pablo.