Can I manually set session state to authenticated in embe simple auth? - django

I am using session based authentication common for django application (subdomainA.example.com) and SPA consuming django API (subdomainB.exmaple.com).
I check certain artifact in my custom authenticator's restore methdo to determine either user is currently authenticated (certain cookie - seems poor solution but any idea how to do it better) and if yes, I would like to set ember simple auth session as authenticated.
How should I do it?
this.set('session.isAuthenticated', true);
seems not working fine, because on invalidate I got error:
ember.debug.js:16624 Uncaught Error: Assertion Failed: Session#invalidate requires the session to be authenticated!

You cannot set the ESA session to authenticated manually. Actually any attempt to write the isAuthenticated property should result in an error.
What you can do is to implement a custom authenticator and use that to authenticate the session with some static data that you pass to the authenticate method, e.g.
this.get('session').authenticate('authenticator:my-authenticator', sessionData)
// app/authenticators/my-authenticator.js
…
authenticate(sessionData) {
return Ember.RSVP.resolve(sessionData);
}

Related

How to properly check authentication with Vue.js (Vue router) and Django

I am trying to check if a user is authenticated on protected routes in vue-router. I have Django rest framework that sets sessionid on login.
I have seen people using vuex or local storage to store session information. But, If the token was forcibly expired on the server-side a user will be allowed to navigate since localStorage still says IsAuthenticated=true. In this case, is it the best choice to make a request to the Django backend such as fetch("url/auth/authenticated")?
Please consider adding routing guard on protected routes.
Vue Router permits you to do stuff before entering any route.
The following docs get you covered. Do remember that your API response is what rules you front end. So for checking if a sessionid is still valid, you can create an endpoint to do that and when it respond with an expired state, your frontend should unset everything related to the session in your vuex store and from the local storage, then redirect the user to the connexion page!

Django REST framework - prevent data access for user view?

In my api, I have a /users endpoint which currently shows (eg address) details of all users currently registered. This needs to be accessed by the (Ember) application (eg to view a user shipping address) but for obvious reasons I can't allow anyone to be able to view the data (whether that be via the browsable api or as plain JSON if we restrict a view to just use the JSONRenderer). I don't think I can use authentication and permissions, since the application needs to log a user in from the front end app (I am using token based authentication) in the first instance. If I use authentication on the user view in Django for instance, I am unable to login from Ember.
Am I missing something?
UPDATE
Hi, I wanted to come back on this.
For authentication on the Ember side I'm using Ember Simple Auth and token based authentication in Django. All is working fine - I can log into the Ember app, and have access to the token.
What I need to be able to do is to access the user; for this I followed the code sample here https://github.com/simplabs/ember-simple-auth/blob/master/guides/managing-current-user.md
I have tested the token based authentication in Postman, using the token for my logged in user - and can access the /users endpoint. (This is returning all users - what I want is for only the user for whom I have the token to be returned but that's for later!).
The question is how to do I pass the (token) header in any Ember requests, eg
this.store.findAll('user') .... etc
This is clearly not happening currently, and I'm not sure how to fix this.
UPDATE
Fixed it. Turns out that the authorize function in my application adapter was not setting the headers, so have changed the code to set the headers explicitly:
authorize(xhr) {
let { access_token } = this.get('session.data.authenticated');
if (isPresent(access_token)) {
xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', `Token ${access_token}`);
}
},
headers: computed('session.data.authenticated.token', function () {
const headers = {};
if (this.session.isAuthenticated) {
headers['Authorization'] = `Token ${this.session.data.authenticated.token}`
}
return headers;
})
Ember is framework for creating SPAs. These run in the browser. So for Ember to get the data, you have to send the data to the browser.
The browser is completely under the control of the user. The browser is software that works for them, not for the owner of the website.
Any data you send to the browser, the user can access. Full stop.
If you want to limit which bits of the data the user can read from the API, then you need to write the logic to apply those limits server-side and not depend on the client-side Ember code to filter out the bits you don't want the user to see.
I don't think I can use authentication and permissions, since the application needs to log a user in from the front end app (I am using token based authentication) in the first instance. If I use authentication on the user view in Django for instance, I am unable to login from Ember.
This doesn't really make sense.
Generally, this should happen:
The user enters some credentials into the Ember app
The ember app sends them to an authentication endpoint on the server
The server returns a token
The ember app stores the token
The ember app sends the token when it makes the request for data from the API
The server uses the token to determine which data to send back from the API

