I am currently starting work on a new app/website. Currently planning to have 1 BE API set to start, probably graphql (which will be user data/information and need to check with the auth server about being protected). I will also have many client apps (web, mobile, potential partners) that will need to make queries to that BE. Do you usually roll your own authentication or use something like auth0/fusionauth/gluu/etc? This product is going to need to be secure as it will be in the healthcare space (so think oidc).
Hard to say without more concrete details, but if I had to reply in broad strokes:<p>- For web, user/pass login exchanged for plain session cookies. Should be marked httpOnly/Secure, and bonus points for SameSite and __Host prefix [1]<p>- For web, deploy a preloaded Strict-Transport-Security header [2]<p>- For api clients, use a bearer token. Enforce TLS (either don't listen on port 80, or if someone makes a request over port 80 revoke that token).<p>- If you go with OpenID/Oauth for client sign-ins then require https callbacks and provide scoped permissions.<p>- Don't use JWT [3]. Don't use CORS [4].<p>Again these are broad strokes - if you gave more information you'd get a better response.<p>[1]: <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Set-Cookie" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Se...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Strict-Transport-Security" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/St...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Web_Token" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Web_Token</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS</a>
Healthcare is a dangerous sector for a security novice. Please make sure you are familiar with HIPAA [0], including your obligations when handling health information and the nature of possible sanctions. Handling health data at all is risky. Sharing it with partners is something you probably shouldn't even consider before you can afford a serious legal team.<p>OpenID is a mechanism for one website to assert a user's identity to another website. OAuth is a way to let a user delegate access to some of their data on one site to another site. Neither have any particular affinity with the healthcare space, and they are not things you sprinkle on for extra security.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/index.h...</a>
I would echo a bunch of the comments in this thread. I am only posting this because I own a healthcare startup and your question put the fear of god in me. I would strongly advise that you build a different app if you do not already possess the knowledge required to do this. If you have the means hire a professional and you will be better off. You need to get this right from day 1 or people will get hurt, you will be fined into oblivion and/or possibly thrown in jail. There are also numerous other security concerns that you should be worried about since Auth is just the tip of the iceberg.<p>I will add the following details which are specific for healthcare companies and a bit of inside baseball. Typically people use an email address as the lookup field for a user account. Since email addresses are considered protected health information under HIPAA, I would highly suggest you use usernames instead (possibly auto generated to be safe). HITRUST includes some details about password rules for their certification process. No one will question you if you follow their rules (I think it's 12 characters minimum 1 Upper/Lower/Symbol/Number each). Use a banned password list, you can find one here[0]. You are going to want to set up some manner of 2 factor authentication (I would recommend U2F or TOTP) for all accounts with manual code backup. OAuth and OpenID are goddamn nightmares. You need to own and manage this process entirely by yourself.<p>[0]: <a href="https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords" rel="nofollow">https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords</a>
Professionals.<p>Hire an expert.<p>If you can't answer these questions yourself (which is fine - it's specialized knowledge separate from the skillset needed for building a useful application), you are lacking <i>critical competence</i> for coding anything handling health information.<p>The security minefield is much much bigger than the login page.
Before writing any code you should seek to deeply understand the problem space of authentication and authorization. HIPAA compliance is primarily an authorization problem, not an authentication problem. That is: both are important, but the unique set of challenges within the scope of HIPAA have to do with <i>authorization</i> of read/write access to data, not authentication.<p>Authentication asserts identities. Authorization asserts capabilities. This shifts and compartmentalizes the problem somewhat. Almost all interactive applications need to support robust authentication, but most applications do not require the sophisticated authorization restrictions HIPAA demands.<p>Whatever it is you choose, you should:<p>1) Use a mature, reputable library;<p>2) Use a library which provides the simplest possible interfaces for solving your needs in the most turnkey manner;<p>3) Engage with a reputable consulting firm specializing in HIPAA compliance and application security.<p>I would also recommend reading through as much information about Aptible's architecture and design ethos as possible. They have done an excellent job of navigating this problem space.
