Keep Facebook session alive? - session

I know there is the offline_permission option, but is there a way to keep the Facebook session alive?
Facebook generates the session from the stored cookie, so I am not sure, if a periodical API request renews the session.

The offline_access extended permission keeps the token you receive alive. Checkout the documentation at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/permissions/
Enables your app to perform authorized requests on behalf of the user at any time. By default, most access tokens expire after a short time period to ensure applications only make requests on behalf of the user when the are actively using the application. This permission makes the access token returned by our OAuth endpoint long-lived.
You don't need to make repeat calls to keep the token active, you can just store it and use it as needed. Here's an answer that describes how to use the token with the PHP SDK: How to login with OFFLINE_ACCESS using the new Facebook PHP SDK 3.0.0?

Related

How to invalidate mobile personal access token after backend deletion?

I am using Laravel as my backend together with Sanctum which generates personal access token for mobile users. For my mobile application I am using flutter.
To authenticate users they login with their username/password and get a personal access token in return. This works but requires a user to login every time they open the application again so I did what most tutorials suggest which is saving the token on the mobile device using shared preferences/secure storage.
Now comes the question how do you invalidate a user when you remove their token from the backend? On initial login it appears everything is still fine because like in most tutorial I check for the existence of a token. After that whenever I want to make a request which uses the token I obviously run into problems because it not longer exists on the backend.
Most tutorials/guide suggest saving the token and using that a reference to see if the user is logged in or not but this seems flawed because it gives the false impression you actually have a valid token.
My guess is this can be solved by always performing a heartbeat/ping action to check if the current token is valid and if not send them to the login screen instead of simply checking for the existence of the token.
Thoughts on this?
I can suggest a hack or trick here in every launch of the app you can send a request to an API to check if the user's token is valid or not and if it is valid then you can continue the app otherwise force the user to login and generate new token this way your app will be secure via server / API.
For this, you can store the user's secret token in the database and check it via HTTP API call and send a response from the API accordingly and check the response in app and do the next operation according to the response you get.
I don't know if this is a great way of doing this job but it is a kind of hack/trick to achieve what is needed.
Thanks

OneLogin programmatic session cookie validation - No browser

I have the following scenario that I am curious if it is possible to implement. I need to use SSO and more specifically OneLogin to authenticate the user via custom UI from my Java standalone application. I know this can be done via Create Session Login Token and then Create session via token One Login API calls. With some parsing I can get the session cookie out of the last call and store it.
Now I need to programmatically hit the API server, which is to be build still and this server somehow needs to validate the session cookie that I am going to send along with request. The key word "Programatically" as in there will be no browser
OneLogin doesn't provide SDK to validate existing session cookie => it would be nice if I could, based on session cookie find out if it is still valid and what is the user name used for this session. If session is invalid API server would return unauthorized.
Is this even possible? Or is it possible in some other way?
Basically One Login is already used in our ecosystem and I have to continue using it
The app that will log user in and get the session cookie may not be the one calling the API server. This could be another java application that would receive the session
I guess what I am looking for is Validate Session equivalent from Open ID Connect API in general API
The session_token that is returned via that API has a short expiry is only intended to be used for making the Create Session request which returns session cookies.
It sounds like OpenId Connect might be the best option for this use case. If you have user credentials then you could use the Resource Owner Password Grant flow to authenticate the user and obtain an id_token.
The id_token is a JWT containing user details can then be verified for authenticity by checking its signature, audience and expiry claims. It can also hold other custom information about the user that may be used by your backend application.

Should I or shouldn't I use refresh tokens with Password Grant authorization in Laravel Passport?

If I have a single page web application with a Laravel back end, my best option for authentication seems to be Passport with a Password Grant authentication flow. In Passport, this returns an access token and a refresh token.
For security, I would like to issue a short lived access token and refresh it when it expires. However, all the available information about using OAuth with a Javascript application says "don't make your refresh token accessible to the front end" because it's long-lived and can be used by others to generate new access tokens.
For example:
A Single-Page Application (normally implementing Implicit Flow) should
not ever receive a Refresh Token. A Refresh Token is essentially a
user credential that allows a user to remain authenticated
indefinitely. This sensitive information should be stored securely and
not exposed client-side in a browser.
Does this mean that a browser-based SPA cannot use refresh tokens and must, therefore, only issue access tokens that expire after a reasonable "session" length, forcing the user to log in again afterwards?
Otherwise, is there a suitable way to implement short-lifespan access tokens and refresh tokens in a Laravel Passport app with Password Grant authentication, while maintaining good security?
There is no harm in storing refresh token, as they can be used to get another access token after the access token(short lived as you mentioned) expires which create a good user experience.

