I have a web application that we are building. We need a text editor to allow for our registered users to create and or edit documents. We want the documents to be used within our app, but would like to use the Google drive interface to create/edit/upload docs. What I am concerned about is the OAuth2 process. I would like for our web app to be the authenticator, and allow our users access to our files/folders that are under our account rather than theirs. Can we do this? All of our users are authenticated by our application already, and we do not want them to have to use their personal credentials to access files used by our application.
According to Google's documentation:
Each Gmail account intended and designed for use by an individual
user. If you have multiple users frequently accessing the same account
from various locations, you may reach a Gmail threshold and your
account will be temporarily locked down.
Anecdotal evidence confirms this: a worker at a school reported a 403 error possibly caused by too many people logging into the same account at the same time.
Related
Th company I work for recently switched to using Team Drive and we had multiple applications that would interact with Google Drive using the Google Drive API. The API calls would be authorized using Google Service Accounts and access to specific files would be given to an app by sharing the file with the Service Account email in the same way you would share a file with a normal user. Now that we've switched to Team Drive I'm unable to grant access to the Service Account as the email address associated with it is not considered part of our organization. I've also looked into adding the Service Account as a normal user in our organization through the Google Admin dashboard, but it only allows me to create new users, not include existing ones. The only solution I've found is to enable sharing with external parties which would allow me to share Team Drive files with the Service Account, which would be considered an external party. This solution is risky and incorrect as the applications using the Service Account are part of our organization. We also do not want enable sharing with external parties in general for security reasons.
I've followed the steps described in How to access Team Drive using service account with Google Drive .NET API v3 and they work, but as mentioned above they require sharing with external parties to be enabled which we do not want.
The ideal solution would be for the Service Account to be considered part of our organization, but I cannot find a way to do this.
I've also tried delegating Domain-Wide Authority to the Service Account as described in https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2ServiceAccount#delegatingauthority, but as far as I understand this is not what I want as this will allow the Service Account to impersonate other users, but the reason we have a Service Account is for carrying out processes that happen automatically and which aren't associated with a specific user.
I've also followed the steps outlined here https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/reports/v1/guides/delegation#delegate_domain-wide_authority_to_your_service_account for white-listing a specific API service through the Google Admin Security interface, but this doesn't seem to do anything, and I'm not sure what it is supposed to do as I have already enabled the Drive API for this Service Account in the APIs & Services dashboard where I originally created the Service Account.
We're using R and so I've been using the googledrive package which has functions for working with Team Drives like:
googledrive::drive_find()
googledrive::team_drive_find()
googledrive::team_drive_get(id = "team-drive-id")
I would expect to be able to see the team drive, but I guess this is not possible unless the Service Account email is a member of the Team Drive which is not possible because the Service Account (which is linked to our organization through its owner) is not considered part of our organization.
I had the exact same issue and after trying a lot of approaches, landed on the solution below (++):
Create a group in Google Workspace. You can add any external identity/email to a group, since they can be used for multiple things. So add the role account to this group.
Google has recently come out with "Trust" rules, that allow granular sharing. You can share with a group. So I created a trust rule that allowed sharing of any data source (easier than restricting who can share since file/shared drive ownership affects this rule) to only the group that contains the service account. Now external sharing is permitted, but only to the role account.
Lastly, share the drive with that role account.
++ Note that I also had followed the majority of steps above including the GCP project creation and domain-wide delegation before this portion, but was similarly stuck getting a 403 for access rights.
I'm a hobbyist student developer playing around with the Actions on Google to create a simple "text adventure" game on Google Home. Since Google Home will be speaking to the player rather than the player reading the text, I'm hoping this will create an experience similar to the "Dungeons and Dragons" roleplaying game, with the computer working as the "Dungeon Master." With the natural language assistance offered by API.AI and Actions on Google, it seemed like a good fit, since the player can respond "naturally." Here's an example of an Amazon Alexa skill that does essentially what I'm going for.
However, every time I boot up the game, it's always a new game. I'd like to store a savegame with the user's previous state in a JSON file hosted on the user's Google Drive -- Since I'm just a student doing this for fun, I don't actually have an official website or anything beyond a free Heroku server I'm running the app from, making storing saves on my end pretty much out of the question.
I've walked through the Google Drive REST quickstart for Node.js, and I've gotten that working in the console just fine. The only problem is in that quickstart, the user has to click a link to authorize the application to read the stuff in their Google Drive account, and I'm not sure how I'd be able to "click a link" and give back an access token via voice on Google Home.
