I am currently trying to authenticate users in a c++ application in Windows. I need to display a dialog for username and password and verify that they are an authenticated user on the Windows machine. Are there any libraries that allow for this functionality or a good way to go about it?
Probably CredUIPromptForWindowsCredentials (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa375178.aspx) or old CredUIPromptForCredentials (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa375177.aspx) could solve your problem?
UPDATED: Another the most old way to authenticate a user is using of SSPI. It will not help with displaying a dialog but this can you implement yourself. You can find a very old code example (probably the first one published by Microsoft) here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/180548.
If you do want use LDAP API (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366102.aspx) you can use ldap_bind_s (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366156.aspx) to verify user authentication. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366106.aspx as a code example (it is not exactly what you want, but you can understand how these API work)
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I use psexec to run my app,
Some of the tasks my app does should have a logged on user,
so I want to check (from the app, not the server which runs the psexec)
if there is a user which currently logged on. I couldn't find any api which retrieve this. My code is in c++.
Any idea to check it?
use LsaEnumerateLogonSessions + LsaGetLogonSessionData
Found a solution to this issue
I enumerate the registry keys (using RegEnumKeyEx) under HKEY_USERS.
If there is a key different from the default ones (".DEFAULT","S-1-5-18","S-1-5-19","S-1-5-20") it means that at least on user is logged on
I have an application that is run on multiple user systems, and using OAuth, allows the users to log in via Facebook, Twitter, etc. The entire point of the user logging in is to get settings and actions that the same user made while logged in on other computers, as identified by logging in with the same OAuth provider + provider user id. The application itself is written in C++ using Qt.
My question is this: how can I save the settings that a user made, and allow them to retrieve it in a secure way? I have a centralized server that I can store information using MySql tables, but I'm not sure the best way to have the user application prompt the server, and receive the data stored for that user.
Any ideas or places you could point me towards?
There are several ways I could think of with this, all have trade offs:
Generally I would store the data in mysql using some kind of string or object encryption/serialization method. I do not use Qt much but http://qt-project.org/wiki/Simple_encryption has some examples of very simple encryption that could be used.
Then the question becomes: What do you use as the key? I would go either with the key provided by OAuth for that user (which could be an issue if users de-authorize the app but still want access to this data) or some other user provided key (which is counter to using OAuth in the first place).
Another option is to go with Qt Users session http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qtwebkit-guide-cache.html
This would maybe remove the need to encrypt since it should only be accessible within the users scope.
NOTE: Based on comments below it seems the issue is more about securing communication with the MySQL versus the data inside of MySQL. Waiting on user comments to revise my answer.
This issue is very common in stackoverflow, and there's a lot of different questions and answers about it, yet I couldn't find exactly what I need.
First, I'd like to define exactly what I need: the option to let users log in to my app using their Facebook credentials. The app will save a matching classic Django user. I will only need to use the user's profile picture and to make sure that each time the same Facebook user will be related to the matching Django user.
Unfortunately, I find it really frustrating to implement for the following reasons:
By now, after reading a lot, I couldn't find out what is the best package for this task.
Some people recommend django-social-auth and praise its functionality and documentation. Personally, I don't understand why, since it's not specifically for Facebook and there are no explanations about the client side, i.e the Facebook login button and how the whole flow works.
When you go to Facebook developers, you suddenly find yourself reading about some magical javascript sdk, and about a promise that that's all you need. Then you get frustrated again and can't understand how a client side related sdk can sign up users to your app.
I know developers somehow implement Facebook auth packages in their apps, but I just can't figure out how to do it.
If anyone could tell me: at this time point, what is the best way to add Facebook authentication to my Django app? I would also ask for detailed documentation / tutorial that explains how to log in a Facebook user, from settings and configuration level through signup to Django app and to client side code.
There are multiple ways to approach the problem, what is the "best" way is really subjective.
Subjectively speaking, you could opt for django-allauth. Here are a few pointers to help you get started:
If you want to keep the signup simple, set SOCIALACCOUNT_AUTO_SIGNUP to True in order to achieve a "no questions asked" login. Users simply approve the FB dialog and they end up logged in in your site right away.
Adding a login button to your template is merely a matter of:
Sign In
The app offers support for the JS SDK login (pro: users are accustomed to the typical FB popup that appears), or you can use your own OAuth flow. Whatever you please.