Open ID Connect Session Management Access/Refresh Token vs Session iFrame

We have a web app in which we allow users to log into the app using any Open ID provider(e.g. Okta, Google, Facebook etc.). We want to implement the correct Open ID Connect prescribed methodology/workflow to keep the user logged into the site.
The existing implementation, looks at the expiry of the Access Token then if it's close to expiry uses a Refresh Token to get a new Access Token to keep the user logged in. I feel like this is wrong. When a user logs in to the web app, the Identity Token is used to Authenticate the identity of the user using the Authorization Code workflow. The Access Token and Refresh Token are stored on the server side. Periodically, the Refresh Token is used to get new Access Tokens to keep the user logged into the site. I believe this is a security risk because -
Imagine if a user is logged onto his OP account in a browser. He opens up Sky and is directly logged into MP because he’s already logged into MP. He then in a separate tab, logs out of his OP account. He will continue to be logged into MP for days on the basis of this Refresh Token/Access Token mechanism! Isn’t this a security risk?
If feel like the correct way to go about this is to use Session Management using iframes as prescribed here on OIDC -
https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-session-1_0.html
For more context, when a user logs into our WebApp we pull data from the OP's UserInfo endpoint to create a profile within our WebApp and set permissions/roles within our app based on data sent over from the OP's UserInfo endpoint. We continue doing this periodically. For this purpose, I feel like using the Access Token(and using the Refresh Token to get new Access Token) to access the UserInfo API is correct because it conforms to the OAuth 2.0 concept of protecting/authorizing API/Resource endpoints using Access Tokens.
I want to know if this is indeed the correct way to manage how a user should be logged in when supporting Open ID Connect.
I think the first question is whether you want to bind the lifetime of an OpenID Connect provider Single Sign On session with the session of your application. You just want to authenticate a user using their OpenID Connect service. If I logout of Google, I expect to be logged out of GMail, but not a third-party application that used Google for authentication. Would you like to implement Single Sign Out as well?
But if I wanted to be logged out when you logout of the OpenID Connect provider, I would implement the OpenID Connect Session management. There is one thing good to be aware of when using iframes and cookies - browsers have an option to "Block third-party cookies" (that's how Chrome calls it), it's turned off by default, but as far as I know, it disables the SSO functionality when turned on.
I'm not sure why you request the userinfo endpoint periodically. If you just want to check whether the access token is still valid, you could also use the token introspection endpoint.
For security concerns, I would suggest you to read the OAuth 2.0 for Browser-Based Apps RFC. It recommends using the auth code flow with PKCE instead of the implicit flow. With the implicit flow, access tokens transported in redirect URLs stay in network and browser caches and can be used right away by an attacker. The auth code with PKCE needs a code_verifier (one-time secret) in order to be exchanged for tokens. So I would first check how the providers work with a configuration you choose and if it's even supported.

Google OAuth2 - tokens, on-line, offline, adding scopes incrementally

Trying to organize this question into something clear. We are integrating Google for Work into our application, to use login, Google+, and eventually Contacts, Calendar, etc. As is recommended by Google and everything I have read, we are going to use incremental access, only adding scopes when they are needed. We are a PHP shop.
But, we will also be needing offline access, as our Contacts (and eventually Calendar) access will be synchronizing with our internal database.
We currently capture the Access and Refresh Tokens when doing the initial link, and store them locally, so that we can re-authorize at any time by using the Refresh token whenever the Access token expires. This is working correctly.
Questions:
a) when adding the incremental scopes for Contacts, the documentation says we need to call the gapi.auth.signIn() function in the page javascript with the new scopes. This is working on the page where we are allowing folks to manage settings. In the original login function callback, I save the Access Token and scopes with an Ajax call that uses the access code passed into the callback, and calls the Google_Client authenticate() function to get the access code and scopes... but at that point, the information I get back does not have the new scopes. Why? Do I have to re-extend the scopes every time the page is drawn?
b) since we are going to have a batch process do the contact synchronization, do I need to get an entirely different access token with access_type=offline, or can I use the current access token (properly extended with the new scopes). Can an off-line access token be used for on-line access as well as off-line? Or vice-versa?
For your questions:
a) have you used the parameter "include_granted_scopes"? as mentioned here:
https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2WebServer#incrementalAuth
b) When you request an offline access token, the response contains the access token and refresh token. so you can refresh the access token after it expires without having the user grant the permissions again.
online access token and offline access token work for the same.
the difference between both its the capability to refresh the access token when it expires without involving the user. Which is the functionality for the offline type.
The online access token doesn't mean that it works for your client-side authentication (done in the browser) and the offline works for the server-side.
You mentioned that you can get an access token, refresh token and authorization code from the client-side of your app. You could send that information to your server and make api calls from there, although this is not a good practice.
I would suggest that you do the OAuth Flow in the server side and from there manage the users information and API calls.
Here you can find the documentation on both Web server applications and Client Side applications.
Hope it's clearer.

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