I need to filter subscriptions through logged users (i.e. user_id or organization_id) in a generic context.
The requirements are that any users can manage (edit or delete) only own subscriptions.
As far as I know, there isn't APIs to filter subscriptions by userid, so how can get from orion all subscriptions inserted by owners?
Orion doesn't support the ownership concept in subscriptions. A possible workaround could be to use some descriptive field (in particular, the description field) and a PEP-like proxy using that information to implement a mechanism like the one you want.
At subscription creation time the proxy set the description to the user issuing the creation request.
At subscription modification time, the proxy check if the user issuing the update request matches the one in the description.
The proxy should forbid any attempt of setting/modifying the description field.
Not perfect, but may suffice your case. A proxy like that shouldn't be complex to implement in technologies like Nodejs.
Related
I have a hard time trying to find concrete information about how to deal with tenants in a NGSI-LD Context Broker.
The ETSI specification defines multi-tenancy but it seems it doesn't specify any operations to create a tenant, list available tenants and remove a tenant.
I presume each broker is free to implement multi-tenancy its own way but I've searched the tenant keyword in broker documentations (at least for Orion-LD, Stellio and Scorpio) with no success.
Thanks to this stackoverflow post I've successfully created a tenant in Orion-LD.
I'd like to know if there are some tenants operations (documented or undocumented) exposed by brokers.
Especially any facilities to remove a tenant - along with all resources that have been created "inside".
Thanks.
So, first of all, tenants are created "on the fly". In comes a request to create an entity, subscription, or registration, and the HTTP header "NGSILD-Tenant" specifies a tenant that does not already exists, then the tenant is created and the entity/sub/reg is created "under it". For ALL operations, the HTTP header is used. jsonldContexts are different, those are "omnipresent" and exist regardless of the tenant used.
GET operations (like all other operations) can use the NGSILD-Tenant header to indicate on which tenant the GET is to be performed, but if that tenant does not exist, it will naturally not be created - an error is retuirned instead.
There are no official endpoints to list tenants (nor delete - that would be a bit dangerous!), but in the case of Orion-LD, I implemented an endpoint for debugging purposes: GET /ngsi-ld/ex/v1/tenants. That one you can use if you please. Just remember, no other NGSI-LD broker is supporting that endpoint
I'm currently working on a project where I would need to Read and possibly update information from tracking records. I haven't found anything in the Knowledge Base that refers to any kind of tracking record (LoanApp, Account, Share, etc) access through the API. Is it possible to read and or update fields in any of the tracking records?
There isn't much support for reading and updating tracking records (I'm assuing you mean SymXchange external tracking records) via the API. Updating, in particular, is not available.
For reading, one option may be to have the Banno Admin at the financial institution enable the Restricted Claim which is https://api.banno.com/consumer/claim/external_tracking_records (that's a scope name, not a URL). You'll want to read this page in the Authentication Framework docs: https://jackhenry.dev/open-api-docs/authentication-framework/overview/openidconnectoauth/
The gist is that the claim (when enabled by the admin at the FI, and also requested by your code) provides SymXchange external tracking records as part of the Identity Token.
If my users are stored in some other database, but I am building posts in my SQL database, should I create another table users?
If I did, I would be duplicating all of my users and would have to make sure this stays in sync with the other database, but on the other hand, my posts tables could save space by referring to fk instead of full id string each time.
What is the recommendation? Create another table users or just pass in the user ids to query?
If you have a service that stores and provides information about users then other services that need that information should communicate with the User service to get it. That is, presumably, the reason the User service exists in the first place.
Depending on the volatility of the users list and requirements for changes there to be respected in the Posts service you might consider some short-term caching in the Posts service, but I certainly wouldn't persist another copy of the user list there.
There are 3 obvious solutions.
The simplest, cleanest and fastest is to use foreign keys and joins between your "posts" database and your "users" database. In this case, when you show a list of posts, you can get both the post and user data in a single query, and there's no need to keep things up to date.
The next option is to store a copy of the user data alongside your posts. This leads to entertaining failure modes - data in the user database may get out of sync. However, this is a fairly common strategy when using 3rd party authentication systems (e.g. logging on with your Google/Facebook/Github/Stack Exchange credentials). The way to make this work is to minimize the amount of data you duplicate, and have it be safe if it's out of date. For instance, a user's display name is probably okay; current bank account balance is probably not.
The final option is to store the primary key for users in your posts database, and to retrieve the user data at run time. This is less likely to lead to bugs with data getting out of sync, but it can cause performance problems - retrieving user details for 1000 posts one by one is obviously much slower than retrieving everything through a joined query.
The choice then is "do I have a service which combines post and user data and my UI retrieves everything from that service, or do I let the UI retrieve posts, and then users for each post". That's mostly down to the application usage, and whether you can use asynchronous calls to retrieve user information. If at all possible (assuming you're building a web application), the simplest option might be to return the posts and user IDs and use Ajax requests to retrieve the user data as needed.
The CQRS approach (common to microservice architectures) provides some structure for this.
I am developing a swing based DEFECT TRACKER application.
The problem is I have to maintain user sessions. I do not have a clue how to do this. Many users may access the system simultaneously and enter their own data. This is a basic scenario seen at many places.
Like any login based application we have.
These are the following answers I can think of:
If the user logs in before performing any activity, you could easily maintain session information based on the login ID.
If there is no necessity for the user to login, you can track the clients connected at the entry point of your application and maintain a map of them. Since each user is not logging in explicitly, you might want to track the clients based on the IP address they are logging in from.
You could assign each Swing client downloaded an unique GUID and send that along with each request.
Of course, the caveat is if there are a lot of concurrent users accessing the system, you have to implement a queuing system and also make sure that your server code is thread safe.
