How to store user's access tokens/API keys without hashing them?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev⁩ to ⁨programming@programming.dev⁩

In an API I have there’s a requirement to use an authentication method other than OAuth2 or any kind of token generation which requires making an extra HTTP call.

With this in mind there’s this www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/12/17/dive.html
I’ve only stored passwords as hashes and used functions like password_verify to know the user sent the proper credentials without actually knowing the password stored in DB.
WSSE requires to encrypt with SHA1 the credentials being sent, which means the API needs to retrieve the password in plain text to recreate the digest and compare it to the one sent by the user.
So, how should I be storing this password if the code needs it to recreate the hash?
Should I have something like a master password and store them encrypted instead of hashed?

Most of the information I’ve found about WSSE is very very old, and some implementations have it marked as deprecated, do you know any other type of standard authentication where the user can generate the token instead of having to make an extra HTTP call?

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towerful@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This seems like a XY problem. You are asking how to do X, when actually you need to be doing Y.

Your description is either too vague, or something I have never encountered.
It seems like what you have is Service A, Service B, and a client.
Service B doesn’t have access to user credentials stored in Service A, but Service B has to know that the client has provided valid credentials for Service A.
At no point can the client make a request to Service A.
The client only makes requests to Service B.
And this has to be a username/password combination.

Is that right?

Implementing security tech from 2003 that is deprecated, especially considering it’s SHA1 (which was deprecated 10 years ago) is not a good idea. Like, just store the password plaintext level of bad idea.
You either have to reasses what you actually want to do to ensure it is actually secure, or you are not describing your goal well (XY problem : “how do I implement WSSE on SOAP” instead of “I’m trying to do Y”)

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- JakenVeina@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Seconded. In particular:
  
  I have there’s a requirement to use an authentication method other than … any kind of token generation which requires making an extra HTTP call.
  
  Why? What qualifies as an “extra” HTTP call, and why does it matter?
  
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  - pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well, an “extra HTTP call” is any call besides the one required for the client to access my API, in this case is an extra call to generate an access token.
    Why does it matter? In words of the client: “making a call to generate a token is slow”
    
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- pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Based on the title you’re right, I asked about how to do X when probably I need to do Y, but the first and last paragraphs mention what’s my requirement: a for of authentication which doesn’t require to make an extra HTTP call to generate a token.
  
  And what I mean by this is OAuth specifies the client needs to request an access token and an optional refresh token to the authorization server, afterwards the access token can be sent to the resource server (in this case my API), if the token expires the client can make another request to the authorization server with the refresh token.
  Each call to the authorization server is that “extra http call” I mentioned.
  
  Currently the only solution I found which seemed somewhat secure was WSSE, but again, I’ve only worked with OAuth2 and hashing passwords (or even better, using a dedicated service like keycloak), so I’m not sure what’s the best option to store the data it requires or if there’s a better solution.
  
  I don’t know how to be more clear, is there a way to authenticate a client to the resource server (my API) without making the client call endpoints to generate the tokens? Is there a way for the client to generate their own tokens and for me to validate them?
  
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  - towerful@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    As for client side token generation…
    Never trust the client.
    
    Say you hash the password client side. At this point, you have to have static salt (which can be extracted from clients), and the hashed result becomes the password.
    All of this greatly weakens the security.
    
    If the client sends a username, and the server returns a salt, then it’s a bit more secure. At least this way the salt can be randomly generated for each user.
    But, it’s an extra API call.
    
    You could use the username as the salt. This makes things a bit better, but you open yourself to being rainbow-tabled for usernames like “admin”. Also, the salt doesn’t change when a password is updated.
    
    Here’s a SE post that kinda pertains to what you want:
    …stackexchange.com/…/how-to-do-client-side-hashin…
    
    This one has a section on client side hashing:
    security.stackexchange.com/questions/211/…/31846#…
    
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  - noli@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Couldn’t you do something like JWT except allow the client to slap on their credentials to any initial request?
    
    From the backend side that means that if there is no valid token, you can check the request body for the credentials. If they’re not there, then it’s an unauthorized request.
    
    You’re eliminating a singular request in a long period of time at the cost of adding complexity to both client and backend but if the customer wants to be silly that’s their fault
    
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  - towerful@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Is the client a web browser used by an end user? Or is it a trusted environment?
    
    Because if it’s a trusted environment (server to server) then you could add an extra field to your user table for api_key, and an extra tokens table to your database.
    Think of githubs legacy access token system (and, again, it’s now legacy because it’s a dated and insecure way of doing it).
    Each user gets a randomly generated 16 character string as their api_key.
    Then the user is given a way to create/regenerate/delete records into the tokens table: a friendly name, user id relation, and finally a randomly generated 16 character string as for the token.
    You could even add some sort of token expiry date, to limit the timeframe of damage for a leaked key.
    
