Not sure if the title is quite right for the question but I can't think of any other way to put it..
Suppose you wanted to create multiple different web apps, but you wanted a user who was logged into one app to be able to go straight to your other app without re-logging in (assuming they have perms to look at the other app as well). If I'm not mistaken, if you're logged into gmail you can go straight to your iGoogle, googleReader, etc without re-logging in (if you set it up right).
How would you approach this? What would you use? Assume the apps already exist and you don't want to change the initial login page for the users.
What you're looking for is called Single Sign On. If you follow the link you'll find several implementations.
Open ID as others have mentioned is not such a scheme as it requires a seperate login for each site. Open ID is merely a shared authentication system.
You would issue a cookie against foo.com, which would then be visible on app1.foo.com, app2.foo.com.
Each application can then use the cookie to access a centralised authentication system.
Try CAS it should provide the features you are looking for.
What you want is a single sign-on (SSO).
There are two approaches to solving this problem:
Roll your own implementation. In its most trivial form it can be implemented by the first site setting a cookie that holds the ticket for the logged on user and the second site verifying that ticket and accepting the logged on user. There are quite a lot of potential pitfalls here:
you have to protect yourself against information disclosure - make sure that the ticket does not contain the actual user credentials
you have to protect yourself against spoofing - a man in the middle stealing a valid ticket and impersonating one of your users
and others
Adopt a third party SSO mechanism. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other big companies allow integrating with their identity providers, so that your users could log on to their website and they handle verification, ticket issuing and so on. There's also OpenID, which is an open protocol you can use to enable SSO on your site through virtually any identity provider that supports OpenID. The potential drawback here is that somebody else controls your access to your user identity and can limit the features you can offer and data you can mine for your users.
As mentioned you can use something like OpenId or similar to make the process simple. Otherwise if you roll your own you could use a cookie to store the login, then basically ALL applications must have an entry point that mimics the base url.
Google for example uses mail.google.com to as a pipline into Gmail which allows it to read a cookie stored with the google.com domain.
Related
Does anyone know why Box.com make it so hard to generate an authorization code programmatically? I wrote some code to do this through screen-scraping, and then recently this broke because (as far as I can tell) one HTTP request parameter changed from [root_readwrite] to root_readwrite. I was able to fix it reasonably quickly (thank you Fiddler), but why make developers go to this trouble?
Judging by the number of questions on this topic, many developers need to do this, presumably for good reason, and I don't think it can be prevented, so why not just embrace it?
Thanks for listening, Martin
The issue with doing OAuth programmatically is that it would effectively defeat the point of OAuth. Users are supposed to be presented with the Box login page so that they never have to give their username and password directly to your app. This allows users to see what permissions your app has over their account (the scope) and also allows them to revoke your app at any time.
Doing login programmatically means that at some point your app knows the user's password. This requires that the user trusts you to not do anything malicious, which usually isn't feasible unless you're a well-trusted name. The user also has to trust that you handle their credentials correctly and won't use them in an insecure way.
Box wants to encourage developers to do authentication the correct and secure way, and therefore isn't likely to support doing OAuth programmatically. You should really try to perform login the supported way by going through the Box login page.
I would like to publish an app in google play, but I want to restrict the downloading under password or something like that. Is it possible? Is there any alternative?
Many thanks in advance,
Short Answer:
No.
Slightly Long Answer:
Applications available on Google Play cannot be downloaded only after a user authenticates. Any such feature will have to be implemented withing your application. At best, if this feature is needed for monetary reasons, publish a paid application.
Since the OP isn't descriptive beyond what you are looking for as a feature, it will be difficult to suggest an option / alternative that might suit your requirement. However, if you have a server setup that can communicate with the app, you can implement a feature which requires users, upon installation and running your app, to Sign Up for a new account and/or Login if already registered.
Again, I will circle back to the original point. Any such feature will have to implemented within the application itself. Google Play does not have such a feature.
i'm looking at building some mobile applications. Therefore, these apps will 'talk' to my server via JSON and via REST (eg. put, post, etc).
If I want to make sure a client phone app is trying to do something that requires some 'permission', how to people handle this?
For example:
Our website sells things -> tv's, car's, dresses, etc. The api will
allow people to browse the shop and purchase items. To buy, you need
to be 'logged in'. I need to make sure that the person who is using
their mobile phone, is really them.
How can this be done?
I've had a look at how twitter does it with their OAuth .. and it looks like they have a number of values in a REQUEST HEADER? If so (and I sorta like this approach), is it possible that I can use another 3rd party as the website to store the username / password (eg. twitter or Facebook are the OAuth providers) .. and all I do is somehow retrieve the custom header data .. and make sure it exists in my db .. else .. get them to authenticate with their OAuth provider?
Or is there another way?
PS. I really don't like the idea of having an API key - I feel that it can be too easily handed to another person, to use (which we can't take the risk).
Our website sells things -> tv's, car's, dresses, etc. The api will
allow people to browse the shop and purchase items. To buy, you need
to be 'logged in'. I need to make sure that the person who is using
their mobile phone, is really them.
If this really is a requirement then you need to store user identities in your system. The most popular form of identity tracking is via username and password.
I've had a look at how twitter does it with their OAuth .. and it
looks like they have a number of values in a REQUEST HEADER? If so
(and I sorta like this approach), is it possible that I can use
another 3rd party as the website to store the username / password (eg.
twitter or Facebook are the OAuth providers) .. and all I do is
somehow retrieve the custom header data .. and make sure it exists in
my db .. else .. get them to authenticate with their OAuth provider?
