I Guys, i have to create a mobile app that need to make a request to a laravel endpoint, app no require registration or login, which is the best way to protect my api? To make sure the only my application can call it?
Thanks!
There's no full proof method of securing your api, because with the right tools and following some tutorials on the web, anyone could view your whole api request, headers, tokens, etc.
Anything you do or store on the app is already compromised, so signatures,ssl, encryption,tokens, etc are not that helpful if malicious users have access to the app. It can make it more troublesome for malicious users, but a dedicated one could overcome it.
Using authentication atleast forces users to register before they can use your api and you can block the user when needed. Along with requiring email verification, users who wish to misuse your api would then need valid email addresses atleast. But since you mention securing without authentication, this goes out of scope.
You can secure your api somewhat by using rate limiting. laravel has an inbuilt rate limiting with the throttle middleware. You can use this to restrict the number of times an api can be called in a particular time interval by an ip address.
Next would be Ip blocking. If any malicious activity is found, you could block the ip address. But this can be overcome with a vpn, and a malicious user could also block someone elses ip in this manner.
Captcha can help against bots, but would also annoy regular users.
Another method would be restriction with cors, those who have faced cors issues know exactly how annoying it can be, but it wont work on native apps (or you could try pwa).
And in a worse case scenario you could go with some terms and conditions and some legal action
A simple solution You can create a table for devices with api key which will be generated for each device app, and always use it to send requests to the api end point, then used it to fetch data from the rest api. The same process like if you are loging in, but you will use the api key unstead and the key will be fixe not refreshed evrey time.
Related
We are using Go server side code to interact with Google Ads REST API.
Namely, we authenticate it with help of "golang.org/x/oauth2" and
"golang.org/x/oauth2"packages.
In May (and recently again) we've got a email from Google regarding deprecation
Out-of-band flow, essentially rewording of this
one.
But additionally to common information, Google email listed account, which we
are using to authenticate, as being used in OOB flow and going to be blocked.
We checked our sources and available sources of mentioned packages but was not
able to find redirect URIs which are said to be used for OOB flow as one of
those:
redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob
urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob:auto
oob
We explicitly use http://localhost in our code and long-live refresh token
(which seems never expires).
We also tried to use tcpdump to monitor our API calls, but was not able to
learn much from it, because calls are made via https and, therefore, encrypted.
We considered to use man-in-the-middle kind of proxy like
https://www.charlesproxy.com/, but haven't tried it yet, because it become
non-free and because of complexity of setup.
We tried to log our requests to API endpoint with custom RoundTripper, but
have not spotted anything suspicious. It seems that we're using refresh token
only and exchange of code to refresh token just never happen in the code.
Because of this, we don't think that further logging or monitoring with
decrypting https packages may help (but we open to suggestions how to do it better).
Finally, we decided to create a new OAuth 2 Client in the Google console with
fresh set of client id, client secret and refresh token. We obtained a new
refresh token with oauth2l and replaced
credentials in our configuration. But still, we are not sure that new account
will not be blocked by Google due OOB deprication, because seemingly it looks
the same as old one.
Questions:
Why may Google mark our account as OOB?
How can we ensure that newly created account will not be blocked?
Same here.
I find out an answer, that says "Desktop" type of Credentials uses OOB by default. Probably you need to create new Credentials with type "Web"
I'm using Password Grant flow in my Laravel api but i find that the tokens generated to the user may be abused.
I have the api running in a domain and a web app in another domain consuming it. I want to make sure that even if someone copy the token from the Localstorage inside my app, it will be useless outside of my consuming domain.
The only solution i find to this problem is by checking the domain with a middleware or inside the Api methods. Is there any secure way to do this? Should i use middlewares as i just mentioned?
To be honest, I don't think there is a way that you can prevent this.
I assume that the web app is using clientside code to get your API, and so the IP address will always be the clients, and so you cannot limit your API to specific IPs.