A completely different approach is use to JSPs or Servlets.
I have a simple REST JSON API for other websites/apps to access some of my website's database (through a PHP gateway). Basically the service works like this: call example.com/fruit/orange, server returns JSON information about the orange. Here is the problem: I only want websites I permit to access this service. With a simple API key system, any website could quickly attain a key by copying the key from an authorized website's (potentially) client side code. I have looked at OAuth, but it seems a little complicated for what I am doing. Solutions?
You should use OAuth.
There are actually two OAuth specifications, the 3-legged version and the 2-legged version. The 3-legged version is the one that gets most of the attention, and it's not the one you want to use.
The good news is that the 2-legged version does exactly what you want, it allows an application to grant access to another via either a shared secret key (very similar to Amazon's Web Service model, you will use the HMAC-SHA1 signing method) or via a public/private key system (use signing method: RSA-SHA1). The bad news, is that it's not nearly as well supported yet as the 3-legged version yet, so you may have to do a bit more work than you otherwise might have to right now.
Basically, 2-legged OAuth just specifies a way to "sign" (compute a hash over) several fields which include the current date, a random number called "nonce," and the parameters of your request. This makes it very hard to impersonate requests to your web service.
OAuth is slowly but surely becoming an accepted standard for this kind of thing -- you'll be best off in the long run if you embrace it because people can then leverage the various libraries available for doing that.
It's more elaborate than you would initially want to get into - but the good news is that a lot of people have spent a lot of time on it so you know you haven't forgotten anything. A great example is that very recently Twitter found a gap in the OAuth security which the community is currently working on closing. If you'd invented your own system, you're having to figure out all this stuff on your own.
Good luck!
Chris
OAuth is not the solution here.
OAuth is when you have endusers and want 3rd party apps not to handle end user passwords. When to use OAuth:
http://blog.apigee.com/detail/when_to_use_oauth/
Go for simple api-key.
And take additional measures if there is a need for a more secure solution.
Here is some more info, http://blog.apigee.com/detail/do_you_need_api_keys_api_identity_vs._authorization/
If someone's client side code is compromised, they should get a new key. There's not much you can do if their code is exposed.
You can however, be more strict by requiring IP addresses of authorized servers to be registered in your system for the given key. This adds an extra step and may be overkill.
I'm not sure what you mean by using a "simple API key" but you should be using some kind of authentication that has private keys(known only to client and server), and then perform some kind of checksum algorithm on the data to ensure that the client is indeed who you think it is, and that the data has not been modified in transit. Amazon AWS is a great example of how to do this.
I think it may be a little strict to guarantee that code has not been compromised on your clients' side. I think it is reasonable to place responsibility on your clients for the security of their own data. Of course this assumes that an attacker can only mess up that client's account.
Perhaps you could keep a log of what ip requests are coming from for a particular account, and if a new ip comes along, flag the account, send an email to the client, and ask them to authorize that ip. I don't know maybe something like that could work.
Basically you have two options, either restrict access by IP or then have an API key, both options have their positive and negative sides.
Restriction by IP
This can be a handy way to restrict the access to you service. You can define exactly which 3rd party services will be allowed to access your service without enforcing them to implement any special authentication features. The problem with this method is however, that if the 3rd party service is written for example entirely in JavaScript, then the IP of the incoming request won't be the 3rd party service's server IP, but the user's IP, as the request is made by the user's browser and not the server. Using IP restriction will hence make it impossible to write client-driven applications and forces all the requests go through the server with proper access rights. Remember that IP addresses can also be spoofed.
API key
The advantage with API keys is that you do not have to maintain a list of known IPs, you do have to maintain a list of API keys, but it's easier to automatize their maintenance. Basically how this works is that you have two keys, for example a user id and a secret password. Each method request to your service should provide an authentication hash consisting of the request parameters, the user id and a hash of these values (where the secrect password is used as the hash salt). This way you can both authenticate and restrict access. The problem with this is, that once again, if the 3rd party service is written as client-driven (for example JavaScript or ActionScript), then anyone can parse out the user id and secret salt values from the code.
Basically, if you want to be sure that only the few services you've specifically defined will be allowed to access your service, then you only option is to use IP restriction and hence force them to route all requests via their servers. If you use an API key, you have no way to enforce this.
All of production of IP's security seems produces a giant bug to users before getting connected. Symbian 60s has the fullest capability to left an untraced, reliable and secure signal in the midst of multiple users(applying Opera Handler UI 6.5, Opera Mini v8 and 10) along with the coded UI's, +completely filled network set-up. Why restrict for other features when discoverable method of making faster link method is finally obtained. Keeping a more identified accounts, proper monitoring of that 'true account'-if they are on the track-compliance of paying bills and knowing if the users has an unexpired maintaining balance will create a more faster link of internet signal to popular/signatured mobile industry. Why making hard security features before getting them to the site, a visit to their accounts monthly may erase all of connectivity issues? All of the user of mobile should have no capability to 'get connected' if they have unpaid bills. Why not provide an 'ALL in One' -Registration/Application account, a programmed fixed with OS, (perhaps an e-mail account) instead with a 'monitoring capability' if they are paying or not (password issues concern-should be given to other department). And if 'not' turn-off their account exactly and their other link features. Each of them has their own interests to where to get hooked daily, if you'd locked/turn them off due to unpaid bills that may initiate them to re-subscribe and discipline them more to become a more responsible users and that may even expire an account if not maintained. Monthly monitoring or accessing of an identified 'true account' with collaboration to the network provider produces higher privacy instead of always asking for users 'name' and 'password', 'location', 'permissions' to view their data services. IP's marked already their first identity or 'finding the location of the users' so, it's seems unnessary to place it on browsers pre-searches, why not use 'Obtaining data' or 'Processing data.'