I am using MobileServiceClient for authentication, my provider is Microsoft and Google. After success login in response I am getting auth Token and Sid. But I want more detail. I am using this service for Xamarin forms. Is there any way to get more detail of login user like email, username, verified_email, family_name etc?
Yes. Send a request to the /.auth/me endpoint with the X-ZUMO-AUTH header set to the ZUMO token. You will get back a JSON blob that contains all the claims plus the identity provider token. You can use these to get the information you need if it is available.
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I'm creating an API server which will be consumed by a mobile app that I will work on later. I have yet to see any reference of API best practices related to user flow and returned data even after searching for several hours.
My question is whether the login response of an API should return the a personal access token with the refresh token along with the user info? Or should I just return the token and make another API call for getting the user info.
I could just do what I have in mind but I'm trying to learn the best practices so that I don't have to adjust a lot of things later.
I need suggestions as well as good references related to my question.
Thank you.
It depends on what you are using for your authentication. If you are using libraries like Laravel Passport or JWT, you can have the token endpoint which returns the access token, refresh token, validity period and the token type (Bearer). You can then have an authenticated endpoint which will be used to get a user's profile based of the token passed in the request header.
However, if you go through the documentation for those libraries, in most there is an allowance to manually generate a token. You can use this in a custom endpoint that will return the token as well as the user profile Passport Manually Generate Token.
If you are using JWT, you can also embed a few user properties in the token itself. The client can the get the profile info from the JWT itself without having to make a round trip to the server. Passport ADD Profile to JWT
If you have a custom way in which you are handling authentication, you can pass the token as well as the user profile in the same response.
In the end, it's up to you to decide what suits you best.
Have you looked at OpenID Connect? It's another layer on top of OAuth 2.0 and provides user authentication (OAuth 2.0 does not cover authentication, it just assumes it happens) and ways to find information about the current user.
It has the concept of an ID_token, in addition to the OAuth access token, and also provides a /userinfo endpoint to retrieve information about the user.
You could put user information in your access token, but security best practice is to NOT allow your access token to be accessible from JavaScript (i.e. use HTTP_ONLY cookies to store your access token).
I have a Web API and AngularJS client. The API is using default authorization provider given by visual studio to generate the token on token request with grant_type 'password'.
The AngularJS client is able to get the bearer token from Web API by calling the token endpoint with credentials and later passes this token to perform authorized requests in the API.
When AngularJS sends the token on any authorized API call, how is Web API able to validate the token? Where does the token get stored?
I checked in Identity tables in SQL server, I could not find any fields to store this token information. I checked in the configuration file, it is not stored there either. Could you please help me in understanding this concept?
Raj,
By default the token is not stored by the server. Only your client has it and is sending it through the authorization header to the server.
If you used the default template provided by Visual Studio, in the Startup ConfigureAuth method the following IAppBuilder extension is called: app.UseOAuthBearerTokens(OAuthOptions).
This extension coming from the Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Owin package makes it easy for you to generate and consume tokens, but it is confusing as it is an all in one.
Behind the scene it's using two Owin middlewares:
OAuthAuthorizationServerMiddleware: authorize and deliver tokens
OAuthBearerAuthenticationMiddleware: occurs at the PipelineStage.Authenticate, read the authorization header, check if the token is valid and authenticate the user.
To answer you questions WebAPI is able to validate the token thanks to the OAuthBearerAuthenticationMiddleware, it will ensure that the token sent through the authorization header is valid and not expired. And the token is stored only by your client, if the client loose it, it will have to request a new one.
I advise you to get deeper in the OAuth protocol, and instead of using the extension UseOAuthBearerTokens, take a look at UseOAuthAuthorizationServer and UseOAuthBearerAuthentication, it will help you to better understand how it works.
The generated token will most likely be a JWT (Get Started with JSON Web Tokens), which means it's a self-contained token that is signed with a secret/key that only the server or other trusted parties know.
JSON Web Token (JWT) is an open standard (RFC 7519) that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed.
(emphasis is mine)
This means that when receiving the token the server can ensure that:
the token was originally issued by a trusted party by checking that the signature is valid.
the token is associated with a user that has permissions to perform the following request because the token itself contains information that uniquely identifier that user.
This type of approach has the side-benefit that the server does not need to keep track or store the generated tokens in order to validate them at a later time. Since no one else has the secret/key you can't modify the token without making the signature component invalid, which would then mean a faked token would end up being rejected by the server.
This is a simplified description of what happens, there are much more details around how to issue and validate tokens correctly. You should read the OAuth2 and OpenID Connect specification to learn more on the subject of token-based authentication.
Also note that I assumed a JWT token because it's the format that currently has the most widespread adoption to accomplish scenarios like these ones and it's also the token format to use in conjunction with OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. However, it's still possible to achieve the same with other token formats.