Additionally, the calling domain is useless as you could fake this in postman or any other API sending tool.
This is a fight you won't easily win.
I'd ask the question of what ways can a user really abuse my API. If they want to use their token to perform actions on their account inside your application, then what does it matter if this happens within your application or outside of it?
How can they abuse your platform if they have the token? If there are ways to abuse it then you are better treating the root cause that allows the abuse to take place, rather than trying to limit how the token can be used.
I am new to laravel and creating a REST API. The client of the API will be mobile app only. There is no front end view to be shown in browser. I have created the routes and the controllers to handle API requests. Furthermore I deleted the Users table (created by laravel) because I do not need an Web interface etc.
I just want simple token based authentication at this stage ( I am aware there is passport authentication) but I can not even understand that at this stage.
There is only one table in the project.
Candidates
(id (PK), name, phone, details)
mobile app users are candidates also, should I create a token column in this table ? and manually create token at the time of register API and return it back as response ?
Please any simple guide or directions will help, I have search quite a bit online and there seems to be quite a lot many topics that show up such as guards, providers, passport which I am struggling to get.
Thanks,
Elliot.
First of all, you didn’t need to delete the users table. You can use it for api auth too. You just need to create a seperate token table.
However, if you want to implementit manually you need to do a lot of things manually.
This is a huge thing to impelement manually and it's not possible to describe it in a single answer. I will try my best to explain it as simply as I can.
You have to create a authentication system yourself that is for login. Define a middleware to check the authorization of the token sent from client to check the validity of every request (this is the guard part).
Also keep track of the token expiry time. Refreshing the token after each expiry needs to be done too (this is the provider part).
Now there are a lot things inside. Like keeping track of the device the request is coming from, providing different tokens for differenet devices for a single user etc.
If you are into learning how everything works then you can try to build one yourself. But if you plan on deploying it to a professional website, I would suggest try to get accustomed with passport. Reinventing the wheel is really not necessary. I hope it gives you a basic idea. If you have any more questions feel free to comment.
I am not so much in need of code help here, more advice on how I should handle this scenario.
I have a REST API built, using Spring boot.
I also have a simple Hybrid app that I need to deploy to users within the company - and clients who "buy in" to the API access. The users can be anywhere in the world, which means I never know what domain they will be on.
I am told that using the header below is bad practice :
"Access-Control-Allow-Origin":"*"
Given that I know the only point of access with our API should be this frontend app, but that I never know where the user of that app will be, or what network they will be on, how should I do this?
Tagging spring community here, even though this is not a spring centric question. This is because I am actually using Spring, and I guess that community will have solved this problem before.
I believe that this question is not about CORS exactly.
"Access-Control-Allow-Origin":"*" is OK since you need your API to be accessible from anywhere.
Even if you know all the Origins you need to allow, you should not rely on Origin header sent from the client as one can send any header.
Authenticate your users and you'll know whether the user can access the API or not.
Thanks.
Currently using the OAuth server side one-time-code flow, discussed here:
https://developers.google.com/+/web/signin/server-side-flow
Works perfectly for google login.
I want the ability, though, to limit this login to only work for users that belong to a specific apps domain.
Is there any way to enforce this through the api?
OR am I limited to only doing this on my end after google authentication by regexing the email domain? (I would like to avoid this).
Thanks!
There is no support for doing this through Google login. We could allow a developer to set some restrictions on the client id if there are good use cases and a lot of developers would benefit with it. The primary issue I see with is the error message that we have to display to the user. It is better to display that error (and explain) on your site.
In general, as a good practice, you would always want to do the checks on your system/services regarding the authorized user (e.g. check domain)
The only way I can see to do this on the API is to use the fully server side flow (OpenID Connect).
The docs are here:
https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OpenIDConnect
With the parameter of interest here:
https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OpenIDConnect#hd-param
It doesn't appear to be possible with the server side one time code flow