FOSOAuthServerBundle + Amazon Alexa: How to manually authenticate user with Access Token? - symfony

In short: How can I manually authenticate a users with a given access token?
The long story:
An Amazon Alexa Skill should access user data within a Symfony 3.4 based web services.
The web services uses FOSOAuthServerBundle to handle the OAauth authentication and link the users Alexa account to the web services user account.
Once the account is linked Alexa API includes the OAuth Access Token in every request. However, the token is not included in the request header but simply within the JSON content. Additionally all request, both linked/authorized and not-linked/unauthorized call the same endpoint / route.
Thus using the Symfony firewall to authenticate the user does not work, does it?
Instead I manually check wether the Alexa request contains an access token to provide the correct response.
If the request contains an access token I would need to manually check and authenticate the user. How can this be done?

Related

Django oauth2 toolkit provider, grant third application access

A Django site acts as an oauth2 provider. A setup for an app tomcat_app looks like:
Whenever somebody tries to login into tomcat_app a user will get redirected to Django. If the user can provide valid credentials they will get redirected to tomcat_app. So far so good. Tomcat_app further offers a REST API which is aware of the oauth2 workflow. If the reqeust supplies a valid token requests will get accepted.
The knot in my head: A third server should be granted to use the tomcat_app rest api as well. Is it possible to
setup a new user in django externalapp_user/externalapp_password
obtaining a key for tomcat_app by sending the new users credentials to django
Where I'm puzzled is, is how to correctly send the credentials and how to deal with the redirect url. I'm looking for something similar to client type: public and Authorization grant type: Resource ownder password-based
curl -X POST -d "grant_type=password&username=admin&password=admin" http://client:secret#localhost/o/token/
What I understand from the django-oauth-toolkit documentation is that: If you want to use 'Resource owner password-based' Authorization grant type you need to have the user registered on your tomcat_app.
But if you don't want to have the user registered on your app and still provide him with the api endpoint, It is better to use 'Client credentials' Authorization grant type. This will give the third party app the ability to access your api endpoints after they login their users.
You can check out the documentation for better understanding the 'Client credential' flow.

Proper OAuth2 authentication flow for a web API using the EWS Managed API

I've been reading through a bunch of documentation for using OAuth with Azure AD, but am still completely confused about how to properly implement things for my situation. Hopefully someone can steer me in the right direction.
I have created an ASP.NET Web API application that uses the EWS Managed API to access Exchange on behalf of different users. My application exposes endpoints such as /Mailbox/Messages and /Appointments with the intent that some front end web application will eventually use them to retrieve a user's emails and appointments. Currently the endpoints are working using basic http authentication, but I'd like to update them to use OAuth. The application has been registered in my Azure AD instance and I've configured it to require the "Access mailboxes as the signed-in user via Exchange Web Services" API permission.
Since the front end hasn't been implemented yet, I've been trying to test by manually calling the authentication endpoint. This prompts me to log in and provide consent. If I consent, I'm redirected to the callback URL that I provided when I registered the app with the authorization code contained in the query parameters. I'm still not quite sure how I'm supposed to be using this callback, but for the sake of testing I currently have the callback redeem the authorization code for an access token. This is done by calling the AcquireTokenByAuthorizationCode method on an instance of the AuthenticationContext class and providing my application's id and secret. Again, just for the sake of testing I return the access token to the browser. I can then call my aforementioned endpoints (after some modifications) with this access token and get the emails for the user. I'm guessing much of this is not the correct way to be doing things.
Some of my points of confusion:
What should the callback that I registered in Azure AD actually be doing when it gets the authorization code? Is this intended for a different type of application? Perhaps one that isn't just playing the role of a middle man.
I'm trying to make my application somewhat RESTful, so I don't want to have to maintain the access tokens on my end between requests. As such, does it make sense for my endpoints to expect that the access token be provided in the authentication header for each request? If so, does that mean the front end application should be responsible acquiring the access token and passing it to me?
Being completely new to OAuth and Azure, I'm not sure if any other details are pertinent, but I can provide more information as needed.
What you are implementing is this scenario: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-authentication-scenarios#daemon-or-server-application-to-web-api
Here's how it works:
Your client app redirects the user to sign in at the authorization endpoint
Your client app gets back an authorization code (if using the auth code grant flow, there are others)
The client app exchanges the code for an access token for your API app
It will need to provide its client id and secret along with the code and the API's resource URI to get it
The client app calls to your API app, passing the access token in the Authorization header
Your API app then validates the access token, and requests for another access token from Azure AD for the Exchange API
It will pass the access token sent by the client app, along with its client id and secret and the Exchange API's resource URI to Azure AD
Your API app receives an access token so you can call to the Exchange API as the user
And to answer your two questions:
Authorization code flow is not used with APIs, only with apps that have a user signing in, thus the redirect URL is basically never used
Your API can and must expect and authenticate the access token for it to be in every request. But the access token it uses to call the Exchange API can and should be cached on the API's side. This is provided out-of-the-box with ADAL, though the tokens are only in memory.

