My question is: I have a web application built using ASP.net and a web service. The web service has to use a different database, depending on which client is logged on.
Is there a easy and elegant solution to do this ?
You can check it by passing client credentials in each request to service.
Ask client to call init(id,pass,...) method with credentials before calling any web method. You can also ask for optional settings in Init, based on inputs you can give client the access token and let client pass this access token to each request, you can check this access token and parse the settings to take action i.e. to call a particular DB connection. Facebook api works in similar way.
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I have a Asp.Net WebApi that provide some native and javascript platforms with its data.
I have identityserver3 as the authentication/authorization module for this WebApi.
For example i used implicit flow in the communcation between my WebApi and It's native clients.
Now I want to integrate this WebApi system with Facebook Parse server system.
so for example:
If there is a user already in the parse server database and login to my identityserver, i can initiate requests from my WebApi to the Parse server and return data to it.
I know that parse using oAuth2 and OpenId too but what is the required steps for that, or what is the best approach for that?
I have hard time understanding your question. So my answer may not be what you want, but please send me more details if what I said doesn't make sense.
Register your Web API with Parse server as a client. With the client ID and client secret you get from Parse server for your API, you can make calls to Parse by obtaining an access_token with client credentials flow. Now, use that token from your API to call Parse to see if the user exists. If the user exists, then use that user details, token along with the data you want to post to make a request to Parse server to update the data.
Thank you,
Soma.
I am developing a WCF based ERP application. My service is using Per Call instance mode and Concurrency mode Multiple.
I am using custom UserName/Password validator for authentication. Since for Per Call services, services instance is created for each call,
I am not sure how to deal with the authentication.
Is it the correct approach to send user name and password with each service request and validate
on the server side?
If so, at the client side, should we store the user name and password entered by the user?
If there are any better ways of doing user name/password based authentication, please let me know.
You can pass credentials in SOAP header instead of passing as method parameters.
For that you need to use MessageContract.
I have a API mobile service that handles users' login and verification. If a user is verified then it produces an authentication token. On my end I have a Web client that receives that token and uses it to call different Api controllers. How should I go about keeping a user logged in status constant?
Can I store the token on a cookie? would it be exposed to abuse if I do so? would a session work better? What is the best way to handle this issue? Sorry for the noob question, but I have never done this type of setup before.
The token can be stored relatively securely on the client as a cookie. Here's an example using Forms Authentication. It can be made even more secure by requiring SSL.
You can also consider using HTML 5 local storage like this:
http://www.princesspolymath.com/princess_polymath/?p=396
...which can be more efficient, as you manually use the token when making AJAX calls that require it instead of sending the cookie on every single request.
I looked everywhere for an answer about securing my webApi but always i'm pointed to OAuth or openID, but i don't want the user to login or authenticate. This is my problem:
I have a webapi which is called via Javascript to get the data in Json. This data is used in the Html of that page. (deployed on Azure)
Now i don't want someone else to get that data via Javascript or with a simple GET request. Only my html page is allowed to do so.
I'm looking for something to secure my Webapi to be only consumed by the applications i want. If i look to the OAuth and Azure stuff, people always have to login, but i want this page to be public, but only the webapi needs to be secure.
I can't check on IP, because the call is done at client side in the browser.
It is not possible to authenticate and thus secure the API to be used by a specific client (run entirely in the browser - like SPAs) app. You cannot protect the data the app sends to the API. (see for more details Protecting REST API behind SPA against data thiefs)
You could build some modules server side and then use some token based server to server communication if you do not want to introduce users and end user authentication.
Of course it is also a question of how you interpret security.
If it is just that you do not want other web apps to use the data -
CORS policies will do the job. It is unlikely that there will be more
than some isolated cases of users using a browser other than the
popular once which respect CORS.
If it is you do not want data to be mass downloaded you could
implement some client filtering based on IP. This could even be done
on the networking layer so the API do not need to be modified in any
way.
As a suggestion, you can have it secured making sure the request has some headers defined by you. For example, you can set an Authorization header with a token that only you know. You can for example, create a token based on a key that you and the webapi share, encrypt it with the time you are calling the api. The web api receives the request and:
1 - Check if the request has the token it requires;
2 - if it does, it creates a token the same way your page did;
3 - matches its token with the requests token;
If you are calling the webapi via javascript, the method may be exposed. However, it's one idea
Take a look to CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing), it may be your solution.
In synthesis you can allow requests to the Api only from some specific websites. Most, nearly all browsers, support it.
This is how you enable and configure it in Web Api 2.
I have an ASP MVC4 web site. Originally, most of the content was served via controllers as one would expect. I have moved the data storage from SQL Server to MongoDB. I have also added a lot of ajax to update data client side, without a full refresh. This is working fine, but my controllers now have lots of methods that take json and return json. I was able to build a Node.js server that hits the database and exposes exactly the same functionality, without lots of going to and from C#.
My javascript client-side is now calling a Node.js REST API, this works great. My 'secure' code (like adding a new user) hits the same REST API from the server side.
My question is this: How can I handle security properly with this? I have three scenarios:
GET api/messages: No need for security, I want to expose my site's messages to anyone who is interested via a Json REST API.
GET api/my/messages: I need to allow access to this only if the user is logged in (it gets the user's messages).
POST api/users: This is a function that should only be called from the server, and nothing else should be able to use it.
As the user is already logging in to my ASP website, how can I use their logged in credentials to authenticate them with my REST service? While the user is logged in, the pages client side will hit it regularly for updates.
Is there any sensible/standard way to do this? The core idea is that the client side code uses a REST API that is at least partially open to the public, and that in fact that API offers all of my business logic - only parts of it (like creating a user) are locked down to super-admins only.
Thanks in advance!
Create two authentication middleware handlers. One you add to all your "my" routes and another which you add to your POST routes.
The "my" authenticator takes the asp.net auth cookie that is present in the request and makes a http call to your asp.net mvc site with it.
You'll need an action which either returns a 401 if the cookie is invalid otherwise it returns some info about that user's permissions perhaps.
If the request into node doesn't have a cookie, return a 401 again.
In addition, to prevent excessive calls to your mvc site to check the cookie, you could use the cookiesession middleware to set a cookie on the client with a flag of authenticated. That will result in 2 cookies for your client, but that shouldn't be an issue. Just make the node one expire before the aspx one.
The POST authenticator middleware can use any shared secret you like between your node and mvc server. e.g. a special header in the request.
If the user is required to login you can use [Authorize] on your controller actions. Autorization will be handled like any other webrequest.
Furthermore you might consider to add a key to your api requests which you can provide in the initial page load. A autorized user will have a GUID which he will sent with the api call. You can check if this key was issued by your app to a valid user.
As you said all the secure calls already go through your MVC server code which in turn calls the Node.js code, am I right? Basically you need a way to block calls to this Node.js from other clients that are not your MVC code.
Thinking out loud, these are the ideas that pop into my mind:
Use SSL only between MVC and Node. You can set up client and server certificates so that the Node code will only respond after authentication (I don't know how Node handles SSL so you will need some documentation here
If you want, the Node server could also check the call origin and so you can filter based on IP and only allow IPs where your MVC code is sitting
Use an encrypted authentication token on the secure methods on the Node code. Again I'm not really a Node expert but I can imagine it has ways of decrypting a token, or you can simply base it on a random number with a common seed... If noone has access to your server code ideally noone should be able to guess this token. Again, SSL will help against traffic sniffing
I am quite sure that people will come up with other ideas. For me, the most basic thing is anyway ensure that the secure methods are only accessible through an SSL connection and on this connection you can exchange all the info (token, passwords, etc.) you desire.