    Another option for untrusted environments (egba we browser) is JWT. It’s used a lot for microservices.
    It’s a token with a lifespan minted by your Auth server. Anyone can decode the token and inspect the payload, so it’s not secure for storing passwords but it’s great for storing user ID and perhaps access scopes. The token can be verified by anyone to ensure the token is authentic and hasn’t been tampered with.
    But only servers that know the JWT secret can mint them.
    The issue with JWTs is that there is no way to revoke them. If you mint a jwt that’s valid for 4 years, the only way to invalidate it is by having all servers share a list of revoked tokens - or by having all servers call back to the Auth server that minted the token (which probably maintains a revoke list) to check it’s still valid. And, there is no way to “ban” a user if they still have a valid token.
    Essentially the JWT is keys to the kingdom, and they are hard to get back.
    Which is why they often have lifetimes of 5-30 minutes, and - you guessed it - are issued along with a refresh token.
    
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MajorHavoc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Someone wants you to use this WSSE? I would brush up your resume and start interviewing - it sounds like that place is on track for a “we liquidated our internal IT and now pay a consulting firm” level of security event.

In the meantime, If you have to store a non-rolling API secret for your app to use, and it’s going to live a long time (not regenerated), then you need to secure the entire environment that has access to that secret. Any additional local reversible encryption is just security theater.

In this scenario, you need a popular modern well supported password vault soltion. Do not attempt to roll your own. The purpose of this vault is not to protect the secret, it is to quickly reset the secret* when it inevitably eventually gets compromised.

You must do frequent tests of replacing this secret, in production, with a new one. This is not theoretical. You will eventually either test it on your own terms, or on the badguys’ terms.

Good luck, you’re going to need it.

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- pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Someone want’s me to implement a way to access a resource without having to make the extra HTTP calls required by OAuth, WSSE is a possibility since I saw it had some standards to send the credentials in a secure way.
  I have been reading about WSSE for less than a week '^-^
  
  Yeah, the idea would be the tokens used to generate the digest WSSE requires will live in our secure environment, and that’s the question: how is a secure environment created to store tokens/API keys of users which will be used to authenticate them into my API?
  I haven’t implemented this kind of stuff so I don’t know what are the best practices to store this kind of sensitive data.
  So, I’d need to research password vaults to store my user’s secrets so I can use them to authenticate them?
  
  I went into WSSE since sending a client id + secret seems just rewording of basic authentication and well, sending the credentials in plain text seems more insecure than sending a hash.
  
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  - MajorHavoc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Neat. I can help with some of these concepts:
    
    WSSE is just a reimplantation of Basic Auth, but it has a dramatically worse security posture today, than Basic Auth. WSSE is complex and deprectaed. Basic Auth is not wonderful, but is simple and is still being patched.
    
    On that note, Basic Auth is almost certainly what you want here.
    
    Don’t use cleartext for any of this (obviously). It need HTTPS or it’ll get owned immediately.
    
    Don’t do an extra encryption step inside your HTTPS connection. HTTPS isn’t perfect security, but if a job doesn’t call for OAuth and token rotation, it also probably also doesn’t call for a needless extra layer of encryption on the wire.
    
    Do encrypt your data at rest.
    
    None of your source code should be doing any kind of encrytion.
    
    Encryption on the wire should be via HTTPS.
    
    Encrytion in storage (at rest) should be via a database or disk drive setting.
    
    There’s no benefit to encrytping data that has already been encrypted, and there’s real risks of accidentally ruining the protection of the original encryption. But mostly, additional encryption just makes life hard for your ops team while adding zero security value.
    
    You can protect your Basic Auth password simply by storing it in cleartext where it is needed with reasonable protections
    
    (This is again assuming your use case is actually okay for not having OAuth. If it’s health data, suck it up and do real OAuth, obviously.)
    
    Reasonable protections for your Basic Auth passwords:
    
    Make sure nobody except your administration team can read the file where it is stored.
    
    Have separate basic Auth passwords for every service and client. No one wants one compromised password compromising everything. This happens all the time and it’s not pretty.
    
    Don’t ship it around your network for fun. If you have access to AWS secrets, Hashi Vault or Azure Secrets, put it there and check it out as runtime. Otherwise, just put it where it needs to be and don’t try to be clever about it.
    
    Don’t check passwords into source control. It ends up being another avenue to accidentally share them.
    
    In summary:
    
    Use basic Auth.
    
    write the password in plain text in a correctly secured file exactly where it’s needed.
    
    for the love of all that’s holy, don’t try to use WSSE.
    
    use HTTPS.
    
    Happy sailing!
    
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OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Granted, security isn’t much my background, but that algorithm basically sounds like a TOTP, so I’d look into how people protect those secrets. You’d generally use a kind of vault/secrets storage. Also, whatever authentication secret that the API uses should be independent from the password to any user account, such that it can be easily revoked in case of a leak.

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mrkite@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Feels like you want JWT.

jwt.io/introduction

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DeprecatedCompatV2@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Here’s a simple approach:

Basic auth via a custom header, like X-Auth

JWT auth on Authorization header

uuid on the JWT (as a claim) that gets stored temporarily (until it expires) to allow the server to revoke the token

Initial request -> server looks for Authorization header, falls back to X-Auth header -> generates JWT and sends back to client in Authorization header (or whatever makes sense)

Subsequent request -> server looks for Authorization header -> checks JWT against revocation database/table and that it isn’t expired

Subsequent request with expired token -> server returns 401, client retries using X-Auth header -> server sends back JWT on Authorization header -> client updates locally-stored JWT for future requests

There are probably ways to make this more standard or optimal, but this is a simple approach.
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