I am trying to secure my Flex application within my Java web application. Currently my Java web application, handles logging and managing user accounts and the like. I was wondering if there is a way to essentially share that user credentials with the Flash movie in a secure mechanism? For instance, if you log in, we want you to be able to save items in the Flex application for that user, only if that user is logged in of course. Any ideas? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Update:
I apologize for the vagueness. I'm running Tomcat 5.5, Java 6 doing portlet development inside a Vignette Portal. All data communication is via Blaze DS. In our environment, we have data services and the portal handles logins, user management and the like. Currently we are simply passing down the username to the flash movie, which I don't feel is very secure.
You can pass data to a flash movie using flashVars which can be generated in a JSP. The data can be a one-time key generated on the server and associated with a user id. The Flex application can then take the key and use it to log in via a webservice call. The server will then validate the key and allow access to the user's account.
It is a very general question and it's hard to provide a good answer without knowing what is your current architecture. The Flex application is using the same web server as your web application? What are you using in order to discuss with the backend (web services, sockets, rtmp sockets)? If you are sharing the same web server you can access the same HTTP session and you can check if the user is logged in or not.
If you need to be aware in your Flex application that the user has just logged off from the HTML application or the session has expired you have several options, again depending on your architecture. Assuming that the HTML application was already was notified you can call through ExternalInterface a method from the Flex application. If not (session expired while you are using the Flex application) you will know when trying to save your data.
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I have created Java Web Application by using Netbeans IDE. I have created entities with relationships. Webpages are simple dashboards where I can add new entities, change them and delete them.
I have added Restful web services to my entities. So web page will be available only for admin and I want to create client application that will have access only for his own data. That means client must login or register to my server.
When user logins/registers on website, server will create session for this user. I know that in RESTful service there is no sessions. My thought is to pass login and password every time when client wants to do some operation with server.
Question: is there any other method to create something like session between client and server? I hope it is not connected with encryption.
There are many options for authentication as well as authorization. If you want to use simple authentication then 'Basic Auth' of HTTP. Check out https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2617 for details. Remember that this is unsafe because the username/password flows on wire. Anyone can sniff username/password. This is updated by new RFC7235 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7235#section-4
Safer choice is oAuth. Explained in RFC6749 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6749. In this case an access token goes with each request.
In both the cases the credential details travel with headers. No interference with parameters.
I have a web PHP web application that has a link to a java web application. The php application has a login page, and a link to the the java application, but not every user has permission to access the java web application. What I was trying to do is send user credentials from the php application to the java application, and then the java application checks the credentials and if correct logs in the user. I was thinking of using http headers to do this.
So my question is what is how to send user credentials from a PHP application to a java application?
If it helps I am using a Java web framework called Vaadin.
Do a normal POST request from the PHP application to the java application. This can be done as simply as having a normal HTML form in the PHP application, set the form's method to "POST" and action to the java application's URL. If you want to catch HTTP parameters in a Vaadin application, you can do it by using request handlers (https://vaadin.com/book/vaadin7/-/page/advanced.requesthandler.html).
Then a few words of advice or something to at least consider. If your login page is in the PHP application and your "admin" application is the Vaadin application, then I discourage you from doing the credential checking in the Vaadin application. This is because when you enter the Vaadin application, a new application instance is created. This means that your UI will be initialized and whatever else you do in the UI's init method. What you probably want to do, is to hinder the user from entering the Vaadin application unless she is logged in - which means that you need to do the credential checking somewhere else - for example, have a separate servlet whose only responsibility is to log in the user. If login is granted, then give access to the Vaadin application, if access is denied, forward the user to the PHP login screen. The next question is, how do you hinder the user from accessing the Vaadin application until she is logged in? Typically, this is done using servlet filters.
I highly encourage you to use a 3rd party framework for doing the authentication and authorization. Take a look at http://shiro.apache.org/, it's easy to install and seems to work nicely together with Vaadin. All you need to do is to configure it and implement a login screen, the framework will take care of the rest.
If I understood your question, you want to be able to provide an "auto-login-link" to some specific users that are logged in to the PHP application. This link should automatically login the user to the java application, right?
Without knowing any details about this case, like are both apps running on the same domain or do they use the same database (same user credentials in both apps), etc., I would propose the following solution:
Create an action (link) on the java application, which receives the necessary parameters (as GET) needed for creating the session (probably userId is sufficient), timestamp and a signature of all parameters. For example:
http://javaapp.example.com/autologin?userId=123&timeStamp=123456789&sign=hj23kh4j234jk324h
Where the signature is calculated with some strong encryption algorithm. Then you verify that the signature is correct at the receiving end (java app). If it is correct, you create the session. Signature calculation could be something like:
$signature = sha1($userId . $timeStamp . 'some salt' . $sharedSecretBetweenBothApps);
With the timeStamp you are able to check that an old link is not used. For example not allow older than 15 min old links and store used links in the java app to make sure they are never re-used. You do not have to keep history of links older than the expiration time.
