I'm creating the authentication for an app that requires Office 365 integration. I got the authentication in the front-end to work but I'm not sure what is the best way to link this authentication information to Firebase Cloud Functions.
I saw answers related to this that say I should redirect the user to the login page of Azure AD and get the token back to my cloud functions to mint a custom token and give that one back to the user.
But this is not clear for me, how can I confirm this token the user sent is valid?
And can I use the admin.auth().verifyToken() to get the user information from this custom token?
Related
I need to use the authentication service from firebase. but use my existing authorization service.
Can i use user token, sessions info from firebase.auth().onAuthStateChanged(function(user) {})
what is the best way/ways to manage these kind of use cases.
Should i also store my user details cookies, token etc?
You can implement a custom provider for Firebase Authentication. In this process:
You sign the user in to your service with their credentials as usual.
You then mint a token based on the user's profile.
The user then uses that token to sign in to Firebase.
The entire process is quite well documented on the links I included above.
How can one use Firebase to SSO into some product?
Firebase is a federated IdP, meaning, they handle the auth flows for other IdPs, ie Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
So how can I set up a product with SSO that is expecting some kind of Auth flow, ie OIDC, SAML, when FireBase doesn't necessarily do that? Note, I am comfortable building my own login pages and using the FireBase SDK, I'm just not sure where to start.
Let's take Google for example. I can easily setup Google SSO for my product. I just generate a client ID/Secret in the Google Dashboard, and then use Google's OAuth flow.
My product initiates the login and redirects to Google for logins
Google identifies my user and redirects to my product's callback URL
Done, user is logged in
How would I do the same thing in FireBase, which is a sort of middleman between my product and Google?
If you have your own user auth system, and you want to integrate that with Firebase Auth for the purpose of creating accounts that integrate with other Firebase products, you can write a custom authentication provider. Your backend will take the user's credentials and create a custom auth token that the app can use to sign in the user.
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.
i have built a webapp using angular material and firebase functions + realtime DB as the backend. I am using slack "Sign in with Slack" API oauth flow. All works well and i am able to generate a accessToken in the backend which i can store against the user in the realtime DB. Once that is done i make a redirect call to my angular app on the dashboard page. Currently i am passing userid in the redirect url which i use to drive user to dashboard and show his data.
This functionally works fine but is a big security issue. As i can directly type the redirect url and boom. I am in the dashboard.
So, how do i solve this? What should i be doing in the url redirect that is secure and validates the response is the the result of a valid request?
I am not familiar with the Slack OAuth SDK but in general, this is true for all OAuth providers. Ideally, at the point where you redirect to your callback URL with the slack authorization code and you exchange the auth code for a Slack access token before returning that access token to the client, you call the Slack API to get the Slack user ID with the access token and then mint a Firebase custom token with that uid. You then return that custom token to the client and signInWithCustomToken. Make sure you are checking the state field (which you set when started the Slack sign in) along with Auth code to verify that the flow started and ended on the same device.
Mainly token are used for authentication but firebase provides different
Sign-in providers like email and password, Facebook, Google, GitHub and Anonymous for authentication. Then what are this tokens used for?
Can anybody guide me to a use case where this custom tokens are useful?
Here's where I got to know about this Custom tokens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqEOjBMQWE&t=93s
https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/create-custom-tokens
Custom tokens are used when you want to use a Custom Auth System:
You can integrate Firebase Authentication with a custom authentication
system by modifying your authentication server to produce custom
signed tokens when a user successfully signs in. Your app receives
this token and uses it to authenticate with Firebase.
For example: Let's say you're developing an app that needs authentication, but you don't want to use the Auth Providers that Firebase supports (Google,Twitter,Facebook,etc). Let's say you want to use Instagram Auth.
Since Instagram Auth is not provided by Firebase you can't set your Realtime Database rules to auth!=null. You'll probably set it to public, which means that anyone can access your data and this is an obvious security risk(Your database is not safe at all).
So what you can do is create your custom auth system that allows a user to authenticate with Instagram and then give him a Custom Token. The user will then use this token when signing in to your Firebase App, and he will be recognized on Firebase Authentication. Which means that he can now access data that is protected by auth!=null. Your database no longer needs to be public.