i have an angular app which uses Firebase authentication - email provider. Works just the way, application wants it.
Now, i have a new customer who wants to use the application. The only issue is that he is not keen on having email addresses / mobile numbers as login identity. He wants to create his own usernames for their users to login. the username will be a string something like:
md, accounts, branchmanager, customer_with_weird_requirements etc
for attacking this situation, i have two approaches in mind.
changing the provider to customauth provider, bring in jwt and have a back-end endpoint
making the user only enter the username and suffix a common domain url like #abc.com and mock an emailauth provider
the following are the problem i have using the approaches
the app is fully powered by firestore and its web sdks. i need to start a new cloud function for creating the endpoint. well, not difficult but for just one module, we have a architectural change which i am not a fan
not the ideal way to handle auth module. also, reset password will not work as the rest link will be sent to the user#abc.com which doesn't exist in the first place.
Is there any way to use the providers available in firebase auth, with maybe basic tweaking, which doesn't make your email/mobile no mandatory?
What you want is beyond what the built-in providers of Firebase Authentication can be configured to handle. You'll have to create you own provider to support you needs.
Keep in mind that Firebase has some great examples of how to build a custom provider, like this username/password provider.
Related
I did some research and experiments on integrating LINE login with Firebase Auth using Flutter. I have some questions:
Looks like in Firebase Auth, there are AuthProvider, and in Flutter source code, I also found an OAuthProvider. There you can create Credential to include your idToken and access token. But I don't know how to specify the providerId in that Credential. I guess it is not possible, because Firebase hasn't integrate LINE login. The client side api: logInWithCredential can ONLY work with Firebase supported login methods, and you have to enable them in your Firebase console. Am I right?
So it looks like now I have to setup my own server to exchange LINE access token to Firebase custom token. In my server, I first verify access token and grab the LINE user profile, then I create a custom token, but there I have to decide a UID, which I have to use some pattern like LINE:${LINE_UID}. This looks like some hacking, is there a better way?
Admin API to create custom token only accept UID or optionally a user claim, I have no way to set its display name or some other basic info. So if I directly send the token with UID like LINE:${LINE_UID} to a client, then the client logInWithToken, it will create a user without display name if it doesn't exist. The only workaround I can image is, in the server-side, generate the LINE:${LINE_UID} and look up it in Admin API, if it doesn't exist, then I create a user with a proper display name. This looks again not so good, because the document said if you do logInWithToken, it will create one if it is not there, and we cannot use that because I want to set it's display name when it is created. Any better solution?
I want to link a user with multiple auth provider. I saw in the Firebase JWT, they are well included, that is cool. But those linked elements are user profile get via credential. So can we link a user to a LINE login? Which is not built-in Firebase Auth Provider? Is auth provider linking only valid for Firebase built-in provider?
Regards,
Xiang.
You're asking way too much in a single post, which makes it hard to help. I'll try to address below, but please follow the advice on How do I ask a good question going forward.
The general approach for adding LINE as an authentication provider is shown in this blog post: Authenticate your Firebase users with LINE Login. There is also a example, which shows how to use Cloud Functions as the server component for this. If you get stuck implementing those for Flutter, post the minimal, complete/standalone code that reproduces this issue.
The client side api: logInWithCredential can ONLY work with Firebase supported login methods, and you have to enable them in your Firebase console. Am I right?
Nope, you're wrong. You can also provide your own sign-in provider for Firebase, and use the tokens you mint there with the Firebase Authentication SDK.
This looks like some hacking, is there a better way?
The UID can be whatever you want, but you'll have to ensure it is unique. A common way to ensure global uniqueness is to embed some identifier for the provider in the UID. If you prefer another way to ensure global uniqueness, you're free to use that too of course.
I have no way to set its display name or some other basic info [when creating the account]
This is indeed a common problem with some providers, as you for example can't set the display name for the email+password provider until after the account has been created. With a custom provider you can put whatever information you want in the initial JWT already though.
can we link a user to a LINE login? Which is not built-in Firebase Auth Provider?
See Linking custom auth provider with Firebase
Late to the party .
but This article helps you which I publish on Medium.
I'm using A Flutter plugin LINE's native SDKs in Flutter apps with Dart. The plugin helps you integrate LINE Login features in your app. You can redirect users to LINE or a web page where they log in with their LINE credentials. package
Also, I make a git hub repo for the same.
Did you check out the firebase_auth plugin? It has lots of helpfull features.
https://pub.dev/packages/firebase_auth
According to firebase doc, it seems that client side SDK allows email address as well as user profile information to be updated directly.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/android/manage-users#update_a_users_profile
If I build an android app without any UI workflow for users to change email address, I am confident that majority, 99.99%+ of the regular users, will use the app as intended.
However, if certain users investigate/reverse-engineers into the app, learns that it uses the firebase, wouldn't it be possible for them to debug and invoke any one of the Firebase Auth client SDK methods provided? (e.g. Wouldn't it be possible for hacker to change email address [not supposed to be allowed in my app after initial registration] & change photo url to point to something inappropriate images?
