What is the recommended way to restrict my django rest framework APIs to be available to my mobile and web apps only ? I'm using django-rest-auth to authenticate my users. There are some APIs that can be accessed anonymously. But I need to make sure that all the APIs are available only through my apps (mobile and web).
Any help/tutorials are highly appreciated.
Thank you
You need to setup the authorization scheme at the configuration level to restrict it to your mobile / web app only and explicitly set the public ones at the class level. See http://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/permissions/#setting-the-permission-policy about implementation details.
Because all requests can be sniffed you can't use any Secret-key or check for HTTP origin (it can be faked easily).
For mobile you can try using secret-key generator with some special algorithm. Fro example MD5(current_time + your_secret_phrase). Then you will be able to verify that code is acceptable. It will make using your API almost impossible for sniffers.
But for Web you can't do much. All headers can be faked. The only way - user authentication.
You can, of course, use Secret-key and change it every month/day/hour. But is it worth it?
Related
I've been searching for a solution that makes sense for the past few days, so forgive me if I overlooked something or am ignorant to the correct path.
I have an existing Website built with asp.net framework MVC where users register for Individual Accounts and are stored in a MSSQL Database. I'm creating a Xamarin.Forms app where we want users to login with their website credentials.
I've been looking at Microsoft docs to try and accomplish this. In the past I created an Apache Cordova app (2014) that communicated in a similar fashion successfully (potentially in an insecure way) that called the /Token endpoint and Authenticated the user with 'grant_password' flow and returned the user data to the app.
So I landed on this documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth-ropc
However, from what I can gather it basically says this should be avoided moving forward and a MSAL approach should be used if possible.
After reading through hours and hours of documentation trying to make sense of it all, I can't seem to grasp what my options are. It seems to me that in any MSAL flow, users will have to login with Microsoft accounts or other social accounts (facebook, google).
Am I missing something?
Am I going to have to go against Microsoft's advice and end up storing the client_id and client_secret within the Xamarin app source code? Which from everything I've read is a big security concern, especially with Android apps.
References: 1. Restrict API requests to only my own mobile app 2. How to secure an API REST for mobile app? (if sniffing requests gives you the "key")
Any help or direction would be really appreciated. Thank you
Your focus should be on requirements + understanding preferred designs rather than jumping to a technology.
DIRECTION
Standard modern systems look like this:
Mobile apps use OpenID Connect to sign users in
Authorization Server issues access tokens to the mobile app
APIs authorize requests via JWTs containing scopes and claims
Aim to make iterative steps towards this type of architecture.
PATTERNS
Plug in an Authorization Server, which uses your existing database as a credential store
Mobile app uses AppAuth Libraries to sign users in and receives access tokens
Back end can handle JWTs without data security risks
DIFFICULT AREAS
Your existing back end may have no support for mobile clients, and be too web focused - eg requiring cookies to access data, so may need to be split in be into 2 entry points.
Choosing an Authorization Server (while you are learning) is difficult, because you may not know what you want yet.
The mobile app will spin up the system browser and present a login page from the Authorization Server, so the login UX could be unexpected.
STEP 1
Ensure that you can authenticate from the mobile app, then make API calls with JWTs and ensure that requests for data are properly authorized. This could use ropc and involve a temporary API. But the deliverable should be that your back end now supports calls from mobile apps.
STEP 2
Integrate AppAuth into the mobile app, which is tricky but there are resources online such as Curity Mobile Guides. Update the mobile app to use the Code Flow and integrate an Authorization Server, then deal with connecting to credential stores.
SUMMARY
This stuff is hard and reflects the cost of modernising architectures. It requires people agreement as well as the technical stuff. Happy to answer follow up questions if it helps.
We have a custom built web app backed by a REST API. We already have existing user accounts that are created via our system. We've just recently integrated Domo to do reporting and they recommend Okta.
Is it possible to get have users sign in on our site and in the background also sign them into Okta via an API call/OAUTH request etc?
