I an using Django OAuth Toolkit and Django Rest for OAuth authentication for mobile app. For accessing any protected resource client id and secret of the app is required . Where should I store client secret. Storing in APK is unsafe as it can be decompiled. Even obfuscation can be reverse engineered . Then whats the best and safe way to serve client secret to the app.
It isn't extremely important to keep the client id hidden, but you are right not to save the client secret somewhere in your app. Exposing it would definitely compromise your security.
In your case, you could set up an OAuth app that uses the Password Grant type (my personal preference), or have your user authenticate with your server which will grant them an expirey access token to use with future requests. These are two different "OAuth flows" that are common for mobile apps.
There's also this awkwardly titled slideshow which I thought had some useful illustrations to describe the use of OAuth with mobile apps.
Related
I am developing web platform which has to have 3 type of users (user, admin, partner companies). For the authentication I am considering to use google Identity platform with multitenancy (probably users in one tenant and admins are in different tenant).
As I understand from documentation, how do we integrate identity platform to our application is to create identity platform provider from console and integrate it into frontend with UI. From front-end, without contacting backend service we can sign up, login and logout by calling firebase SDK and it will give us authentication token. From backend I can check that token with middleware and decide if I agree the user as authenticated or not. Correct me if I am wrong.
Then I can get some metadata of authenticated user from the token, maybe email or name etc. But I want to store user related information on noSQL database as well. For example, if user wants to change his email I need to handle it in backend server, also, I'd like to store users log (access and audit log on somewhere else). In case of, I am using frontend UI and SDK how do log the access and audit information on my backend? also, when changing user's information, do I just write handler function in backend end update user's data with REST API or Admin SDK? what is the best practice over here? Or should I better write my own login and logout function on my backend then call REST API or Admin SDK? is there preferred way? Google is showing me only integration way of authentication from frontend?
BTW, I am deploying backend application on google cloud run, and frontend would be developed in react and should be deployed maybe in firebase or in cloud run as well.
Thanks
As per the Documentation,Yes your understanding is correct to integrate identity platform to the application.
You can store the user related information on a noSQL database like Firestore or Firebase Realtime Database. You can write the Rest API to change or update the user's information in the database.
If you want to write your own login and logout function, I don’t think it is necessary because Firebase Admin SDK provides these features. But if you want to manage user authentication in the backend for specific requirements, you can write your own login and logout function on the backend and use the Firebase Admin SDK.
For access and audit log information you can use Firebase Analytics, Firebase Analytics helps you understand what your users are doing in your app. It has all of the metrics that you’d expect in an app analytics tool combined with user properties like device type, app version, and OS version to give you insight into how users interact with your app.
But finally, the best way would depend on your requirements and use case.
I am creating a Flutter project with Django + Django Rest framework as the backend. I want to add user authentication to the app.
I found some ways to achieve that such as Session authentication or token authentication. According to this article, if we want to add user authentication for mobile-based apps, it is best to use token authentication since session authentication is not suited for mobile phones.
Is it really best to use token authentication for mobile-based apps instead of session authentication?
Yes, token is best for mobile client.
Mobile and cookies are not good friends ;)
Token authentication work well for multiple device connection with same account and it's easier to store token.
It's stateless and work without cookies.
I have worked on two projects with Django and flutter.
I think for android or ios projects, token based authentication is best to go with because they are stateless and you can easily manage user roles and permissions for the application too.
From security point of view, it's also better because there's no possibility of creating a CSRF request when you app is using tokens.
Cookies don't fit much with other platform than a browser.
I am developing Django(Server) with React(Web Client).
And I want to use facebook social login.
I knew that client is public client, server is confidential. So I want to use authentication code grant way for authenticating user.
So I find out the way but there is no way to implement that. All the python oauth2 library limplements is just for django server side rendering.(Django Server + Web client).
So I confused about I am wrong or just the others just did not make the grant way.
When you use DRF(Server API) + React(public Web Client),
how do you implement for OAuth2 social login?
I wonder that. please give me some advise to me.
Thanks.
Let's start from basics, people usually split frontend and backend to improve the production speed as frontend and backend can be developed by two separate teams. But in order for the frontend and backend to work together, there needs to be a connection interface, an API.
React is a frontend that runs in the browser, so in order to talk to the server, it uses a REST protocol.
As the backend in this scenario is Django we use DRF as React uses REST API. DRF provides easy flexible pre-built packages to carry out this communication job between server and client.
Now the authenticator for web login you choose to be Facebook hence you will get the identity token from facebook, which will correspond to the rows in the Django User table which will give you access to the user's data in Django.
You don't need to do everything at once, you need to first implement the Facebook social auth and after test(test using postman app) only think about connecting React
A good place to start is this DRF documentation, look into Social OAuth2
https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/authentication/#django-oauth-toolkit
I am creating a service that will include a website, a mobile app, and a web service.
Both the website and mobile app will talk to the web service to interact with the database and any other backend items.
I would like users to be able to log in with other services (such as google, facebook, twitter, etc.)
I have two questions in implementing this:
1.) Should I use OpenID or OAuth? I'm not sure which is better for the situation. I have no need to actually access features from a users account, I just want them to be able to log in with accounts they already have,
2.) Where should I implement the authentication? Do I have to implement it both on the website and on the mobile app, or could I have both talk to the web service and do the authentication there?
Thanks
If you are just doing authentication and not syncing any account details, I think OpenID is the way to go. From a security standpoint, I would say to implement your authentication on the website and on the app and not in the webservice. You want to handle credentials the least amount possible and especially avoid sending the credentials via webservice if not using SSL.
I want to upload a file to a website via a desktop app and then take the user to the website. The website has a web service, but requires authentication as does the web site. Is there a way to do this without forcing the user to authenticate twice (once in the desktop app and once in the web browser)?
Unfortunately, you can't prefill an input of type file for security reasons, which makes sense since the user won't want you uploading arbitrary files from his/her computer. But if they have a desktop app, is there some way around this?
Or maybe make the user log into the web app first and then the authentication cookie can be reused?
Any other ideas?
Thanks,
Ben
I would use the dekstop app as a client to the website app via an api.
So, login via the desktop app. The api returns a authentication token (as Carlos suggested) which might be a md5 hash stored in your database for a certain period of time, possibly matched to the clients ip address.
The desktop app can then make calls on the api (like uploading a file) as a authenticated user (by using the auth token).
When loading the website, perhaps the url is http://website/login/{auth_token} where the auth token is added to the url. The api can check to see if its a valid auth token and consider the user logged in.
You could generate an authentication token that could later be used on the website.
It all depends on the type of authentication of the service and the site. Is it integrated Kerberos, WS-Auth, is it Basic/Digest HTTP, is it forms/cookie ?
This answer will most likely not work in the very general users-on-the-wide-open-web scenario, but in intranet contexts, using Windows Authentication (on an ASP .Net solution), would provide this.