The fastest way understand FB's Oauth 2.0 flow is to play with FB's Javascript SDK. Once you get the hang of it, the FB's PHP library is similar. Also, other OAuth sites like Google, Twitter or Dropbox have almost identical implementation.
In baby steps:
Learn how to install FB Javascript SDK onto a simple page
Use FB.login to determine login status and obtain the login url.
Lastly, use FB.Event.Subscribe and subscribe to auth.statusChange to detect the login/logout changes.
Also, good to check out https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/ on the upcoming features or features being removed.
django-social-auth is not just for Facebook, but that doesn't mean you should use all the backends available.
Project documentation is at http://django-social-auth.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html and Facebook backend details at http://django-social-auth.readthedocs.org/en/latest/backends/facebook.html.
Using Coldfusion 8,
how can I check whether window user is currently logged in?
I know, I can use cgi.auth_user variable (domain\username ), however is it always reliable to use?
if not, what other ways to check?
IIRC, cgi.auth_user shows the username of a user authenticated via basic authentication. I don't think it supports windows domain connections. Assuming that you are on a windows domain, that should be easy to test -- just dump the cgi scope.
I want to implement Facebook connect login for my Django site and I've checked the already existing apps.
So far, I have found Django-Socialauth, django-socialregistration, and django-facebookconnect for this purpose.
The question is which one to choose, and I would like to hear from other developers who have experience with any of these apps.
It is important for me that the Facebook Connect login app plays nicely with #login_required, with the default auth system, and with django-registration.
Please share your experience :)
Update (11/26/2013): I'm updating my recommendation. Since a sufficient amount of time has passed since I wrote this answer, I would recommend python-social-auth or django-allauth as the best tools for the job. They are active projects with good documentation and support for a lot more than just Facebook. I've had success using both.
I have had the most luck with adapting django-socialregistration with django-registration (0.8). Since you're working with django-registration, you're going to have to do a little bit of work, since all three of those packages assume the role of both the creation and the authentication of the user.
I was just going to explain what needed to be done, but you inspired me to finally get my version out: hello-social-registration.
Like I alluded to, it separates gives the registration functions to a django-registration backend and handles all the authorization itself. I've been using this on my near-beta application for a while now with no problems (I also handed it to a friend to use a few months ago and he got it to work without much modification).
It's definitely not ready to be a plug-and-play reusable application, yet, but hopefully it'll provide you with some insight. :)
By far the most commonly used package for Facebook authentication in Django is Django Facebook:
https://github.com/tschellenbach/Django-facebook
It also gives you access to the facebook APIs using the included Open Facebook api client.
I wanted to implement a basic "Login using Facebook" functionality in my Django app. I didn't want to show the user a form to fill or have her choose a password. I preferred to make it seamless.
Based on my requirements, django_facebook_oauth was the best app for me. It simply allows the user to login using facebook, and gets the user info my Facebook app requests from her (based on my Facebook Auth Dialog). It creates a new user in Django with the user's facebook email, a username and a blank password.
I highly recommend it.
Hi Take a look at fbconnect app that we (actually, Hernani, a guy on our team) put together for osqa (a clone of CNPROG).
You will have to, probably, tinker a bit to adapt that to your needs. It does work with #login_required decorator and the standard django.contrib.auth system, but we do not use django-registration.
Our app also works with openid and password login, but the openid part is tightly coupled with the Q&A component at present.
We may separate it though some time in the future, if anyone might be interested in "anything-signin" django pluggable app or has something better already - pls let us know.
I've used django-allauth and django-facebook on two different projects.
django-allauth was great and provided very good support for logging in and creating user profiles. It could also work with other auth providers, which I didn't implement.
django-facebook worked out of the box, but it's only compatible with Facebook. It also provided simple APIs for fetching users' likes and friends from Facebook directly into the db, which I liked very much!
facebook.get_and_store_likes(user)
facebook.get_and_store_friends(user)
I played with .NET based libraries and found them to be frustratingly out of date. Facebook seems to change their APIs frequently, so if you cannot find a library that is routinely maintained, you will find that you will get halfway through your implementation before you realize that there are serious problems.
I had some success with the javascript API that Facebook publishes and maintains. While the documentation may not be always up to date, I found that I was always within striking distance of the correct implementation (one or two changes needed).