One of the key principles of REST is that its stateless. This means that the server never keeps user state. In the context of security, this aspect has impacts when implementing security. This means that authentication hints must be sent and verified at each time.
The REST API is a key part of web infrastructure. Learn about REST and REST APIs, and how web apps communicate over HTTP like web browsers and servers do. The API is set up on a publicly available server with Azure. I've tested the API from a Web-project; and it works just fine. However, when I run the iOS app through VS13 and Xamarin Build host on my Mac, I get an exception when trying to connect to the API (using the excat same method in the Portable Class Library). The exception is.
In the following we will describe the different approaches to handle authentication for RESTful applications, the HTTP basic authentication and OAuth2. For the latter, we describe how to design the resources that manages security tokens within a RESTful application. In the past, StackMob provides a great sample of this within their plateform.
Basic authentication
HTTP provides a built-in authentication mecanism based on a username and a password. These hints are provided within the request using the header
Authorization and formatted as described below:
Authorization: Base64(username:password)
Base64 simply means that the enclosed content is encoded using the base 64. We can also notice that the password can consist in a token to be more robust. We mean by token an UUID.
Following code described a sample request that uses HTTP basic authentication:
GET https://api.myapplication.com/{{entityType}}/(..)
Restlet implements such authentication within its client support thanks to the class
HttpBasicHelper . Its method formatResponse shows how to format the content of the header:
public void formatResponse(ChallengeWriter cw, ChallengeResponse challenge,
To have a look at the complete content of the class, we can use this link.
The drawbacks of such approach are the following:
As said in the name of the authentication, the latter is basic and should be used for simple scenarios. For more advanced and robust use cases, we should consider to use
Advanced token
The OAuth2 authentication mechanism is based on the following elements:
Following figure describes the different elements how the flow to use them:
Lets dive now into more details about the resource that allows to obtain temporary tokens.
Getting temporary tokens
The first resource allows to obtain temporary security tokens that can be used to authenticate actual calls to RESTful applications. The following parameters are required to call the resource:
The two first parameters are generally available within your account within the application you want to access.
Following code describes the content of the request to send by a REST client to obtain a temporary access token:
POST https://api.myapplication.com/user/accessToken
If the provided credentials are correct, the response will return the following hints:
Some additional fields specified to the remote application can be also present. They can correspond to hints about the current user that executes the request.
Here is the corresponding response for the request:
{
Lets focus now on the resource to refresh expired temporary tokens.
Refreshing temporaring tokens
As described in the previous section, the resource used to get temporary tokens also returns a refresh token. The latter can be used to obtain a new temporaty token when the expiration occurs. For such case, we dont have to send again the username and password. They are sent only once when calling the service described in the previous section.
Best gmail calendar app mac. The following parameters are required to call the resource: How to install app from mac to ipad screen.
Following code describes the content of the request to send by a REST client to obtain a new temporary access token when an old one expired:
POST https://api.myapplication.com/user/refreshToken
The corresponding response for the request is the same as the one for the resource that returns temporary tokens.
Supported token types
OAuth2 describes two common modes linked to the values that can be provided in the field
token_type :
We took the sample of the OAuth2 Mac mode above. In the case of the Bearer mode, fields
mac_key and mac_algorithm wont be returned in the response content when interacting the token resources. For more details, we can have a look at this link.
Now we obtained the temporary tokens, we can use them to authenticate our REST requests.
Authenticating with temporary tokens
With OAuth2, the hints to authenticate the request are provided within the header
Authorization . Lets start with the approach bearer . With the latter, we can directly use the access token right after the word Bearer , as described in the following code:
GET https://api.myapplication.com/{{entityType}}/(..)
With the approach
mac , things are a bit tricky since we need to sign the request and send the signature in addition in the header Authorization . In this case, the value of this header is structured with the following elements:
Rest Services Api
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Following code describes a typically request with the approach
mac :
GET https://api.myapplication.com/{{entityType}}/(..)
For more details of the build of the value of this header in such case, we can have a look at the class
HttpOAuthMacHelper and its method formatResponse :
See class HttpOAuthMacHelper.
public void formatResponse(ChallengeWriter cw,
To have a look at the complete content of the class, we can use this link.
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