I am using EWS managed API to implement notification subscription with exchange server. So, I am trying to figure out if I can assume that the autodiscovery url for users within the same domain will be same?
Yes
Autodiscover is used to get necessary information on how to connect to the exchange server by itself, with minimal user input required. It does so by taking the domain from the users e-mail address and is testing various standard EWS Exchange-Endpoints with it.
An example:
"https://" + domain + "/autodiscover/autodiscover" + fileExtension
Because users within the same domain communicate with the same exchange server, the AutodiscoverURL stays the same for all of them.
You should be using Autodiscover to work out the endpoint for ever user unless you have a very simple network topology (eg one server etc) so making that assumption woudn't be best practice. The URL that Autodiscover will return can be different for a number of reasons eg different Internal and External exchange configuration https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529912(v=exchg.150).aspx (so depending on the client location). Also if your using notifications on Exchange 2013 and up for multiple users then you should be using Autodiscover to get the grouping information for the users https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn458789(v=exchg.150).aspx so you can maintain affinity correctly.
Related
I have a working implementation of SAML (OneLogin) within an enterprise architecture.
When a guest user arrives at my application they are redirected to the company login where they enter their username / password. After that the user identity is passed back to my application and we log them in.
However, I notice that in other applications within the company I do not have to login at all. Somehow the website "knows who I am" and seems to authenticate me automatically. I presume there is some form of certificate on my pc / browser which the other applications are passing to the SAML??
Can somebody tell me the technical term or process? Is there a process whereby I simply pull the certificate from the browser or PC and pass it to the SAML? I would like my users to be able to auto-login without entering their credentials.
Thanks
There's a number of mechanisms that support an "automatic" authentication like what you describe. In the Identity and Access Management (IAM) realm, we have all sorts of names for it, but many of us call that "seamless single sign-on (SSO)".
Within a corporate environment, I would suspect that you are dealing with a one of two mechanisms: Kerberos authentication (especially if you're a Microsoft shop and log in to a domain-joined machine on a daily basis), or your machine is in an MDM-type of system, which uses a machine- and/or user-based certificate (aka PKI) to authenticate the user or user/machine combination.
Within your enterprise, if there are other applications whose users are immediately authenticated to the application without entering their username and password, then you should talk to your IAM team or your Single Sign On (SSO) administrators to understand why that doesn't work for yours.
I will also say that it's possible that your security team evaluated what information your application offers (insider financials? source code? your secret recipe? credit card data?) and decided that they would still require the user enter their username and password to get access to the data. So when you go to your SSO admins to ask, if they say that it's intentional, you should feel free to ask why and who you should talk to about it.
After a LOT of research and testing I finally have the answer to this question, and it is incredibly simple!
In summary:
I have a working solution with OneLogin that sends me to a page like this:
https://sts.companyname.com/adfs/ls
The url is specified in the config: saml->config->idp->singleSignOnService->url
However, this page requires the user to enter their username and password and, instead, I would like the system to be fully seamless.
The solution, it turns out, is simply to hyperlink to the following url:
https://sts.companyname.com/adfs/ls/IdpInitiatedSignon.aspx?LoginToRp=https://mypage.com/saml/metadata
where "loginToRp" url is the url provided in saml->config->sp->entityID
The ADFS IDP Initiated Signon will connect to your metadata schema and automatically log the user in (without the user needing to provide any credentials)
NOTE: this only applies to intranet sites in a corporate environment
A service provider is supposed to forward messages on to an endpoint (specified by me) but all I get to give them is a URL. How can I make this work.
I have signed up to a satellite service and I am trying make the first steps with their cloud API. I have hardware which sends simple messages over their satellite infrastructure to their cloud services. The provide the user (me) with a dashboard type interface to register the hardware as well as a desitnation (or multiple destinations) each destination is a single url. I dont get to specify usernames, passwords, code or anything just a single url. The service says
"the data will be forwarded to the pre-registered http(s) endpoint (the URL I have given them). Data is sent as a http POST request with Content-Type: application/json. All data is accompanied by an endpoint reference, timestamp, a unique identifier (UUID), and a digital signature that may be used to verify that the data originated from Myriota. Multiple packets may be batched into a single request."
I have a website so to start with I just want to get a single message to display on my page. I have completed and tested the code to display posts by GETing from https://www.mywebsite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts. This works.
the URL that I have given the service provider is the same as above. But none of the data reaches my site.
I dont really know how the data exchange or handshaking works here but I assume that for a third party to post to my site, they would need to include some sort of authentication. can this authentication data be included in the url? what is the authentication data? is it my Wordpress username and password? Is it safe send this data in a url? Can I turn off authentication so that anyone can post to my site? surely that isnt safe?
I have minimal experience with web development but plenty with embedded systems, I am working with a young software engineer and he is stumped also. together we have burned nearly a whole week on this so I have bit the bullet and turned to stackoverflow to see if anyone can help
Here is what I am planning to to for keeping separate tokens for web and mobile
1.When user is logged in from web JWT token is issued and it is stored in DB table with created time stamp.
