We are calling Google api via https://www.googleapis.com for social login on our website. Everything works fine upto staging , however on Live server due to firewall restriction api calls are throwing socket exception.
What is the best way to configure our live server to allow connectivity to Google.
Is there a list of ip addresses . How can I make sure it's all up to date.
Note: You must be using Google Maps for Work (paid) in order to host maps on a website that is behind a firewall. Otherwise you are in breach of the terms of service.
As for configuring your firewall, Google will provide you with all of the settings that are needed. You don't need to make constant changes to keep it working.
The primary source of information for configuring your firewall is found here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/articles/prelaunch_checklist#firewall
Configure Firewall to Allow Access to the Google Maps API Services
Why it's important: The Maps API services use a variety of domains, some which do not belong to the *google.com domain. If you are behind a restrictive firewall, it is important you understand which Maps API services use which domains.
Failure to allow access to the correct domains will cause API requests to fail, which can break your applications. For a complete listing of domains used by the Maps APIs, please consult our portal resource (login required):
Log in to the Google Enterprise Support Portal
The support portal is only available to Google Maps API for Work users.
Navigate to the "Resources" tab
Select the Resource called "List of domains used by the Google Maps API Family."
You should allow your applications to access these domains.
Please note that we do not recommend managing firewall restrictions by IP address, as the IPs associated with these domains are not static.
Related
I basically have an API that is going to be used with a web app and a mobile app. I don't want the API to publically available, where should I deploy it then? is there a way without using AWS? Thanks, Nav :)
There are multiple ways of doing this. This is a sensitive topic, as this is an opinion-based field.
However, I will try to answer below - and challange your way of approaching this.
It really depends on your 'operational' skills, funds, need for security, deadline(s) etc.
Basically you need to make an endpoint available on the www, without everybody being able to connect.
You could either:
Deploy a virtual machine or web app. in Azure/AWS/GCP/... and whitelist the IP's you need to connect from.
Rent a VPS from any provider, and deploy your application here - Again, whitelisting. (Edit: Not phones, since this IP changes constantly. A proxy can be implemented here (potential bottleneck), or any authentication mechanism like OAuth, JWT, Certificates etc. can be implemented either on the ingress controller (e.g. NGINX) or the application itself.)
Deploy the application on your Home-PC, order a static IP to your home and make a forwarded port and set up security on your premise (not recommended, and raises and bunch of other headaches)
Get in touch with a company that hosts web applications (Can be quite expensive)
Based on the limited information provided in your question, there is a ton of options, nice-2-haves and factors that comes in to play when choosing the setup that suits your needs.
You should also consider; VPN usage, Backup/disaster recovery, data leaks, redundancy, the need for future deploys, how you would access your environment in six months....
I hope this answered your question, but also raised a few for you to answer yourself.
Finally, I'd recommend you looking for inspiration here.
EDIT:
Question:
Whitelisting mobile IP's.
VPS selected.
Answer:
This becomes quite a task when mobile phones tend to change IP's frequently.
Since you are looking further into the VPS setup, you are more in control of the setup and can choose to look into OAuth and JWT.
Links:
OAuth - https://oauth.net/getting-started/ https://developer.okta.com/blog/2019/01/22/oauth-api-keys-arent-safe-in-mobile-apps
NGINX JWT - https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/configuring-jwt-authentication/
So - At the end of the day, you can make your app use a proxy (potential bottleneck) and whitelist this IP, or make the endpoint open (any -> 443) and implement an authentication mechanism like the ones mentioned above.
Consider implementing a DMZ zone for incoming traffic from the web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMZ_(computing)
and put your application behind this zone, making sure that the only the DMZ zone is facing the internet, and the server hosting your application is talking to the server in the DMZ.
Again, this is quite a big topic and is hard to simplify to a stackoverflow post.
If you are hosting the app on AWS you have a couple of options.
API Gateway now supports private endpoints. These endpoints can not be called via the public internet. That means if your app is hosted on AWS only the internal services of the app can call the end point. i.e. front end to database etc. I've used this method for internal micro services such as placing in house app data onto kinesis streams.
Alternatively, if you don't want to use API Gateway you have lots of options. Most of which would involve you creating rest APIs from where ever you plan on hosting your code. This could be on the server it's self or some sort of container.
API Gateway Private Endpoint Reference:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-amazon-api-gateway-private-endpoints/
I am making requests to the Google Geocoding API within my node project. In production the project is running on Containers (AWS Elastic Container Service) which means the IP address for the service can change automatically - this means that I constantly have to update the IP whitelist in my Google API Key.
IP whitelisting is the only means by which I can secure the API Key. Furthermore, if I don't secure it then the key shortly becomes useless because of unauthorized use from another source.
Is there a practical solution to securing the connection with the Geocoding API from an application running on containers?
Thanks in advance for your help!
When you create your key for the Geocoding API you can simply add no website restrictions. The security implication is that your key is now usable from anywhere so the import of keeping it safe is a bit higher.
I have an Azure web app up and running, using a custom domain purchased outside of Azure... and that all runs fine. So I have https://myappname.azurewebsites.net/ loading fine with my domain name URL https://www.myappname.com
I'm trying to upgrade the web app, though using Azure Traffic Manager. I've cloned the app a few times, each on its own app service plan, and I have the traffic manager all up and running fine. I can successfully hit different versions of my cloned website based on the traffic manager configuration profile... so no issues there.