Yes it is. The methods are available via the API, and I just created app that demos exactly this in Python. Check out http://developer.okta.com/docs/api/resources/authn.html for links to test stuff in Postman. My basic approach was to have Okta be the system of record, but it can certainly be the other way :)
I am building a mobile app in which the users need to be authenticated via TrueVault which is a HIPAA compliant data store. TrueVault offers a REST API and generate an access token post basic authentication. They have endpoints to check token validity etc too.
We need to do 2 things:
1) Authenticate all users via TrueVault and store the auto generated TrueVault id in Parse to facilitate data mapping.
2) Setup an interceptor in Parse which verifies the access token with TrueVault before serving any protected resource.
What would be the simplest and most efficient way to implement the above? I have gone through the tutorial to add Third Party oAuth to the mobile apps, but TrueVault does not have oAuth in place yet and thus needs authorization requests via Basic Auth only. Also, would we need Cloud Code for the above or Custom Web Hooks?
Thanks
Sameer
i would suggest you to use retrofit, Gson(or jackson) and rxjava(rxAndroid) in order to handle all api calls, i made a quick overview to the api documentation and this libraries should work for this problem.
links:
https://github.com/square/retrofit
https://code.google.com/p/google-gson/
https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxAndroid
Cheers.
We're developing an API and a single page application (that is one of more possible future consumers of it).
We already started on the web API, and basically implemented a system very similar to the one John Papa made in his course on pluralsight, named "Building Single Page Apps (SPA) with HTML5, ASP.NET Web API, Knockout and jQuery".
We now need to implement authentication and user managing in this application and need to find the easy way out to implement this in as little time as possible as we are in a hurry.
We realized the SPA template included in the ASP.NET update had very similar features to our needs, but we wonder what the best approach to implement a similar feature in our existing code.
We are novice developers, as you might figure.
Is it possible nstall some packages using the package manager, and voila, a simple membership and OAuth auth option be readily available?
Our use case is that we need to protect some resources on our API based on roles, and that one should be able to log in using a username and password, but also log in using ones facebook, google, or twitter account.
Found an interesting talk regarding the subject here: https://vimeo.com/43603474 named Dominick Baier - Securing ASP.NET Web APIs.
Synopsis: Microsoft’s new framework for writing RESTful web services and web APIs is appropriately enough called ASP.NET Web API. As the name applies, this technology is part of ASP.NET and also inherits its well-known security architecture. But in addition it also supports a number of new extensibility points and a flexible hosting infrastructure outside of IIS. There are a number of ways how to do authentication and authorization in Web API - from Windows to usernames and passwords up to token based authentication and everything in between. This talk explores the various options, and puts special focus on technologies like claims, SAML, OAuth2, Simple Web Tokens and delegation.
We eventually went with the SPA template, doing authentication on the API (separate MVC part).
Then the API would generate a unique token and redirect the user to the front-end with the token in url parameters.
The front-end then needs to send this token on every subsequent request.
Have a look here - Identity Server done by the security experts. This is all you need in one package.
In terms of OAuth, you would need to use Client-Side Web Application flow which the access token is issue immediately to the client and can be used.
I have the task to build a new API. The API will mainly be used by tablet applications.
I'm thinking of using the new ASP WebApi.
My biggest concern however is the security part. Because the apps will be build by third-party companies, we do not want that usercredentials will be entered in their application, but redirected to our site (authenticationserver).
I have done some researching and I came accross OAuth 2.0. For working with mobile devices and tablets it's probably the best to work with the 'autohorization code flow' principle -correct me if I'm wrong-.
Am I thinking in the right direction or are their simpler authentication systems to achieve my goal?
Are their any frameworks (.NET) available (or documentation) how to create an Authentication Server and how to use it in the Asp webapi?
Is it easy these days to implement oauth2.0 in an IOS app?
Thanks for any help!
OAuth 2.0 authz code based grant is suitable when client app is a Web application. Will the apps that are going to be built by third party all be Web applications? There are HTTP redirects involved in that flow.
In OAuth 2.0, there is a client, there is a resource server (Web API in your case) and there is an authorization server. There is no such thing as Authentication server. Are you referring to some thing else?