I roll my own using well supported libraries for the languages I work with. These libraries handle the gory bits and pieces where it's easy to make mistakes.<p>It's a split between using passwordless logins, or standard password authentication depending on who the target audience is.<p>I would never in a million years ever think about using a service like auth0. It's not just a huge privacy issue but now a critical component of your app depends on a third party service. Also I know of a few sites who use it and the user experience is really bad. It seems like every other time I access a site that uses it, I have to goto a third party auth0 screen to re-enter my login details (which are already auto-filled out by the browser).<p>Your user authentication flow is a very unique aspect of your site and it's also one of the first things your users see.<p>You should have full control over it because if your user's first impression is a slow loading non-intuitive user auth system that bugs them to login every few days they're probably going to look for a competing service. I know I would.
For authentication I use Auth0 on the free tier, with a passwordless setup that uses Google OAuth and Microsoft OAuth and allows fallback to emailing a code to a user. We store nothing more than the email address. The great thing about Auth0 is the separation it provides between the authentication layer and the web app, and how if you go down the SaaS route you can allow people to bring their own Auth0 accounts and configure their own bespoke authentication.<p>For authorization you are going to have to implement your own solution once you have an authenticated session. What someone can do always depends on your app and the functions you provide and so there is no nice third party solution to this. In my case I store the map of users to roles and what a role can do in a PostgreSQL app and cache there the answers to "which users are in a role" and "what can a role do"... user permission and roles changes are infrequent but flush the cache and so take immediate effect.
Ory Hydra<p><a href="https://github.com/ory/hydra" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ory/hydra</a><p>Open source OAuth / OpenID connect server<p>The docs, API and Docker images make it really easy to start developing against. Then the Docker images and database migration tools make it easy to deploy into our production infrastructure.<p>Also evaluating the other Ory tools like Keto, a policy engine.<p>The hackability of these is very attractive over closed services like Auth0.
Since it's in the healthcare space, have you considered hiring a consulting team? Or at least a firm? What other Hacker News readers use for authentication is largely irrelevant since we don't usually work on HIPAA-compliant applications.
It depends on what type of system you plan to support. If it's for a hospital setting featuring many different types of actors, roles, and constraints, this requires a greater level of sophistication.<p><i>Beware, authorization is an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole where one may fall far deeper than one expected to.</i><p>A few years ago, I ported Apache Shiro from Java to Python, resulting in The Yosai Project: <a href="http://yosaiproject.github.io/yosai" rel="nofollow">http://yosaiproject.github.io/yosai</a><p>It was a grueling but rewarding experience.<p>I honored Shiro in name and license, open sourcing everything and using Apache 2. I went even further than Shiro by adding two factor authentication workflow using totp and including starter modules for caching, data store, and integration with the web app I was using (pyramid).<p>If you choose to use python, or even just want something to learn from and reference, check out Yosai. I put a lot into this work to make it useful for others, entirely on my own.<p>I spoke with Tobias (podcast init) about the project some time ago: <a href="https://www.podcastinit.com/yosai-with-darin-gordon-episode-120/" rel="nofollow">https://www.podcastinit.com/yosai-with-darin-gordon-episode-...</a>
If someone else needs to use your API, please use OAuth/OIDC. I've seen countless hand-rolled (and insecure) authentication schemes. It's almost always a nightmare. If you plan on connecting this to multiple apps and partners, rolling your own will create a hellscape for everyone<p>If you use OAuth, anybody can connect using a standard library and "flow" across tons of languages. And you don't need to worry about screwing up the most security critical part of your API. It will save you countless headaches.<p>Some people bash OAuth because of JWT, but this overblown. Storing permissions in a token is the only sane way to do things if you end up with multiple services down the line (you will).<p>The whole revocation debate is a bunch of noise about nothing. Make the expiration interval fairly short, and if that isn't enough you can make a cache of revoked tokens that only needs to live as long as your expiration interval. This is still orders of magnitude more efficient than not storing permissions in the token and just as secure.<p>If you need to revoke all tokens in a breach scenario you just change your signing key. I recommend using SHA256 based signatures rather than public/private key since even though public/private is theoretically more secure, calculating signatures is quite a bit of overhead. If your backend is using a fast language like java/C#/Go, the majority of server CPU will be signing tokens.<p>Read about OAuth and ignore the haters. The design is well thought-out, secure, and efficient. If it was really that bad you wouldn't see most of the tech giants migrating to and using it. There's a lot of people that don't like it because they don't understand it well enough.
