Been reading and watching quite a bit, and asking a lot of questions regarding ReactJS and Django.
This particularly helped me to understand the the flow of data from Django REST Framework to ReactJS and from ReactJS to Django REST Framework.
Django Forms and Authentication with Front-end Framework (AngularJS/ReactJS)
However, the one thing I am trying to understand is authentication to the Django REST Framework. I understand from the documentation that it has built in authentication. Since this is sensitive data, I would obviously want it protected people retrieving it just by going to http://www.my_site.com/info/api.
I would need to setup ReactJS to be the only thing that can request data from the API whether that is through a key or username/password credentials. I am just curious how this is handled? Obviously I don't want that hard coded in ReactJS because it will compile with the rest of ReactJS.
Here's how I'd approach it: I'd use a JSON Web Token (JWT) for authentication and authorization.
You'd use your back-end to protect ALL API requests from invalid JWT's except for routes where a user won't have a token (ie, registration/log-in pages).
Here's how the flow of the application will go:
A new user registers to your app with standard credentials such as email and password.
Your back-end will create a new user, sign a new JWT token (usually with the user's ID). You'll probably use a third-party library to sign/verify tokens (I don't have experience in the Django community but I am sure a quick Google search will give you answers). Your back-end will send back this token. This is the only time the back-end will receive email, passwords or any other sensitive information on registration.
From this point on React will only use this token for authorization. React will save this token somewhere (ie, localStorage) and send this token along with the other parts of a request to the API routes you created with your back-end. You'll send this token in the authorization headers in the request.
Your back-end will validate this token using a third-party library. If it's invalid the request stops and an unauthorized error is returned. If it's valid the request continues.
This achieves the following:
Your API routes are protected against unauthenticated users
Each request to your API is verified for authorized users which protects anyone from requesting any part of your API.
You can further solidify this by only allowing requests for users to modify their own data. For example, protect Suzy's profile from being modified by people other than herself by only allowing her token with her ID to modify her account/data.
Important Note- Your backend will never save these tokens in storage. It will verify the token on each request. Read more about JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and how it works.
Django Rest Framework has built-in token authentication and a third party package for JWT Token Auth.
If you the standard token auth would work for you, then it could be pretty simple with drf-redux-auth. If you need JWT for some reason, as suggested by Keith above, you could easily fork the above...
Related
We have a django project that uses the Graphene-Django library to implement a GraphQL API in our project. This backend is accessed by our mobile apps. For the authentication of the apps, we use the django-graphql-jwt library, which is a JSON Web Token library in Django with GraphQL approach.
Now we want to implement the Facebook Login in our system and with it the authentication happens in Facebook. After authentication, what will be sent to our backend from the mobile app is only the email of the user. How can I register and authenticate the user in django-graphql-jwt without the password? Or is there a better workflow for this?
After authentication, what will be sent to our backend from the mobile app is only the email of the user.
Hey Al Ryan, this seems like a faulty implementation of OAuth, what you get back from facebook is a token you send that token to your server, and it will send it back to facebook to verify it's not faked, then only user can be logged in.
Otherwise anyone can call the server with a email and act as that user.
This is a library with social auth and JWT support, see if this helps.
I'm also sharing solution from my project
Create a facebookAuth named graphql mutation
Above mutation will take two params access_token and access_verifier
Send a GET request to this url f"https://graph.facebook.com/me?fields=name,email&access_token={access_token}"
If json response has a key errors, stop user from logging in.
Otherwise above response will contain email, use it to create/get a User object.
Now you simply need to return the JWT token from your mutate function.
To generate access and refresh tokens call this function jwt_encode, imported as from dj_rest_auth.utils import jwt_encode
above will return tuple access_token, refresh_token
Note I have used dj_rest_auth instead of django-graphql-jwt, but it's pretty equivalent you just need a function to sign the JWT, rest all is custom logic so better write yourself.
PS: OAuth is a sensitive entry-point for attackers so implement is securely, you can contact at atul7555[at]gmail.com for any assistance.
I'm using Django REST framework JWT library for authentication in my django application. And I thought the whole idea of using JSON Web Token Authentication was NOT having a database trip in every request.
