I am developing a web system in php using the laravel framework, I arrived at the part of authentication of users, where it is not allowed the type of user x access to page y. What is the best way to do this with laravel? I thought about creating a session and saving the id of the user, so every time he accesses a certain controller I check if he has access to the id or not. so I had some doubts.
Is this a good way to perform this authentication?
Is this really safe?
is there any way for the client to change my session?
What would be a better method for authenticating user access?
Laravel provides a very good authentication system out of the box. Even though Hacking is inevitable it provides very good protection and since Laravel is pretty popular framework you don't have to worry about the security part. if there is any security bug, patches will be available almost immediately.
And your second concern can a client can change the session ? the answer is NO, if you code it properly. session resides in the server unlike cookies, so there is no direct way for a user to change the session. if you follow good coding practices you are good to go.
And how do you limit userA from accessing pageB. This is a pretty common feature needed in almost all the applications. As of now Laravel does not provide an out of the box solution for this. but this is pretty simple, you can add a role column to the users table, and check whether user have appropriate permission in each page. Laravel keeps the user object in the session, and it is avilable via the auth() helper or Auth Facade. if you want a little sophisticated solution there is a package out there [entrust][1]. it seems a good choice.
You may want to read about
Authorization
Csrf Protection
Authentication
I hope I have addressed all your concerns
Laravel provides a simple way to authorize action thats purpose built for what you need:
https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/authorization
Related
I start building a new app and wonder what will be the best way to implement auth - security wise.
What are the cons, pros, and differences between the Laravel make:auth and using jwt-auth.
Is Laravel's default auth will be enough?
This description is pragmatic approach so you can do something else if you want.
I think while developing an API you should use JWT based authentication mechanism.
The Json Web Token(JWT) tokens includes user information in itself. So it giving so much important benefit to manage session. First and most important of the benefits is you can be manage sessions without storing them at server. I would like to explaint it just to avoid misunderstanding, you can have store it at server but it's not necessary except a few scenario. These scenarios depend on how you could designed your authentication.
I able to do a lot of more explains about of it but in summary if you are developing an API I propose you would use JWT-Token.
My question may be answered here, Are sessions needed for python-social-auth, but I feel as if I'd be making assumptions and would like to be positive regarding my understanding (NOTE: I'm not using django, I'm using mongo express react node, I'm guessing django might come with sessions built in or something). I followed this guide https://medium.com/hyphe/token-based-authentication-in-node-6e8731bfd7f2 to add token authentication and user login to my CRUD web app, works great, users are authenticated properly, routes are protected. However, everywhere I read about the fundamentals of session and session management states that "every web application in the world that maintains user data has to deal with sessions" (source: https://nodewebapps.com/2017/06/18/how-do-nodejs-sessions-work/). Currently, my react client uses setInterval to regularly check if the access token will expire soon enough to receive a new one via the refresh token. Is implementing sessions required for my app? If so, what is it that they add that I am missing?
It depends on the type of application.
If the resources being accessed using a token are not user specific, then sessions are not useful.
However, in a scenario where the resources are unique for different users (e.g. one has to sign in, etc), then it's wise to implement both sessions and access tokens.
Remember that tokens can also be saved within a session. Checkout 'express-session' to implement sessions in expressjs.
I am doing the security of my website and I'm using the Auth module that Laravel provides, as you know there are a lot of ways to perform security, you can use the middleware Auth to protect Routes, you can protect your controllers and views with the same module, that is what I'm doing right now.
I want to know from someone has experience hacking this system if just protecting my the routes where I want more security is more than enough, or I should keep protecting controllers and views that I don't want other people have access.
It is a simple question and I don't know if I should better put this question in the meta stack overflow.
Well, as far as i know, you can just protect routes. Routes are the way that people is going to access your application, they cant have access to the plain controller code. Using the auth you are going to create an "authentication" session, this is, you are going to protect the specific routes and give access just to an authorized person, this person is going to have an user/password to have access to your route. This is enough as route wise, but you (laravel takes care of it for you) have to be aware of sql injection and other stuff, thats the way that hackers will be able to have access to your information.
This is a follow-up question to Is Forms Authentication as described in the Nancy docs susceptible to session hijacking?
I understand now how Nancy Form Authentication works and also the idea behind it, thanks to Steven Robbins' answer.
However, for my application that approach is not sufficient. It must not be possible to gain eternal access for an attacker if he manages to steal the auth cookie once. Thus, I'm currently investigating possibilities to switch to a session-based approach to authentication, so I can invalidate sessions when the user logs out and also after a fixed amount of time.
Nice thing about Nancy, such things can be customized!
My question is, does it make sense to reuse Nancy.FormsAuthentication for that purpose? One solution I have in mind is making the user identifier only temporarily valid. That way I would delete the GUID identifier from the user database when the user logs out, and create a new one everytime a user logs in.
I'm asking because the docs state:
It is also important to know that the identifier should be treated as
permanent for the user that it was generated for and will be reused
across requests and application sessions.
Are there any unwanted side-effects when I ignore that and make the identifier non-permanent?
Yes and no.
If you change it each time the user logs in then you are effectively logging the user out.
You could create a Session / Identity table which allows the same user to login multiple times (assuming that the browser is different) which would allow you to manage the timeout / extending the timeout on each authentication.
That would require no changes to the Forms Auth, you would simply change the IUserMapper to authenticate against your Session / Identity table rather than the user directly.
(hope all that makes sense)
I implemented codeigniter Ion_Auth library for user registration and etc. I noticed it does not have a built-in user manager such as edit user accounts. Does a user manager such as edit user accounts exist? I can always code one, but I rather not reinvent the wheel.
I use Ion Auth too, it is pretty well coded I and I like writing code with it.
I also needed users editing, but I find it quite easy, because I needed only one simple form, because the library has update_user() and you need only to pass an array with your new data.
Download a CMS because it looks to me you have little or no experience with codeigniter or php for that matter. I dont mean that in a rude way by any means but if you cant perform simple CRUD operations, install a pre-built system as it will save you lots of headaches.
I've just started using CI and am also using Ion Auth for authentication. I'm handling user signup/authentication exclusively with ion auth and extending public profiles using Grocery CRUD. All public info can be viewed globally, but only edited by the user that owns it (as defined by linking the ion auth user table to the extended profile table). I don't know if this is the best way to do it, but it is what I'm doing so far.