I’ve got a project using a Django backend, with Django Rest Framework to serve an API, and a Vue.js frontend SPA to consume the API. I’m running into some kind of CORS issue during authentication.
I’ve been using mozilla-django-oidc to implement the Authorization Code flow with Okta. This works fine pretty much out of the box, and if I navigate to the API in my browser, I can login to Okta and I get a Django session. I’ve also enabled SessionAuthentication for DRF, which allows the same session cookies generated by Django to be accessible by the SPA (both SPA and API are on the same domain), provided I login first directly through the API. This all works fine until the id token expires. In Django, when the id token expires, I get a redirect to https://example.okta.com/oauth2/v1/authorize?..., the Authorization Code flow completes and I get sent on through to the originally requested page. Where things fail is in an ajax request from the SPA to the API with an expired id token. I get the same redirect, but this time it fails due to CORS.
Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://example.okta.com/oauth2/v1/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=X&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2F127.0.0.1%3A8000%2Foidc%2Fcallback%2F&state=X&scope=openid+email+profile&prompt=none&nonce=X' (redirected from 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/X') from origin 'http://127.0.0.1:8080' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.
I’ve tried to identify why it’s failing.
On local development, I’m running my API on 127.0.0.1:8000 and my SPA on 127.0.0.1:8080, so clearly the origins don’t match. I have Vue setup with a proxy so it looks like requests are coming from 8080, but the redirect_uri in the request to Okta is still using 8000.
When I deploy to a test server, I’m using docker containers for the API and SPA and a reverse proxy to route requests and also for SSL. In this case, the API and SPA have the same origin (I think). Yet I still get the same error message.
Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://example.okta.com/oauth2/v1/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=X&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Foidc%2Fcallback%2F&state=X&scope=openid+email+profile&prompt=none&nonce=X' (redirected from 'https://example.com/api/X') from origin 'https://example.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.
If you notice, the redirect_uri is http, not https. I suspect that is why this is failing. Though I’m not entirely confident because if I navigate my browser to the API, I am on https, but the redirect_uri is still http, and it still successfully authenticates.
Any insight would be really helpful.
What am I doing wrong or missing here?
Am I approaching the authentication flow all wrong for an API+SPA app? Should I do authentication on the SPA instead? How does the API then know who’s logged in?
Edit: I have already tried adding the origins to the Security > API > Trusted Origins section in Okta configuration. No dice.
https://developer.okta.com/docs/guides/enable-cors/overview/
In Okta, CORS allows JavaScript hosted on your websites to make a request using XMLHttpRequest to the Okta API with the Okta session cookie. Every website origin must be explicitly permitted as a Trusted Origin.
So configure your Trusted Origins properly in the Okta client configuration.
Are you making an AJAX call to /authorize ? That could be the reason for the error.
As mentioned here, when making requests to the /authorize endpoint, the browser (user agent) should be redirected to the endpoint. You can't use AJAX with this endpoint.
Related
So I'm trying to deploy my website which works well when in a local environment, but when it is deployed to Cloudfront, it can't seem to access cookies.
My frontend tech stack is as follows: Angular site hosted on S3, cloudfront distribution in front of it, custom domain name with a valid ssl certificate.
When the user navigates to the login page, they can successfully submit the forum, and the server responds with a JWT token in the Set-Cookie header.
After this though, in the angular site it says that the access-token cookie does not exist. The strange part here is that on subsequent requests, the access-token cookie is in fact forwarded back to the backend. (In the image below, the login button was pressed again, so the response cookie is the same as the request cookie.)
I've ensured that HttpOnly is not set, and that the frontend and backend are both hosted under the same root domain frontend.root.com and api.root.com.
Cloudfront has been configured to forward the access-token cookie:
cache policy:
origin request policy (note that it still did not work when I had this set to forward all cookies and not just the access token):
Response headers settings:
So in my angular site, after the /login api call resolves, I use the ngx-cookie-service to check and try to retrieve the cookie.
this.cookieService.check('access-token'); // checks if it exists, returns false
this.cookieService.get('access-token'); // returns '' meaning the cookie does not exist
Any ideas on how to resolve this issue and access the cookies from within my angular site? I can provide more information on my configurations if needed. Thanks!
As you can barely make out in the screenshot the Cookies have the domain set as something starting with a suggesting that it is api.root.com, most importantly it is not frontend.root.com and not root.com.
The server needs to set the domain of the cookie to root.com for it to be available to all subdomains of it.
I have multiple web applications that I want to use our oauth provider for. All web applications live on different domains. For example, a.com b.com and c.com.