With Firestore database, I could use security rules to prevent read/writes, but I wasn't sure how I could do something similar in Firebase authentication.
Yes, it's possible for users to get a hold of the token that would be used to call the backend APIs exposed by Firebase Authentication that would normally be used by the SDK. There is no equivalent to database security rules.
The fact of the matter is that users normally should be able to change their email address, as they might actually need to change email provider at some point. If your app doesn't allow this for some reason, and you have a hard requirement to only use the email address provided by the authentication provider(s) you allow, you should consider writing that value to a database at the time the user account is created. Then, use security rules to prevent the user from changing it there. From that point on, you would only ever trust the value initially written to the database, and never use the email address from the auth provider.
You would probably want to handle writing to the database from a Cloud Functions auth onCreate trigger, so that you control all the logic.
I am now facing the same issue, and I think I will just not worry about the 0.01%. This is mostly because if they change their own email with Firebase Authentication via reverse-engineering and my web server is unaware of their new email, this would not have any impact on the other genuine users except maybe not being able to find them (email is only used in searches for now).
Is it possible to use a custom authentication provider which I don't have any control over?
I develop an app in addition to a teachable course. Teachable is a platform like shopify where you can create online courses.
I want to use it as an auth provider, so a user, that already has an account can login with his teachable account.
To my knowledge custom authentications with auth tokes work like this: I send a request to my server with the entered user credentials. From my server I use these credential to login to teachable, if that was successful my server gets a callback and I return a token to my client, so the login was successful.
However as far as I know teachable doesn't have an api option for me to login and get a callback if it was successful.
What can I do about this? Also are there any security issues I didn't realized?
Your understanding of the flow to add a custom provider to Firebase Authentication is correct. You need to be able get the authenticated token from the provider, and mint a Firebase custom token from it.
If the provider you're looking to add doesn't have an API, you won't be able to add it as a custom provider to Firebase though.
I don't immediately see another way to connect the provider without an API.
CONTEXT:
In firebase settings, there's a permissions tab. This shows the users/emails that are associated with accounts that have admin access to the firebase project and console.
I could have sworn I once saw a document describing a method or some way of checking if a user account in firebase auth is also an administrator of the firebase project.
I seriously can't tell if it was in a dream (yes I dream code) or if I actually saw it. I often work late nights and fall asleep in front of my computer.
Question: Is there any way to tell if a user is also an administrator of the firebase app?
IE the user email matches an email that’s listed in the IAM/access management section of firebase as an 'owner' role?
Im currently writing an admin panel for my app, so such a feature would be very useful.
If such a thing does not exist, can anyone suggest an alternative way to manage and authorise users that are capable of logging into the admin dashboard to have control over the app? I already understand custom claims so I will use them if no better solution is suggested.
Well, using only the FirebaseAuth through your app, I don't think you can (as far as my knowledge goes). But you can easily implement the Admin SDK to manage your Custom Claims. Basically, you can use the Admin SDK and find out which "role" you want to access.
Referencing Firebase
Custom claims can contain sensitive data, therefore they should only
be set from a privileged server environment by the Firebase Admin SDK.
and
Custom claims can only be retrieved through the user's ID token.
Access to these claims may be necessary to modify the client UI based
on the user's role or access level. However, backend access should
always be enforced through the ID token after validating it and
parsing its claims. Custom claims should not be sent directly to the
backend, as they can't be trusted outside of the token.
Once the latest claims have propagated to a user's ID token, you can
get them by retrieving the ID token.
Therefore, you'll only need the FirebaseAuth implemented on your app's (client), but will need an extra implementation using a server.
Please see the Firebase use cases, they'll probably fit your needs, and you can pick the one that is "easier" for you.
It turns out it can't do what I wanted in the first place because it's only available on certain triggers.
Here it is: context.authType
https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/functions/functions.EventContext#.authType
The level of permissions for a user. Valid values are:
ADMIN Developer user or user authenticated via a service account. USER
Known user. UNAUTHENTICATED Unauthenticated action null For event
types that do not provide user information (all except Realtime
Database).
Although it would be great if we could get this information on callable functions and firebase triggers because it would help further secure hosted backend admin apps for customer service or developers, who have high-level access to admin functions. This variable seems to not be available on callable functions but is available on newUser trigger - which is strange, because how can user signup ever be authenticated anyway?
I am building apps using Firebase (Storage, Functions, Hosting, Real-Time Database and Firestore). In the apps, the user authenticates using a third-party library (like Google connect but not Google).
I don't know how to protect my database because I am not using Firebase Authentication. How can I use this third party authentication to protect data for example? Maybe I need to create a user manually and attach information to him so that this info will be available in the Security Rules editor?
Thanks
I don't think you can secure your database or storage without a form of authentication.
Now firebase provides multiple methods of authentication (email , google, custom , anonymous .....).
What you might want:
You might want to add custom login to your users in which they get registered with extra data that you provide. And they will still get a user id that you will use to check in the rules to allow read and writes along with some custom data you provided while registration (so you can check these data from the rules).