The only issue is that I can only access the "traffic managed" version of my website via the standard azure URL -> myappname.trafficmanager.net.
All examples I've seen say all I really need to do now, is go into my DNS Management screen, and add domain forwarding, however, my online DNS management tool does not offer this option.
I can't really change my A record in the DNS management screen, because I don't know the IP address of myappname.trafficmanager.net
Every place I've tried to change the name of the current/working Azure URL (like in awverify text files, www cnames, etc.) does nothing. The DNS still points to the single instance which remains in the IP address od the DNS managers A record.
Also, since my live/single instance is linked to the domain name (along with the SSL binding), I can't add those properties to the clones, which makes sense....only one version can be live. However I could unbind that when I make the switch from the single instance web app to the traffic managed set of clones, but I fear I can only bind that to one of the clones. I can't seem to bind it to the myappname.trafficmanager.net version, which might cascade down to all of its endpoints. Is there a way to bind my domain name and SSL cert to more than one version of my web app?
Thanks!
Is there a way to bind my domain name and SSL cert to more than one
version of my web app?
I don't think you can do that unless you have two different domains or subdomains with each own SSL cert. Each web app hostname is unique globally and each SSL binding is attached with the web app domain name.
If you have a purchased domain and just keep the default xxx.azurewebsites.net as each hostname. Then you could configure the two Azure app serves as the endpoint of TM.
By default, Azure provided a wildcard cert for this domain *azurewebsites.net, so you can automatically access this hostname with HTTPS without any extra cert. Then use a CNAME record www in the domain domain.com in your DNS provider to point to the traffic manager hostname myappname.trafficmanager.net. Since Traffic Manager works as DNS level, it does not validate the server and client SSL, you could safely ignore the SSL warning when accessing with traffic manager hostname.
Feel free to let me know if you have any question.
I am using URL Shortener API to shorten our mobile app download link. (https://www.googleapis.com/)
We have some restrictions on our server such that we don't allow unrecognized IP access.
So I would like to know what would be the IP range that googles use when the URL is shortened using this API (https://www.googleapis.com/).
This will help us to configure our security settings to allow access to these IP's
google-apis-explorer
When you say "using the URL Shortener API", are you referring to making calls to this API from your server (as in outbound traffic is IP restricted) or using the short URL to reach your server (as in inbound traffic is IP restricted)? I'll go ahead and answer both possibilities, but please clarify if these weren't what you meant.
If you're trying to allow calls to this API from your server with outbound traffic IP restricted
The URL shortener API can be called through any of Google's IP addresses. There's no way to get a list of these because they will vary by location, load balancing, etc. Plus, you wouldn't want to attempt to restrict by IP this way because whitelisting even one of Google's IP addresses would allow calls from your server to all of Google's services. This likely includes any service hosted on Google Cloud, which could be a proxy, meaning literally anything in the world could be called this way; you'd be entirely eliminating IP restrictions on your server.
If you're trying to shorten your server's URLs using this API and your server has inbound traffic IP restricted
You shouldn't need to do anything. These URLs are just domain redirects. In the end, the user ends up visiting your website (server) using its actual long URL (there's no proxying), so just whitelist the allows users' IPs and it should work.
I'm developing a web application using Laravel hosting on a public cloud. Now, the application can be accessed publicly on the internet via domain address. However, I want to restrict to only users who are connecting to the organization networks to be able to use the application since we do not want the application to be used at home or elsewhere.
At the moment, the organization has 2 places (2 public internet networks) where they must be able to access to the application. Both of them are using home-standard internet where IP address changes every time the internet reconnects. As we do not have static IP addresses, I cannot filter user by using IP address filter. The IP filter rule must be changed every time when the organization network reconnected.
My application already have solid authentication and authorization mechanism and, of course, the users must know this information since they must access the app for work. However, this doesn't meet the requirement.
I have thought about the VPN but it (probably) doesn't not work because if we allow user the access to the VPN, they still be able to access the VPN anywhere and use the application outside the work places. If we restrict the VPN client to access from specific IP address, then when the IP changes, the same problem occurs.
To sum up, I would like to ask for the advice on how to restrict the access of web application, hosted on public internet, to the users that are connecting from the public IP address that can change every time when the internet reconnected. The requirement may sound strange but it is as it is. Please feel free to ask for more details if you want to and have a discussions on the suggestions.
Thank you in advance.
You could setup a client for a dynamic dns service (e.g. dyndns) on the client-side.
Then you could use that on the server-side to always check against current IP using that dns.
As alternative you could bind the website to localhost only and only let it be accessed via an pubkey-enforced SSH tunnel (and make that get auto-established by a script/scheduler on the client side, on a permission level outside of the users' reach, so that they can't take the private key needed for the connection anywhere)
You can use different PHP methods and variables to detect from where the request has been originated. Just whitelist your domains and organizations, and allow only them by adding a middleware.
Additionally, you can generate a token using Laravel Passport or you can create your own mechanism, and then use that token to authenticate if the request is valid or not.
Since the IP changes, you can setup a dynamic dns or as suggested on the comment above.