Another idea, as discussed in the comments, is creating an API on the java side, which is able to provide a one-time link.
The sha1 algorithm is probably not strong enough, but shows the idea and is simple to implement.
Does this answer your question?
I have a web application which has several users and each user will have some username which will be unique.
What I want is every registered user get a unique email id like when user xyz registers he gets xyz#domain.com.
This user registers using our web application developed in java, struts2, hibernate etc.
I will need a mail server to do this that I understood, but I do not want to write a mail server application but just talk to that application with some api calls or something.
I am evaluation hmail serve which is java based open source solution, any other solution that will address this particular usecase.
I want my application to act like the front end to this some like any other email service provider.
You can try Mail Enable.
Have a look at Spring's email library: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/reference/mail.html
I want to use a Java EE application server (GlassFish 3) as SSO service for both Java applications and PHP applications. If a user gets authenticated by GlassFish he should also be logged into the PHP applications.
Is there a best practise to share the Servlet session (more precise: authentication status) with PHP?
Have a look at PHP / Java Integration. You can either integrate PHP into a servlet environment or have PHP call Java. Now I'm not 100% sure this will specifically solve your problem and the integration is deemed experimental.
What you're probably better off doing is using something else to share session data. Something like memcache. Both Java and PHP can freely talk to memcache. That will be a far more robust solution.
I have no experience with connecting PHP and a Java app server, but on integration in general:
A common way to do a single sign on is reading a session ID (e.g. a cookie set by the Java Server) in the PHP script, passing it to the app server internally (e.g. through the command line, by making a HTTP call or a shared cache instance) and getting back the authentication status.
If this is not possible, e.g. because the services are running on different domains, you would pass your app server's session ID to the PHP application the first time it gets called. The PHP app will then create a session of its own, and store the session ID from the app server in it. The internal verification of the app server's session would work as outlined above.
If you need to exchange more than just a "logged in / not logged in" flag, you could also look into replacing PHP's standard session handling using session_set_save_handler(). Your custom session function would, instead of storing the session data to a file, get its data from your app server, which can pre-fill session data with things like authentication status, user name, and so on. This would allow for some amount of easy inter-application communication as well.
Of course, first check whether the built-in Java/PHP integration functions mentioned by cletus don't already do the trick.
i dont know about best practice... but usually if it works and is not ridiculously expensive and does not compromise security, it can be an acceptable practice.
when the user visits a php page without having a php session, that php page redirect to a specific jsp page. the jsp page will see if the user has an active session. if not the jsp page will allow the user to log in. the jsp page will redirect to a specific php page, passing it things like authentication tokens and so on, as well as the url of the original page. the php page creates the php session and redirects to the original page requested. these pages could be in different domains and running on different servers. this can also be replicated and implemented across different servers running java or php or anything else.
acc.intt/page.php -> sso.intt/cosession.jsp -> acc.intt/cosession.php -> acc.intt/page.php
I don't know if this question has any sense, but this is what my boss want.
I work in a company with an intranet web.
In my department we have developed an application wich connects to a Bussiness Object server and executes and prints reports. This is a regular client/server app with our own user/password manintenance to log in.
My boss want to remove our password maintenance and let the users log in using the intranet password, somehow the desktop app connect the intranet (i don't know if it has a web service, but probabilly yes), makes the log in and retrieves some kind of object the Bussiness Object can use to authenticate.
Can this be done? I know the B.O. can use LDAP authentication if its well configured, so that if i can verify the intranet password and redirect the same password to B.O. it can autenticate the user by itself.
The closest I have seen/created is to use the shared secret (ITrustedPrincipal) mechanism to authenticate the user against secEnterprise without knowing the true password of the user. The only gotcha with this log in model is that the Universe Connection needs to not use the Business Objects credentials for connecting to the database.
The alternate is LDAP can be used and is fairly easy to set up as an authentication method for logging into Business Objects and auto adding users. The only caveat is that LDAP groups need to be correctly such that the Business Objects groups that the LDAP groups associate to are set up correctly.
Probably you'll have to look to some kind of "Single Sign One" ( sso ) and see if 1) your server can handle, 2) You client can implement it.