My webapp has means of abuse, users can access things they're not supposed to, such as 127.0.0.1/users/1 & 127.0.0.1/users/2 & 127.0.0.1/users/3 and so on, within these it reveals the user's registration email, ip, etc (via JSON, so the web server can return customized messages, greetings, and allow users to edit account data within profile settings)
This is what my route looks like:
forum.GET("/users/:user_id", routeFunc(UsersGET))
I'm using Gin-Gonic HTTP framework to create a dummy forum, can someone tell me how to stop users from accessing the /users/ route whilst allowing the actual web server to use freely? and maybe link me to the correct direction. Thanks!
(The server uses it to return things like, Welcome Back, USERNAME).
You need to add authentication and authorization to your server.
Authentication is where a user will prove their identity to you by means of a shared secret (like a password hash) and authorization is where you check if that authenticated user is allowed to take the action they are trying to make.
There are many third party services that might help you with this (e.g. Auth0) where they can handle authentication for you and provide you with libraries for authorization.
Usually people bind authentication into their Gin-Gonic server by means of middleware (e.g. gin-jwt) which is run in front of every http request. Once that middleware authenticates the user, you can add some logic to your handle that states only users can only view themselves.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
Related
There is a lot of good content on the internet that explains how to secure a Spring API with Keycloak: Create a Client that represents the API Service in Keycloak and use a link like the one below to get the access and refresh token:
<Domain>/auth/realms/<realm>/protocol/openid-connect/auth/{some parameters}
This yields both tokens. So far so good.
Now, however, I am not sure how the flow for the frontend accessing the API should look like.
Should the frontend directly access this endpoint and, therefore, obtain the access and refresh token? That would mean that the API can only have the access-type public because there is no way to store the client (the API) secret securely.
Or should there be a third server that somehow stores the refresh token for each user, that the user can call if his access token is no longer valid. This server would then use the client's refresh token (and the client secret that could be stored securely, since it would be in the backend) to get a new access token from Keycloak and would forward it to the user.
I guess the main question that I am asking is, whether the client/user should get the refresh token.
If one needs to implement a logic according to the second option, I would be interested in a link or description of how something like this can be done in Spring.
I think, in either case you need to use the Authorization Code Flow. The implicit flow, which was recommended for SPAs (frontends without a backend server) in former versions of OAuth2 must not be used anymore.
The best option is to have a backend server, so the user retrieves the auth code via redirection and the backend server exchanges this auth code with the access and refresh tokens (and keep them without forwarding them to the frontend).
If there is no backend in place and your frontend needs to retrieve and hold the tokens directly, I would recommend to use the Authorization Code Flow with a public client and the PKCE extension (which - put simply - ensures that the entity asking for the auth code is the same as the entity asking for the tokens and that the auth code was not stolen and used by a foreign entity). There are several sources with more detailed explanations, which might help you, for example: https://auth0.com/docs/flows/authorization-code-flow-with-proof-key-for-code-exchange-pkce
Hope this helps you with your architectural considerations.
currently, I'm working on an application in which we want to offer a single sign-on experience, but let me put you in the context:
We have two different Cognito clients created for the same Cognito pool, both are configured to allow the users to login into two different applications:
App A: mydomain.com
App B: appb.mydomain.com
well, the thing is that when a user uses the hosted UI to log in to the first application, I noticed that the Cognito server creates a cookie called "Cognito" as can see in the image:
Cookie set by the auth server
Then, when a user tries to access the other application appb.mydomain.com, and the application, instead of showing the hosted UI, the user automatically enters the application without going to all the login process again, and this is possible because of the cookie I mentioned (when I delete that cookie, then the user is requested to login again using its credentials).
So, that's nice because the user doesn't need to go through all the login process again. But my situation is the following:
I want to create a login page in mydomain.com with my own customized form and using the Cognito SDK. I already have the backend working, also the frontend. The backend can authenticate users to get the JWT tokens (IDtoken, refresh token, etc.) as you can see in the next image:
Tokens I get when I authenticate a user
But at this point I'm not able to redirect the user to appb.mydomain.com with a valid session, I mean, I have the JWT tokens, and I tried to do the same thing that the hosted UI clients are doing, that is setting a cookie somehow containing the JWT session. But I don't know how to make the application appb.mydomain.com to be able to detect this cookie. But the most important problem is that I really don't know how to construct a valid cookie (like Cognito's) to be detected by mydomain.auth.eu-west-1.amazoncognito.com (this domain is shared for both Hosted UI clients).
I don't know if this approach is feasible, or if there is another approach to send a JWT token to the auth server with a callback to redirect the user to the appb.mydomain.com
without going to all the login process again or something like that.
Do you have any advice on how to implement this kind of SSO Experience? I'm using .Net Core in the backend.
been trying to figure this out forever, and I don't think it's supposed to be that complex...
I have an AzureAD setup with an OAuth2 Connection that I want to point to Cognito so that I can authenticate users in the User Pool, get a token back and call AppSync APIs, etc. Important note here, I cannot use Amplify in the current situation.
I have configured my App Client as follows:
The ngrok URLs are because I'm working on a cloud based app that needs tunneling. I have multiple URLs in there in the hope that I'd get one that works, to no avail.
To configure the OAuth2 Connection in Azure, I'm asked for 3 URLs,
authorize, token and refresh.
Here are the values I put into these fields
When I initiate the auth process with this connection, I get the redirect_mismatch error. I have no idea why. When I open the HostedUI, it shows up just fine, but it points to login instead of authorize. The redirect_uri, however, is localhost:3000/ as seen at the end of the address bar.
Clearly, I'm missing something, but I have no idea what. Should there be additional parameters in the config of my URLs on Azure's side? Anyone ever connected the two in this way? The company insists on this flow, and I just can't wrap my head around it.
Any and all help apreciated, thank you.
NOTE: There is a possibility to configure a custom OAuth2 connection on the side of Azure with more parameters, should this be the way? I do not, however, know what to put in these extra fields.
In the case of a Bot authentication, as it is the case in my situation, in Callback URLs, add the following:
https://token.botframework.com/.auth/web/redirect
This allows to open the authentication window when authenticating your bot.
It's common to use HTTPS for authentication, so the authentication details from client cannot be sniffed. However once the user is logged in then subsequent calls to a web app passing some sort of auth id which then the web app will then use to authorise with, should that not also be HTTPS? How is this done in things like Facebook? Seems easier to make all traffic HTTPS.
An answer by Jeff Atwood:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/should-all-web-traffic-be-encrypted.html
Assuming the server can handle it, I'd go a step further and use SSL for everything, no matter if users are logged in or not.
This has the advantage that an eavesdropper doesn't even know if the user is accessing your site/app as a guest or as an authenticated user. It also saves you from having to decide when to use SSL and when not.
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...