We are working on an application that uses firebase for authentication purposes. We implemented the authentication mechanism in our angular application and everything works fine. what we want now is to add custom claims to the JWT tokens generated once the user is authenticated. We know about the Admin SDK here:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/custom-claims
but this requires the addition of a web service. is there a way to configure firebase via the portal to add a default custom claim for all existing users and new users. what we want is to add an "id" field with random GUID. is it possible to use the Admin SDK to configure this behaviour once and for all?
Thanks in advance.
There is no way to add custom claims without using the Admin SDK. This requires that you run a script on a trusted environment, such as your development machine, a server you control, or Cloud Functions for Firebase. The latter is probably your best option if you want to do this regularly, and don't have your own server.
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I'm building a social media app with a focus on group chatting. I am working on creating a new user. Firestore provides this function to begin the process of creating the user from the client:
auth.createUserWithEmailAndPassword
However, I read that it's safer to try to minimize what lives on the client side and do most of the app's work on the server side. Should I use the function above (on the client) or should I make a custom function that passes the email and password to the server and create the user there?
Firstly, auth.createUserWithEmailAndPassword is not a Firestore method. It's a Firebase Auth method. Firestore is a database, Firebase Auth is an authentication service. It's good not to mix up their responsibilities.
The options you're proposing are not, in practice, any different in terms of security. That's because the Firebase Auth service provides a public REST API for creating new user accounts that's accessible to the world if you've enabled email and password authentication for your project. It doesn't really matter if you invoke that from a frontend or backend - the net result is the same.
Do whatever you find most convenient. Firebase Auth was designed so that users can create their own accounts using the authentication providers that you enabled. Adding another backend service to that seems to just add more work for no extra benefit.
I developed two different Flutter applications. An Admin Version and another Client Version. I would like to use the same login (auth) and access to Storage for both Apps.
It's definitely possible to access the same Firebase project from two different apps. In fact, when these apps are locally part of the same "application", that is actually an intended use-case.
A few things to keep in mind though:
Firebase Authentication does not have the concept of an administrator user. It "merely" authenticates the user, allowing them to sign in with their credentials. Any administrator logic is specific to your application, hence often referred to as an application administrator. You'll typically want to flag application administrators, for example by setting a custom claim on their accounts.
Not all functionality that the application administrator may need is going to be available in Firebase's client-side SDKs. A common scenario is that the administrator should be able to create accounts for other users, where the client-side Firebase Authentication SDKs don't support this logic. For some more information on this, and how to solve it, see Firebase kicks out current user and my answer with many links here How to create firebase admin user for authentication in java. In a nutshell: you'll have to use the Firebase Admin SDK, in a trusted environment, for some of these operations.
You then secure access to Cloud Storage by writing security rules. For some examples of securing access based on the user, see the documentation on securing user data.
My company owns Active Directory(AD) on Windows Server 2012, We need to integrate the AD with our web app developed and hosted on Firebase.
Company AD supports, LDAP to validate the user credentials.
I need help to get the approach to implement the same.
Firebase does not natively support LADP or any third party OAuth provider. Instead we might need to create custom tokens for authentication.
Custom token can be generated using firebase's built-in Admin SDK or we can also programmatically create custom tokens in any language using third-party JWT libraries.
Refer: https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/
Please refer the link for creating custom tokens:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/create-custom-tokens
I want custom firebase authentication where a user manages the roles of subordinate users. I need guidance on understanding on how to implement my own backend authentication system. Everywhere the documentation keeps mentioning that 'send the username and password to your backend that will generate a custom token'. What is this backend? where do I pursue this? My knowledge domain is firebase, firebase functions, angular 2/4, ionic2 for this discussion... thanks
To use custom authentication, you need to create a JSON Web Token (JWT) on your existing backend server, after you have used your existing backend server to validate the username and password of the user (or however else your backend server validates your users).
To create that JWT, use the configuration described at https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/create-custom-tokens?authuser=0#create_custom_tokens_using_a_third-party_jwt_library
There is PHP and Ruby code available at that page, for anyone using a language that does not have an SDK available from Google, but which does have a JWT library available.
The JWT is signed with your private key, which you can obtain as indicated at https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/create-custom-tokens?authuser=0#create_custom_tokens_using_a_third-party_jwt_library
Although that page describes initializing the SDK, this section also has instructions for creating the private key for your service account using the Firebase console at https://console.firebase.google.com/u/0/project/_/settings/serviceaccounts/adminsdk
You will have to send the email password to the firebase sdk in using javascript in web then when the sdk success functions tell that the user has been authenticated the web page will send result to your backend server (can be nodejs or php etc) from there you have to manage your own database to handle all the role base access.
Firebase is basically authenticating the user for you and telling you that you can identify this user using the following userid and then build your own system.
Firebase has access rules but those you have to define first you cannot fully customize them for each user.
For password auth see this:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/web/password-auth
An easy way to do custom auth with Firebase is using an external identity provider. Auth0 is an example of such a provider.
Guide:
https://shusson.info/post/using-firebase-and-auth0-together
code:
https://github.com/shusson/firebase-custom-auth
I'm trying to authenticate my app users with their credentials used at the website
I managed to authenticate users via Xamarin.Auth to login via Google, Twitter... etc but could not figure out how to authenticate them via ASP.Net Identity provider.
any ideas or examples ?
Your problem is not a new one, and is one that will be easily fixed in the near future (see note below).
When you're authenticating with a provider like Google or Facebook, you're receiving a token that you can then use to send to the API. Unfortunately Asp.Net Identity does not do this out of the box. You can either configure your API to use JwtBearer tokens, or check out the Identity4 project along with their samples. Note that if you're using Asp.Net Identity you'll probably want a cross between Quickstart 6 and Quickstart 8 so that all of the necessary persistent stores are in your database.
NOTE: You might also want to follow the Templating Team's PR #700 which is adding token based auth in the new templates which will soon allow you to rapidly create new Api's with Token Based Authentication for your mobile apps.