User authentication in java web services - web-services

Im developing a java web application which is deployed on a glassfish server. The web services are used to connect to user databases. Each user has a database. My question is, is there a way to keep track of the user? For example in servlets we use sessions in order to store some user specific data. Is there something similar to it in web services? It seems impractical to have to authenticate the username and password each time the user sends a request to a web service. Thanks.

Web services may also use sessions, however there are good reasons to keep them stateless:
it might be that the clients do not support sessions (cookies), e.g. if your clients are not browser based;
stateless services are easier to scale.
You do not have to use username+password for authentication. You may use JWT (or other kind of access tokens) to protect them.
Auth0 has got nice article on this topic:
https://auth0.com/blog/2014/01/07/angularjs-authentication-with-cookies-vs-token/

Related

When you use DRF(Server API) + React(public Web Client), how do you implement for OAuth2 social login?

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

OpenID Connect for service-oriented architecture web portal

I'm building a website using service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles. When users visit the site in their browsers, the interface they see will be composed of resources delivered by several different services on the backend.
My question is how to use OpenID Connect (OIC) to implement SSO so that users log on through the site once and their browsers can automatically retrieve all the protected resources that are necessary.
The main conceptual difficulty I'm having is that everything written for implementing OpenID Connect seems to be oriented toward people creating monolithic third-party clients that authenticate with Google, Yahoo, etc. In my case, however, the client is my web portal and the resource providers are my backend services. Certain OIC concepts don't make sense to me in this context: for instance, the auth grant. Are users supposed to authorize the web portal to access their information the first time that they log on? That would be pretty absurd.
Or Is OIC the wrong tool for what I'm trying to do?

node.js rest webservice authentication for client-server interaction

I'm designing an architecture where the web interface is a client (developed using a front-end js framework) and all requests are routed to several webservices.
All communication will happen using standard HTTP responses and JSON entities.
Now I'm facing the authentication mechanism.
My service will, of course, have several users, and I need to restrict access to users' resources.
Users will 1) signin to the web client (/admin) and then 2) the client-side js will perform several AJAX requests on webservices on user behalf.
Should I create a persistent session between the client/server and then pass some reference alongside each request or authenticate each single request using a stateless approach? How could I authenticate the web-client requests for the current user without adding too much overhead or complexity to my system?
I'm looking at passport-local and passport-localapikey but it's not very clear to me if I should authorize my client or the user itself (meaning should I have only one pair of credentials for all users when performing web-service request or one pair per user?)
A simple example (explained I don't need to copy-paste code) would be very appreciated. At this stage I'd prefer the solution introducing less complexity but granting a good security in order to be able to set it up very quickly.
PS. I could also take into account creating a distinct service handling authentication in order to create a common API to be shared between client and server, but that seems a bit over-engineering to me.
Thanks,
If you're already using Express as a framework for Node.js, you can use it's built in session handling. It is capable of using any sort of session store including memory, redis, mongo, etc.
There's a good example here: http://blog.modulus.io/nodejs-and-express-sessions

Authentication with website, mobile app, and webservice

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.

Session sharing in webservice

I am using a gwt based application and I want to introduce web service [Apache CXF ] to provide access business layer to other application which is build up in other technology like php, iphone and android.
As per client requirement,
->create gui pages in php
->create login module (with oauth concept) in php
->Use php webservice for login process
->Use java webservice to access business layer
Now my question is to access particular business layer for security reason we have to maintain user session some how. right?
so as I mention requirement how can I manage session in my Java EE app server. should I have to create a session for per user request?
How could I maintain session for user if my login module on Apache server?
Note: Please note that my login is using a php app which has some oauth feature and that will redirect to Java EE app.
Passing JSESSIONID between instances of application server will do you nothing. Unless sessions are clustered, each application has it's own session container and cannot be shared, (unless you write a custom valve that will search for all sessions in application server). Plus WS does not have a notion of http session, you would have to implement your own mechanism. Plese elaborate what are you trying to achieve? And then we will be able to help you more.