The above step is repeated for the mobile client ,so the table contains separate tokens for each client.
2.At the time of validation search for the token in table and validate if exists then it will try to verify with JWT.verify
Is it right method to do keeping separate logins using JWT??
Maybe there are other ways to do it, but your approach is totally correct. By fact I would recommend it exactly your way. What you doing, is scoping issued token for specific service, platform. It is useful not only for your use case, but also when you have multiple APIs. You can issue different tokens for each service separately.
Google offers two systems for accessing Gmail. IMAP and SMTP and a the Gmail rest api Gmail - Scope for SMTP is https://mail.google.com/. However with Gmail rest API, just the required scope (like send, modify) can be used.
What are the main differences between the implementation of these two for sending an email? I've been using SMTP to send the mails without any issues but since that involves having a bigger scope for OAuth2, I want to know if there are any possible risks involved in moving to the API approach.
Users.messages: send says there's a restriction on attachment size.
This method supports an /upload URI and accepts uploaded media with
the following characteristics:
Maximum file size: 35MB Accepted Media MIME types: message/rfc822
Are there any other differences that I should know about if I start using Gmail APIs instead of using SMTP connection for OAuth2.
Also, what is the reasoning behind providing full access as the only possible scope for SMTP/IMAP?
Note: I only requirement is the ability to send emails.
Using SMTP you are directly accessing the mail server located at mail.google.com. SMTP servers have been around since the 60's they don't have the ability to limit what access you have. When you log in you have full access to do what ever the mail server in question is capable of. To login to the SMTP server you need the login (most often email address) and password of the account you wish to access. Drawback to using the SMTP to connect to Gmail is that if the user changed the password you would then loose access. This day in age it is also considered by most to be bad practice for third party developers to be storing a users login and password in your system. For example: I would never give any application access to my login and password to Google. How could you ever prove to me that your system is secure? If your hacked so am I.
Now on to Oauth2. Oauth came about sometime around 2005 when people wanted to be able to access APIs without having to do something stupid like
http://awsom.api.com?login=xxx&password=XXX
If memory services it was originally created for the twitter API developers wanted to be able to access their users twitter account without having to store their login in and password. Again the main problem with this was the developer in question would then have full access to a users twitter account and if the user or the developer changed the password things would break.
So they created OAuth. The main features with OAuth are:
You can limit access you give an application: (readonly, read write)
Password change does not affect access
No sharing account credentials with developers of third party apps
So the main point for me as a developer using Oauth with any Google API would be not having to store the login and password of my users and not being affected by a password change. My users would probably say not having to share their login with me and being able to give my application limited access to their account.
Now back to Gmail. Google made a change about two months ago any refresh token(oauth2) that was created using a Gmail scope will automatically expire when the user changes their password. To my knowledge this is only Gmail. so that removes point number two from the features of oauth.
Which should you use is really up to you, assuming you need to be able to send emails. Then limiting access to read only in your application isn't something you need (point one). However in my opinion from a security standpoint I would never ask my users to give me their login and password and would always choose oauth2. Yes SMTP works, will Google shut it down, probably not users have always been given access to the direct SMTP server of their email provider its how applications like outlook work.
as for OAuth support with SMTP unfortunately I haven't done much research into that guess I need to read RFC 4422 . If you can use OAuth with SMTP servers then again I guess the question would have to come down to speed is it faster to access the SMTP server or the REST API server? I can really think of no differences. Attachments with the Rest API can be tricky. I may do a bit more digging on the subject.
I have an iPhone application that needs to collect data from an online MySQL database. I've written a PHP web service so I collect the data with JSON. The problem is that everyone can see the data if they go to the URL now. How do i secure the data transfer properly?
Thanks for your suggestions.
Typically, if you are showing data private to a particular user, then each user will generally have an account (user id and password). The app will pass the user's credentials to the server before the server will provide the user's data.
You can also do something similar using SSO integration, or OAuth (ala Facebook).
In some cases, your app may only pass the username/password on the initial call and receive a session ID, which the app passes on remaining calls. This allows the server to store session data.
Even if the data isn't private to a particular user, you can use accounts to restrict access and privileges for a publicly reachable web API.
In all of the above cases encryption such as SSL (HTTPS) must be used to protect the authentication mechanisms and data transfer.
I'm assuming your data is public for all users of your app, in other words, you don't want to implement a login mechanism for your users. If you just want to make sure you return the data only to users of your app and not to anyone who happens to enter the right URL in their browser, you will need to sign your requests, so that only requests from your app are accepted by your server.
I use a secret key that my app uses to create a hash/digest of the request which the server verifies (it knows the secret key as well). Also I make sure requests cannot be replayed if they are intercepted by adding a timestamp and a nonce. The timestamp is checked to be within 10 minutes of the server's timestamp (relaxed sync) and the nonce must be unique (server keeps the last 10 minutes of nonces). This way no-one can copy the same request, the server will just serve an error if they try.
This post explains how to sign your requests in a bit more detail:
http://www.naildrivin5.com/blog/2008/04/21/rest-security-signing-requests-with-secret-key-but-does-it-work.html