You are confusing two differing technologies here, OpenID and OAuth (don't feel bad, many people get tripped up on this). OpenID allows you to defer identify tracking and authentication to a provider, and then accept these identities in your application, as the acceptor or relying party. OAuth on the other hand allows an application (consumer) to access user data that belongs to another application or system, without compromising that other applications core security. You would stand up OAuth if you wanted third party developers to access your API on behalf of your users (which is not something you have stated you want to do).
For your stated requirements you can definitely take a look at integrating Open ID into your application. There are many libraries available for integration, but since you asked for an agnostic answer I will not list any of them.
Or is there another way?
Of course. You can store user id's in your system and use basic or digest authentication to secure your API. Basic authentication requires only one (easily computed) additional header on your requests:
Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==
If you use either basic or digest authentication then make sure that your API endpoints are protected with SSL, as otherwise user credentials can easily be sniffed over-the-air. You could also fore go user identification and instead effectively authenticate the user at checkout via credit card information, but that's a judgement call.
As RESTful services uses HTTP calls, you could relay on HTTP Basic Authentication for security purposes. It's simple, direct and is already supported for the protocol; and if you wan't an additional security in transport you could use SSL. Well established products like IBM Websphere Process Server use this approach.
The other way is to build your own security framework according to your application needs. For example, if you wan't your service only to be consumed by certain devices, you'll need maybe to send an encoded token as a header over the wire to verify that the request come from an authorized source. Amazon has an interesting way to do this , you can check it here.
I am relatively new to web development, and I was hoping I could get some pointers about the feasibility of a feature I would like to implement. Is it possible to have a url link that you can click on, that can contain login credentials for the website it is linking to, so as to bypass that websites login screen?
In other words, can I make a link from my website to facebook, that would allow me to login right in to my facebook, from any computer? Meaning, if I don't have cookies to store my login info in, is it possible to login still?
This is just a conceptual question, so any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
One reason why this is generally avoided, is because web servers often store the query string parameters in the access logs. And normally, you wouldn't want files on your server with a long list of usernames and passwords in clear text.
In addition, a query string containing a username and password could be used with a dictionary attack to guess valid login credentials.
Apart from those issues, as long as the request is made via HTTPS, it would have been safe during the transit.
It is possible to pass parameters in the URL through a GET request on the server, but one has to understand that the request would likely be made in clear text and thus isn't likely to be secure. There was a time where I did have to program a "silent" log-in using tokens, so it can be done in enterprise applications.
You used to be able to do this, but most browsers don't allow it anymore. You would never be able to do this using facebook only something that uses browser auth (the browser pops up a username/pass dialog)
it was like this:
http://username:pass#myprotectedresource.com
What you might be able to do is whip up some javascript in a link that posts your username and password to the login page of facebook. Not sure if it will work because you might need to scrape the cookie/hidden fields from the login page itself.
It is possible for the site to block you on account of no cookies, or invalid nonce or wrong HTTP referrer, but it may work if their security is low.
While it is possible, it is up to the site (in this case Facebook) to accept these values in the query string. There are some security issues to consider certainly, and isn't done generally.
Though, there are different options out there for single sign on. This web site uses OpenID for that.
I want to implement a discrete remote authentication server that handles login for many sites. Somewhat similar to OpenID.
Basically, I have site-1 and site-2 and they're both reliant on the same user database, which is on a separate auth-site. So, auth-site handles user authentication for them, and during this process, makes information on the authenticating user available to the requesting system.
Each site can be on a completely separate domain name, on completely separate machines.
This is all via HTTP(S), there can be no direct database access.
There's one last quirk: once an user has logged in to site-1, when accessing any other site reliant on auth-site, the site must treat the user as already authenticated.
This whole business must be entirely fuss-free to the end-user. It should work like a simple everyday login form.
As a concrete example, say we're talking about stackoverflow.com and serverfault.com, and they both authenticate via authentic-overflow-server-stack.com. Again, once logged in to either site, I can go to the other and do my business without logging in again.
What I'd like to know are the general interaction mechanism between the sites behind this scenario.
In my particular setup, I'm using Rails, but I'm not looking for code[1], just general best practice and guidance, so feel free to answer in pseudo-code or any generally readable language. OTOH, bear in mind that I'll have decent MVC, REST, and meta-programming in my toolkit.
[1]: unless you happen to know an existing tiny neat free MIT/BSD-licensed app/plugin/generator that handles this.
It sounds like (especially with the emphasis on fuss-free), you want something like what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing. Basically, you log on to en.wikipedia.org, then that server communicates with other servers (e.g. en.wikinews.org) and gets authentication tokens. Finally, those tokens are embedded into images, e.g. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:AutoLogin?token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx , and when your browser visits that url (img src) it gets a authentication cookie for Wikinews. Of course, the source code is available for your reivew at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CentralAuth .
OpenID is also a good choice, but it does require that the user "consciously" visit two domains. An example of one entity with two domains doing this is Canonical. E.g., if you go to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UserPreferences they will redirect you to Launchpad (https://login.launchpad.net/+openid) for authentication.
Note that Wikipedia is doing this over http, but you can do it all https to ensure the img src tokens aren't intercepted.
Looks like CAS is good enough for me, and has ruby implementations, along with dozens of other lesser languages, e.g. one that rhymes with femoral bone rage.
http://code.google.com/p/rubycas-server/
http://code.google.com/p/rubycas-client/
It sounds like you want to actually use the OpenID protocol itself. There's no reason you can't restrict the authentication provider to only your own server, and do some shortcuts that make the authentication process transparent. Also, the OpenID protocol supports what you describe about logging into one implies logging in to all services.