I am making a mobile app with my custom API on AWS, firebase auth and firestore. I want to make secured connection:
- prevent MITM attack between client and AWS, and between client and firebase store
- prevent anybody to make request (and accept request only from mobile app)
Firestore
|(<- should be secure)
User - Firebase Auth
|(<- should be secure)
AWS EC2
Should I use JWT? Does anybody know how to use it on firebase auth?
I have used JWTs previously to allow a user’s login state persist on different sub domains on the same root domain (as Firebase does not do this natively). Check out this article:
https://dev.to/johncarroll/how-to-share-firebase-authentication-across-subdomains-1ka8
It may help with auth and JWT! It will allow you to authenticate in both backend and frontend.
Related
We use firebase to authenticate a frontend application in the standard process- The application connect to firebase and ask for token, than the application send this token in every API call to the server, and the server validates the token.
Now if we want to expose some of our endpoints and supply api access (e.g users will be able to login without browser), how should we do the authentication?
The users will send username and password, and we will need to authenticate against firebase with the credentials.
Is there best practice or guideline to how to approach this?
I want to still leverage firebase security features that I don't need to manage by myself (for example, preventing brute-force attacks), but not using the browser.
I am using firebase firestore as datastore for my web based application. The application has 2 different actors.
Supervisor: logs in via a common password set for all supervisors plus the ability to generate unique codes.
User: logs in via the unique code generated by the supervisor.
I am using cloud functions to do the heavy lifting for both actors. Now these functions are protected with cors and whitelist for origins.
I am trying to secure the routes created with cloud functions with a Auth Middleware relying on the concept of if the request is not from authenticated account or not.
I have created a email and password accounts for both actors for the frontend section of my application.
The question is if I am to go with firebase Auth api to get the refresh token and use it as jwt in the Middleware, will it be an issue since let's say 100 supervisor are connected and performing some tasks, and the same thing for the second actor ? Because after examining the refresh token it contains the uid of the account authenticated and using the same account for multiple connection is the blocking stone in this scenario.
the point of a token to be used in every operation is to validate the origin of the request
Firebase Authentication uses ID tokens to verify the user's identity, not the origin of requests. A malicious user in your scenario can get the credentials from the app, and use them in their own code - calling APIs on your Firebase project.
If you want to only allow calls from your own app, consider using the new App Check feature of Firebase.
I'm developing a web app (using Angular) which works with Firebase.
I installed the ngx-auth-firebaseui which is an easy to use library I used to perform user login. Since I need custom APIs I also developed an ExpressJs server that uses the Firebase Admin SDK.
I call ExpressJs APIs without any security for now (since I'm still in my local environment).
In order to use the Firebase Admin SDK, I followed the official docs, which say:
Once you have created a Firebase project, you can initialize the SDK with an authorization strategy that combines your service account file together with Google Application Default Credentials.
Firebase projects support Google service accounts, which you can use to call Firebase server APIs from your app server or trusted environment. If you're developing code locally or deploying your application on-premises, you can use credentials obtained via this service account to authorize server requests.
[...]
When authorizing via a service account, you have two choices for providing the credentials to your application. You can either set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable, or you can explicitly pass the path to the service account key in code. The first option is more secure and is strongly recommended.
Locally I set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS property and everything is okay. Does this also need to be set in the production environment or is there another method?
I would also like to use OAuth2 to secure communication between the web app and the server APIs, but I don't know how to integrate it within the authentication flow.
In addition, Firebase docs state:
The Admin SDKs also provide a credential which allows you to authenticate with a Google OAuth2 refresh token:
var refreshToken; // Get refresh token from OAuth2 flow
admin.initializeApp({
credential: admin.credential.refreshToken(refreshToken),
databaseURL: 'https://<DATABASE_NAME>.firebaseio.com'
});
but if I do this I receive the error:
.../node_modules/firebase-admin/lib/auth/credential.js:47
var tmp = from[key] || from[alt];
^
TypeError: Cannot read property 'clientId' of undefined
Question 1: Fireabase Admin SDK initialization -- How to handle locally vs. in production?
Answer: Using the Firebase Admin SDK requires initialization in the local development environment as well as the production server environment. In both environments, you may either set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable, or you may explicitly pass the path to the service account key in code.
Question 2: How to use OAuth2 for secure communications between Wep App and Server APIs?
Answer: Verify Id Tokens
After a successful sign-in, send the user's ID token to your server using HTTPS. Then, on the server, verify the integrity and authenticity of the ID token and retrieve the uid from it. You can use the uid transmitted in this way to securely identify the currently signed-in user on your server.
Question 3: How to authenticate with a Google OAuth2 refresh token using the Firebase Admin SDK?