Using Firebase Auth with Django

I want to use firebase authentication for my django webapp. To achieve this, I think would I need to write a custom auth backend - is that right? I don't see any libraries that already do this - django-allauth looks like it comes pretty close as an alternative but I am interested in the phone number verification provided by firebase.
I'm also confused about what happens to the User model and functions like request.user or user.is_authenticated. Right now I use the authenticate and login functions - how does django know that a user is logged in via firebase? Would I still be creating a User model for every user?
Thanks
You can use Firebase Auth with any framework. You don't necessarily need to use custom auth. Typically, you would sign in the user on the client, get the ID token by calling firebase.auth().currentUser.getIdToken() and then pass the ID token to your server, verify it and parse its payload identifying the user ID and its other claims by using the Firebase Admin SDKs and then you can issue a session cookie identifying the user associated with that ID token.
On signout, you would clear that session cookie.
If you also need to persist that user on the backend after setting the session cookie, you can also use the Firebase Admin SDK to lookup a user identified by the user ID or just use the token claims to populate the user without any network call. You can populate that in the user model of associated framework if needed.
For more on session management, you can refer to this django documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/topics/http/sessions/

Django-allauth, JWT, Oauth

I have an AngularJS Single Page Application that uses a Django backend API based on the Django Rest Framework. The API is protected via django-rest-framework-jwt. I would like to use django-allauth for account management and authentication on the server side.
I am just missing one single piece in the flow: How does my Oauth-Token from the client get transferred into a JWT-token? Basically, I would like to do as described here http://blog.wizer.fr/2013/11/angularjs-facebook-with-a-django-rest-api/ based on python-social-auth.
So my question is, how do I implement the ObtainAuthToken class from the link with django-allauth?
There are usually two login flows with social login: client-side ("Javascript SDK") and server-side. If your server needs to be authorised, it's usually a lot easier to go through the server-side flow. And that's also what all-auth does I think (and you didn't mention you use a frontend library like the blogpost you mentioned does).
Now the challenge is to provide the token from the server to the frontend. You would probably load the token in the HTML of the initialisation of the SPA, and then from Angular save the token client side (cookie, localStorage, etc.) so the session isn't lost on a refresh.
If you don't want the user to leave your app, you can open your /accounts/login/ or /accounts/signup/ url in a new window. In that new window they authorise your app, and your server receives the token upon return. There, you will have to generate a JWT token manually, and render that into the template so that javascript can access it. With js in that popup window, you can then communicate with your app that opened the popup and pass it the token – see this SO answer for an example – so it can save it.
Django-allauth provides signals that let you hook into the social login process. In your case, I would recommend subscribing to the allauth.socialaccount.signals.pre_social_login signal. The code will look something like this:
from allauth.socialaccount.signals import pre_social_login
#receiver(pre_social_login)
def create_jwt_token(sender, request, sociallogin, **kwargs):
# dig into the sociallogin object to find the new access token.
We used hello.js for O-Auth at the company I worked at.
You provide a shim on the Python end and get the refresh token and whatever other data needed once the user connects their social account.
We redirect them via Django to the page they attempted to access from their OAuth provider's page.
Each user still has their own email account which is needed for the JWT, but you could assume that whatever email is in the scope of their social account is their email then use django's functionality to create new users: User.objects.create(email=emailStringFromOauthData) etc.

Are there authentication examples with Django and Tastypie?

Are there basic authentication examples with Django and Tastypie?. I'm a little bit confused about how the authentication in Django works, specially with Tastypie.I wanna know how the authentication works with api keys and how to authenticate a user with the built-in User model which Django has. Any suggestion or code are really appreciated.
Thanks.
Just to answer your questions regarding authentication:
How the authentication in Django works?
Django authentication required SessionMiddleware to work. Once a session has been loaded, the Django authentication backend reads a special cookie _auth_user (IIRC) which contains currently logged in user's ID. If you have access to the django shell, you can manipulate it and make yourself logged in as any user! Once the backend notices there is a _auth_user key, it then adds a lazy User object to the request (so it delays the User.objects.get(...) until it is really needed). If there is no such key in the session dict, the user is claimed to be anonymous and an instance of AnonymousUser is added to the request object instead.
How does the authentication work in Tastypie?
Before your resource view is executed, a Resource.is_authenticated(request) method is called, which in turn calls the is_authenticated(request) method of the authentication backend of your the Resource of your choice. If the method returns False, the authentication is claimed to be failed and returns with Unauthorized error. If the method returns a HttpResponse, the response is returned instead. If the method returns True, the request is claimed to have been authenticated.
How does User model authentication work in Tastypie?
The User model authentication can be performed using SessionAuthentication backend provided by the Tastypie itself. What it does is creating a session for the current request so that the authentication middleware can then automatically insert relevant user model to the request. Notice that for this method to work, your API client has to support storing cookies and resending them in future requests.
You might find this useful. It allows you to authenticate the user based on the Django session cookie.
https://github.com/amezcua/TastyPie-DjangoCookie-Auth/blob/master/DjangoCookieAuth.py
I am using this in my application and it works!