My oauth provider when the token end point is accessed returns a refresh token via a http only cookie. This is fine in theory, but the browser will not accept the cookie due to it being a cross domain cookie. (I have tried just about everyhting to allow this. See below.)
Cookie Settings
Same Site: none
secure: true
domain: null
http only: true
I have tried setting the cors of the web app to allow the auth api end point
CORS settings:
WithOrigins: "the url of the api"
WithMethods : "GET, POST"
WithHeaders: "Content-Type, *"
AllowCredentials : true
How can my my oauth provider send back a refresh token that I can securely store on the client?
The usual solution is that the OAuth Provider (Authorization Server) issues tokens to your back end, then applications issue their own first party cookies for the browser, in the Same Site as the web origin and therefore are not impacted by browser cross domain cookie restrictions.
The easiest to manage option can be to store tokens in AES256 encrypted HTTP Only SameSite=strict cookies, whose decryption key is only known to the server.
TOKEN HANDLER PATTERN
One interesting variation in this is for an API to issue secure cookies used by a Single Page Application. This involves hosting that uses related domains. Cookies issued by the API are then in the Same Site as the web origin and not cross domain:
Web origin = https://b.com
API origin - https://api.b.com
See this Curity Code Example for further info on an SPA solution. If you are using a website technology stack, you will not be using an API but the same cookie principles will apply.
I am trying to build a web app using Django and DRF at the back-end and ReactJs at the front end and I want to keep them separate (i.e. avoid Server Side Rendering).For authentication purposes, I want to employ JWT and I am using djangorestframework-jwt for that. I have read it at several places that it is not secure to store JWTs in the local storage so I am trying to use HttpOnly cookies for that. One can achieve that by configuring the django server to send HttpOnly by overriding the following default settings of the drf-jwt package in the settings.py file of your project JWT_AUTH = { 'JWT_AUTH_COOKIE': '<cookie name>', } which is set to none by default. The server sends the httpOnly cookie as anticipated but there are a few issues I am facing:
1.Same Domain Restraint
I am aware that httpOnly cookies wont be attached to the request headers unless the request is being made to the server which is hosted on the some domain. In my case I am using localhost:8000 for django and localhost:3000 for my react project so the browser doesnt attach the cookie as the request is made to a different port. I tried running both app on port 3000 simultaneously, and the browser did attach the cookie in the header and I did get the a 302 response from the server. However, it opened door to all sorts of problems due domain clash. I reckon I can solve this problem using nginx reverse proxy or something like that but I am not sure about it. Do guide me how can I serve both apps on the same host during the development.
2. Token Refresh Problem
When I refer to the view setup to refresh the token, I run into a bad request error even when the browser does attach the cookie along the request header. This is the server response in the browser
{"token":["This field is required."]}
Thanks if for reading it all the way down here!
In order for things to be secure:
You need CORS (Quickstart: CORS_ALLOWED_HOSTS=["http://localhost:3000"], CORS_ALLOW_CREDENTIALS=True)
The short-lived token (session) cookie (5-15mins), should NOT have HTTP-ONLY setting
The refresh token cookie SHALL have HTTP-ONLY setting
Then your basic flow is:
On login Django creates session token and sends it
Your SPA reads the cookie and adds its value to the authorization header (Authorization: JWT ...token...)
Any request to Django should be made with that Authorization header
The refresh flow is:
Send a request to the refresh token endpoint following the documentation of the library you use
Django then reads the HTTP-ONLY cookie and verifies it
If valid, Django sends a new refresh token as HTTP-ONLY cookie along with a new short-lived token session cookie
Once the refresh token has expired, you log the user out.
An article here goes into detail using GraphQL, but the cookie part and handling of most of the frontend code you should be able to adapt to REST.
Let's say I have a web app with domain myapp.com.
This web app will be mostly a client heavy app and will be making authenticated CORS requests (basically setting cookies) to multiple web sites, say abc.com and 1234.com.
Is there any way in current web standards to keep separate cookies for abc.com and 1234.com in client's browser?
The way I see it cookies are always set under myapp.com not to CORS requests.
The browser will never send cookies of domain A to domain B.
If you have js code on myapp.com which issues a CORS request to abc.com, only the cookies of abc.com will be sent (if withCredentials was set to true).
Otherwise it would be a violation of Same Origin Policy
If you want to completely prevent JS code to read cookies you might want to use HttpOnly flag
I was wondering why my Authorization Header is not recognized. When I pass it to my server web app endpoint.
However, when I do it on my localhost it works well
These are my request headers:
PS.
I am using Django Rest Framewok on my backend and what you see is Google Chrome's Advanced REST Client for testing my APIs. Also please take note that the CORS HEADERS are allowed and Token Authentication is the method I'm Using as credentials for my endpoints.