Answer from Manage User Sessions
Firebase Authentication sessions are long lived. Every time a user
signs in, the user credentials are sent to the Firebase Authentication
backend and exchanged for a Firebase ID token (a JWT) and refresh
token.
On the client (web app), the Firebase User has a refreshToken property to retrieve the current refresh token.
However, the standard approach to initialize the Admin SDK is to either set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable or explicitly pass the path to the service account key in code.
I'm trying to build an IFTTT service and connect it to my Firebase backend.
I need to authenticate user as indicated in the IFTTT docs:
https://platform.ifttt.com/docs/api_reference#service-authentication
IFTTT’s protocol supports OAuth2 authentication, including support for
refresh tokens if so desired.
Your service API should use access tokens for authentication and as a
source of identity. A single access token should correspond to a
single user account or resource owner on your service.
If refresh tokens are used, they must be non-expiring. If refresh
tokens are not used, access tokens must be non-expiring.
But I can only get short-lived access tokens from Firebase it seems. Where can I get or how can I generate such tokens from the Firebase auth SDK?
Update in response to #FrankvanPuffelen:
I'll create an IFTTT service running on a Node server (possibly simply Cloud Functions) that will use the Firebase RTDB to send formatted HTTP request back to IFTTT. IFTTT requires me to authorize user accounts. Their required UX is something like this:
If an IFTTT user tries to use my service on the IFTTT website,
an auth dialog for my service pops up.
The user logs in and confirms IFTTT's access to their data on my service.
Some OAuth 2.0 tokens are exchanged.
IFTTT servers will periodically send requests (authentified with those tokens) on behalf of the user to my server.
Part of the question is: Can I use the Firebase Auth API to get those tokens, etc. or do I need to create a new OAuth 2.0 "layer" with my own generated tokens for IFTTT?
PS: I'm very new to OAuth, so it's all a bit confusing to me, sorry if the question isn't very clear.
So IFTTT calls Cloud Functions, which then calls Realtime Database, and you want to authentication the IFTT user with Realtime Database. Is that correct? If so, you can either use an OAuth2 token or create a Firebase Authentication session cookie.
Use an OAuth2 token
I did this not too long ago for accessing the Realtime Database from Google Apps Script. The requirements are relatively simple (once you know them):
The OAuth2 tokens must be requested with the correct scopes: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email and https://www.googleapis.com/auth/firebase.database.
The OAuth2 access token must be present in the request to Realtime Database.
The authenticated user must be at least an editor on the Firebase project. Note that this is not a Firebase Authentication user, but a Google user account.
Also see:
How to integrate Firebase into Google Apps Script without using (deprecated) database secret
Use a Firebase Authentication session cookie
You can also use a Firebase Authentication session cookie, which can be longer-lived (up to 2 weeks) than a regular Firebase Authentication ID token (up to an hour). You'll want to set up a Cloud Function for creating the session cookie, call that from IFTTT, and then pass the session cookie with the IFTTT request and along to the Realtime Database.
For more on this, see:
the Firebase documentation on managing session cookies.
I'm posting my solution here, this is a rough draft of what I did at at the time.
I'm using this auth method: My API has users with non-expiring OAuth2 access tokens and have an Express server responding at a Firebase HTTPS Cloud Function endpoint. Currently, at the prototyping stage, it generates fake tokens from the UID that are successfully accepted by IFTTT.
It's a redirect-heavy authentification flow based on this old IFTTT api example: https://github.com/IFTTT/connect_with_ifttt_auth_sample
Here's the gist of it:
Tokens and Auth Codes are just randomized and encrypted UIDs for now.
/oauth/authorize redirects to my app.
The app asks the user if they want to authorize IFTTT
The app redirects to /oauth/authorize_user
/oauth/authorize_user generates a user-specific code and redirects the user to IFTTT with this code
IFTTT asks /oauth/token to exchange the code for a Bearer tokens.
IFTTT can now make requests on behalf of this user with this bearer token.
Sample code here: https://gist.github.com/nathanvogel/15ed311258b91d7ec3d25f44047780e2
I'm trying to integrate Firebase into a Unity WebGL app, unlike iOS and Android there's no official Firebase plugin for it.
I'd like to try and use the Unity WWW class to make web requests to endpoints to do firebase authentication.
Is there an endpoint I can call passing the username and password to firebase that will return an auth token?
No, that would be a massive security hole for the end user who gives up their password to you. Users should only be typing passwords directly into the site that controls their account.
You should probably take a look into calling through to JavaScript to use the Firebase web SDKs.
WebGL: Interacting with browser scripting
Yes, Firebase Auth has a REST API that sends the email/password combo (as POST parameters) in an https call.
Firebase Auth REST API Sign in with email / password