Is there a way to do this via Google Drive? Or is there a better way to provide persistent data between sessions? I don't normally work in web development, so any help would be appreciated.
The bad news is you won't be able to get away from the need for a user to use his web browser to authorise your app to access his Drive.
The good news is that you only need to do this once. When your app requests authoirsation, it should specify "offline", which will result in you being given a refresh token. You should save this somewhere in your database of users. Whenever you need to access the user's Drive, you can use the saved refresh token to request an access token and you're good to go.
You have a few problems that you need to solve here, and while they seem related, they're not as related as you might hope:
You need to get authorization to access a user's Drive space
You need to authenticate the user's Home (so you know this person has come back)
You have to connect the two relationships - so you know what Drive space to use for the Home device that is talking to you
You've found the answers to (1) already, and as noted, you'll need to use a browser for them to authorize you to access their Drive. You'll then store the refresh token and will be able to access it in the future.
But that is only part of the problem. Home does not provide you access to the user's Google account directly, so you'll have to manage your own account mechanism and tie it to Home. There are a few solutions here:
Home provides anonymous user identity in the JSON sent to your webhook. You can access this using getUser().user_id if you're using the Actions API library, or access this in the data.user.user_id field in the JSON. While this is similar to a browser cookie, it only stores the user ID and can't store additional data. There is also no concept of "local storage". On the plus side, this ID is consistent across devices.
You can request user information such as their name and address. But it doesn't have anything unique or account information, so this probably isn't useful to you.
You can implement an OAuth2 server and do account linking. Note that this is the other side from what you need to do with Google Drive - you'll be providing the access and refresh tokens to authenticate and authorize access to your account and the Google Home device will send these tokens back to you so you can determine who the user is. You don't actually need to store account information - you can provide token information using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) or other methods and have them store account information in a secure way. Users will use the Google Home app to actually sign-in to your service as a one-time event.
In order to handle (3), you may be thinking that (1) lets you get tokens and the OAuth solution for (2) requires you to hand out tokens. Can the two be combined? Well... probably, but it isn't as straightforward. You can't just give the Google OAuth2 endpoints to Home - they explicitly block that and you need to control your OAuth2 endpoints. You may, however, be able to build proxy endpoints - but I haven't explored the security implications of doing so.
I think you're on the right track - using Drive is a good place to store users' information. Using Home's account linking gives you a place where they have to come to your web site to authenticate and authorize their Home, and you can use this to do the same for their Drive.
I would like to use Google Forms as a means for the users of my system to enter their login credentials to various system tools.
The reason this is important is because as their admin, I will need to manage various aspects of their tools.
Users are (rightly so) anxious of entering passwords in clear text boxes. What is the best method for retrieving such information in a safe and user-friendly manner?
You should NEVER collect user credentials for 3rd party services, e.g. collecting username/password to Google accounts. Not even if this is a Google Apps account belonging to your organisation (note that google gives admins the ability to reset password but not to view it). Also, a lot of users are now using two-step verification, so collecting user credentials will not work.
If you need to access Google services in the name of the user, than you should look into OAuth.
I'm using Google Apps Script UI to create forms for students at my school. I've restricted access to my domain for added security, and to capture users' email addresses.
The problem is that many of our students have separate Gmail accounts. If they are already logged into Gmail (not our domain), they don't get a log-in page, but something prompting them to request access.
Any suggestions for avoiding this?
Thought I saw a request in the issue tracker for an account choosing feature, but my guess is that you'll want to allow anyone to access your web app and show a custom prompt if their email is non-domain. I don't know how well this would work with shared computers, but creating separate Chrome user accounts for each of my Google accounts has solved all my multiple sign-in pain.
I have a web app in php mysql, I want to use one google drive account for my app.
Can I use my app's accounts instead of google users for privilages.
I read in SDK I can use service account to login without promting user, but I don't know how to share or give permissions files for custom users.
In api reference I found this:
"The user is not necessarily yet a Google user (e.g. if a file or folder is shared with an email address that does not yet have an associated Google account). Example: 1111459233037698895607".
How a custom user in my app should get a token for own privilages.
I am not exactly sure what you want to achieve here, but if you want to use your own permission system, you can't. You can, however, apply read/write/owner permissions to files to mirror your own permissions.
If I have totally got the wrong idea, please explain.