Firebase CREDENTIAL for rest API

Firebase Rest API mentions that we can pass CREDENTIAL to provide access to authenticated nodes. However I was not able to find documentation on where I can find these credential or generate these credential. Custom tokens generated using NodeJS firebase-admin client also don't work.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/rest/save-data
https://docs-examples.firebaseio.com/rest/saving-data/auth-example.json?auth=CREDENTIAL
If you scrolled down a little on the same page, you would find the answer:
In the following example we send a POST request with an auth parameter, where CREDENTIAL is either our Firebase app secret or an authentication token...
Firebase secrets are legacy credentials you can find/create under Project settings - Service Accounts in the Console. Using one as the auth parameter gives the caller administrative access.
Or you can use a service account to generate admin level access tokens instead of relying on the legacy secrets. See here for the Java implementation.
Or if you have an authenticated user – for example you're implementing an API a client apps call via HTTP, passing along their current access token –, you can use that token directly to impersonate the user.
The custom authentication tokens serve a completely different purpose and are part of a different sign in flow. Therefore they do nothing via the REST API.

Authenticating with Web API

I am using ASP.NET WebAPI for a web service that I am building. He web service will use the Identity service to authenticate users.
I am a bit stuck as to how to authenticate users externally. Our current system is very basic- we send a username and password in the XML request as a separate field and it is all done in 1 request.
From what I can see from looking on Google, the best way is to request a token from the Ali and then pass this token in subsequent requests. Is there a way where I can do it all in 1 request (that is, send to the API my request for data as well as the username/password or perhaps an API key in a single request?)
From what I can see from looking on Google, the best way is to request
a token from the Ali and then pass this token in subsequent requests.
Is there a way where I can do it all in 1 request (that is, send to
the API my request for data as well as the username/password or
perhaps an API key in a single request?)
I'm not sure why your web service want to know user's username and password in Token based Authentication.
In Token based Authentication, your web service should not ask for user's username and password.
Instead, user first verifies the user name and password using a token issuer that your service trusts.
Upon successful verification, the token issuer provides the user with a token. Once the user has that token, it uses it to call your service.
For that, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Here is JwtAuthForWebAPI nuget package for OAuth2 and OpenId Connect.
It is not secure at all to keep sending username/password with each request, you need to configure your api to issue access tokens for specified life time i.e. 24 hours. To do so you need create and end point (/token) which accepts the username/password validate the combination then issue an access token.
The client which receives this access token is responsible to store is securely and transmit it with each request to an any protected resource using the request "Authorization" header using bearer scheme.
As well you can not do this in one request, you need to obtain the access token at the beginning the you keep calling your protected resources using this access token until it is expired.
You can read more about this in my detailed blog post about Token Based Authentication in Web API

Apigee: Add login with an existing OAuth 2.0 id-provider

I have an admin-console for an existing service that I want to provide access to by adding login, using our company's OAuth 2.0 service. I want to use Apigee here, so that the web-app with the admin-console does not have to implement the login-logic.
My idea was to use AuthorizationCode flow and let Apigee manage the tokens and I looked into https://github.com/apigee/api-platform-samples/tree/master/sample-proxies/oauth-login-app, but I really can't see how our existing OAuth service fits in.
Is there a sample like that? Perhaps using Google's or Facebook's OAuth service to authenticate the user?
First, Apigee needs to be a proxy into the admin-console. This means that all traffic to the admin-console has to go through Apigee. Otherwise, you won't be able to enforce authentication.
Second, there are a couple different options for integrating with the external oauth 2.0 service. Apigee has the ability to store an external access token and use it as its own, or Apigee can generate a token and store the external access token as a custom attribute.
High level thoughts on how the Apigee proxy could look like:
ProxyEndpoint - endpoint exposed to clients connecting to admin console
TargetEndpoint (not shown in that oauth login-app example) - endpoint for the actual admin console
The flows that execute in the Apigee proxy before sending the request to admin-console will need to implement logic that checks an authentication token. If it's valid, let the request pass onto the TargetEndpoint (admin-console). If the request isn't valid, step through logic that goes calls the external oauth 2.0 server's auth code flow. This will require the following:
Apigee needs to be registered with external oauth 2.0 server.
Logic needs to be built in this proxy to support the redirection based flow of authorization code grant_type (obtaining auth code, receiving the auth code, obtaining token --> all while being redirection based and transparent to user).
In addition to #2, Apigee will need to store the external token as custom attribute and expose the apigee token, or store the external token for verification purposes later on. http://apigee.com/docs/api-services/content/authorize-requests-using-oauth-20 (see Delegating token management). After the token is stored, you'd need to respond with another 302 redirect to the initial uri + token so the request can pass through to admin-console as an authenticated request.
#2 isn't exactly straight-forward and there won't be an example proxy that shows this implementation. If the oauth 2.0 service supported a password grant, it may simplify the implementation, but allows the credentials to pass through apigee and not directly with the authorization server.

Resources