But it still retrieves user's data (which is stored in the token's PAYLOAD) from database per request.
What am I doing wrong?
The webtoken mechanism and the server authentication internals are rather orthogonal.
The web token just allows the holder to say who they are. It is similar to holding a user's username and password, except the token can be revoked without the user having to learn a new password. This authentication technique has nothing to do with whether the server will do a database access.
If you wish to eliminate a DB access during authentication on the server, you can use some sort of authentication caching mechanism like django-cached_authentication_middleware.
After reading a lot about Oauth2.0, I am still confused regarding following points:
When to create access token? When a user tries to log in or when a user tries to register? Is this token to be sent in HTTP response after logging in?
The client has to store access token somewhere so that it can be sent in every HTTP request by the client. Where should it store it?
Note: I am not doing any third party authentication, just authentication for my own app. I am using Django as the web framework, Django-tastypie for REST API and Django-oauth-provider for Oauth. I followed this excellent tutorial but still have certain doubts. It will be appreciated if the answer is given in the context of these frameworks.
Let's say I have an AngularJS application that consumes the REST API of a Django application.
The Django application has got a built-in OAuth2 provider that can be called to retrieve an access token and use the protected endpoints of the API. This provider is using django-oauth-toolkit.
Let's assume there is a registered client with "password" grant type, so that the end users only need to provide their credentials in the front-end in order to get an access token from the back-end.
At some point we want to add some support for social networks login and we decide to use python-social-auth (PSA) to that end. Here is the workflow I want to achieve:
The user logs in on Facebook from the front-end (via the Facebook SDK) and we get an access token back from the OAuth2 provider of Facebook.
We send the Facebook token to an endpoint of our REST API. This endpoint uses the Facebook token and django-social-auth to authenticate the user in our Django application (basically matching a Facebook account to a standard account within the app).
If the authentication succeeds, the API endpoint requests an access token from the OAuth2 provider for this newly authenticated user.
The Django access token is sent back to the front-end and can be used to access the REST API in exactly the same way that a regular user (i.e. logged in with his credentials) would do.
Now my problem is: how do I achieve step 3? I first thought I would register a separate OAuth2 client with Client Credentials Grant but then the generated token is not user-specific so it does not make sense. Another option is to use the TokenAuthentication from DRF but that would add too much complexity to my project. I already have an OAuth server and I don't want to set up a second token provider to circumvent my problem, unless this is the only solution.
I think my understanding of PSA and django-oauth-toolkit is not deep enough to find the best way of reaching my goal, but there must be a way. Help!
I managed to get something working using urllib2. I can't speak towards whether or not this is good practice, but I can successfully generate an OAuth2 token within a view.
Normally when I'd generate an access token with cURL, it'd look like this:
curl -X POST -d "grant_type=password&username=<user_name>&password=<password>" -u"<client_id>:<client_secret>" http://localhost:8000/o/token/
So we're tasked with making urllib2 accomplish this. After playing around for some bit, it is fairly straightforward.
import urllib, urlib2, base64, json
# Housekeeping
token_url = 'http://localhost:8000/auth/token/'
data = urllib.urlencode({'grant_type':'password', 'username':<username>, 'password':<password>})
authentication = base64.b64encode('%s:%s' % (<client_id>, <client_secret>))
# Down to Business
request = urllib2.Request(token_url, data)
request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % authentication)
access_credentials = urllib2.urlopen(request)
json_credentials = json.load(access_credentials)
I reiterate, I do not know if this is in bad practice and I have not looked into whether or not this causes any issues with Django. AFAIK this will do this trick (as it did for me).
I'm thinking of using a token-based authentication policy for my Pyramid backend & Angular frontend app.
I read many articles today and it has come to my attention that a token based auth policy seems to be the way to go for AngularJS authentication where the token is passed to the client and Angular saves the token using a Service of some sort.
Reading the source of the AuthTktAuthenticationPolicy I realized that it uses AuthTktCookieHelper to generate a cookie. I'm a bit confused here: Is a token the same as a cookie? If so, then how would I be able to retrieve the value of the cookie and pass it on to the client after the user has successfully logged in?