I am writing a code in salesforce to update Email signature using the API documentation mentioned in https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/email-settings/. I am using a 3 legged approach.
Considering that this is an API for domain admins, My questions is
can a user ( non - admin) provide authorization for this API ?.
And can the access token returned as a result of this authorization be used to update his email signature. ?
Right now I am getting an Error 403- "you are not authorized to access this API
Note that this is working fine if a domain admin provide authorization and his access token is used to update his/ any user's email signature
Thanks for your help
With the new updates on the GMAIL Api you can get the user signature by using the method "Users.settings.sendAs: get" explained here https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference/users/settings/sendAs/get and it does not require the user to be an admin. This method returns a Users.settings.sendAs resource in the response body and this resource contains the property signature which you can manipulate.
Hope it helps!
I've created a WebAPI OData 3.0 web service with an OWIN middleware, which is configured for authentication with Windows Azure Active Directory.
The ODataControllers are marked with an [Authorize] attribute, and the IAppBuilder is configured as follows:
app.UseWindowsAzureActiveDirectoryBearerAuthentication(
new WindowsAzureActiveDirectoryBearerAuthenticationOptions
{
Tenant = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ida:Tenant"],
TokenValidationParameters = new TokenValidationParameters {
ValidAudience = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ida:Audience"]
},
});
ida:Tenant is my Windows Azure tenancy, and ida:Audience is the App ID Uri.
Now I would like to consume this service using Excel PowerQuery, authenticating using an account from the AzureAD. However, when I choose "Organizational account" and try to "Sign in", I get the following error:
Unable to connect. This credential type is not supported for this resource.
In Fiddler I can see that the request is made with a Bearer header, but it is empty.
I would like to achieve a behavior similar to when querying AzureAD Graph.
For example, if I try to consume https://graph.windows.net/.onmicrosoft.com/users?api-version=2013-04-05, a single sign-on window opens, and in Fiddler I can see that a token is passed.
How can I achieve this behavior? what am I missing?
Thanks!
Here is the expected flow between PowerQuery and an OData service during authentication:
When you enter the URI to your service in the builder, click ok, you will get a credential prompt asking for your credentials to access the service.
Typically, you would choose Organizational Account if Azure Active Directory (AAD) is your Identity Provider.
When you click sign in, PowerQuery will send a challenge request to your service, which is the empty bearer you are seeing. The reason is, we don't know what's your identity provider or where should we log you in, the request is expecting a 401/403 response with a WWW-Authenticate header that has the authentication endpoint url.
Here is the expected header format:WWW-Authenticate authorization_uri=”token service uri” quotes are optional. If we don't find that header, you get the error message 'Unable to connect. This credential type is not supported'.
For example, in your scenario, the token service uri is https://login.windows.net
When we receive that response, we will get the url from the header and issue a login request, at which point you will see the login page from AAD and you will be able to login using your organizational credentials.
We will wait for the sign in result, which should be a token, that token will be used to fill in the bearer in the header at anytime you request data from that service.
There are two important things regarding your application object in AAD to make this work:
The AppIdUris property has to have a wildcard URI that would match with your service URI. When we send the login request we have to include a resource id, the resource is the authority of the service we are connecting to. So if your service url is: myservice.com/myODatafeed.svc, the authority includes the scheme, the host and the port number, myservice.com/ would be the authority. For services that might have different tenants for example: company1.myservice.com, the AppIdUri has to have https://*.myservice.com. Otherwise, just https://myservice.com.
The second thing (and this on is AAD specific), AAD doesn't support first party client (PowerQuery) to third party service (your service) authentication today. but hopefully soon enough :) Maybe just when you get the rest done :)!
Update: This has been enabled in the latest release of PowerQuery. Your app will need to expose the user_imperonation scope, and you are good to go :)!
I know this question asked many times but I did not get answer that I required.
I want link that can help me to create a spring security framework, In which I donot whant login form validation.
It should be done by login RestAPI. I just hit url like-
http://localhost:8080/login
post request containing username and password and it return json response with sucess or failure status
if sucess I would be able to hit secure API Requests.
I am using spring and spring security since 1 and half year with spring security to develop rest API I use below technique for user authentication
Follow below steps
Allow to access http:// localhost:8080/login for all user
User will pass username and password in body
Authenticate user with database entry
create access token and send back to response
using this access token user with interact with secure API.
I will provide source code if you need.
I suggest you to try with Basic Authentication. I believe Rest services are mutual contract between the consumer and provider, so re design your service to access the basic auth header. Your client need to pass the base64 encoded value of username:password, Your service should get the header value and decode you will get the original data back, Check against your backend storage (Ldap or DB).
More about basic authentication . BasicAuthentication