I was in a similar position, we started using Okta and eventually migrated to AWS Cognito. Rolling your own auth is a recipe for disaster unless you know what you are doing and really need to. Also, be prepared to be fairly locked in once you choose an auth provider, especially if you choose one that is fairly integrated into your ecosystem.
I'd advocate against using third party services here. In general third party services and healthcare comes with a lot of hurdles and costs which you need to evaluate carefully. Even log data stored on a 3rd party server that might have some PII can be a violation of U.S. law unless they are a contracted BAA following all the same security and legal rules required of healthcare tech.<p>Overall just start with strong security in mind that will meet the U.S. healthcare security rules/laws, even if you aren't in the U.S., the basic principles are just focused around strong security. People can debate the specific methods, but I will argue using almost any third party service has potential problems for you with compliance. Yes, I agree and understand those services specialize around auth usually, and for most companies that is fine and even for some more fringe areas of healthcare that is fine. But take another viewpoint, that is because those companies secure so many disparate third parties their attack surface is huge compared to your own, and a vulnerability at their end may force you to do public disclosures. That alone isn't a sole reason not to use them, but do consider all the factors.<p>Also, in the U.S. you will likely (depending on specific type of product) need to deal with HIPAA and other similar acts (HITECH/TRUST etc). None of these are actually all that complicated if you take them into account early, although going back and adding them later can be a struggle.<p>Basic principles is secure everything, have timed (short interval) token expiration, have a global token expunge, and always err on the side of reauth over pass thru. Also, if you have many backend services, do not rely on a proxy authentication service to pass off requests. Force all services to validate the authentication of each request. Yes this is "expensive" in terms of extra cycles but it minimizes the risk considerably. Lastly, store trace and audit logs of everything you can imagine, all requests.
Edit: just read other comments pointing out the healthcare thing. Hire a professional.<p>Honestly, authentication is not that hard. There are many ways to do it, all with valid trade offs.<p>What you need to know is what your AUTHORIZATION story will be. Can anyone who can hit your API receive all data? Otherwise, you either need some kind of stateful access control or some kind of bearer token granting certain kinds of access. If the latter is simple enough for your use-case, then JWT, despite it's naysayers, might shine for you. Otherwise you can just use about anything since you'll be looking up what they can access in a DB anyway.
The open source ory ecosystem ( <a href="http://github.com/ory/" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/ory/</a> ) might have what you're looking for, but it's definitely for advanced usecases. I know a lot of people that worked with Auth0/Okta/AWS Cognito but got so frustrated by downtimes, bugs, and complexity that they moved away. But it is an option for rapid prototyping although I'd keep a "replace it" somewhere in my milestone planning. Another possibility is Keycloak which is very enterprise / java fullstack and quite complex to understand.<p>Most advice in the comments is pretty bad though. Stuff like "API Clients need bearer tokens" is completely backwards and pushed by marketing people from companies (Auth0, Okta, ...) that misuse open protocols (OAuth2, OIDC) as a way to legitimize the closed source saas approach they took. Along the lines "if it looks complex it looks secure because most people have no idea". It's actually very easy to use cookies (httpOnly, secure) with API clients and you're saving yourself so much complexity with refreshing tokens and all that stuff.<p>Yet another possibility for super rapid prototyping is: <a href="https://github.com/bitly/oauth2_proxy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bitly/oauth2_proxy</a><p>edit:// I forgot KeyCloak, but it's also for advanced enterprise use cases (SAML, OIDC, Realms, ...) and (from what I've heard) with a steep learning curve and heavy.
"This product is going to need to be secure as it will be in the healthcare space (so think oidc)."<p>Considering most EMRs (or at least the ones with which I've interacted) don't go very far beyond a username/password combo, you're probably fine keeping things simple.<p>Generally, when in doubt, I'd strongly recommend using some existing auth library instead of trying to roll your own. It's not clear where exactly in the healthcare world your site will fit, but if you're aiming for hospitals, any hospital worth their salt is going to be using Active Directory or something similar, so you'll probably want to find something that can support offloading user identification in that direction (and fall back to username/password if the org doesn't yet have AD).<p>I don't know your specific jurisdiction, but at least in the US, as long as you're encrypting all your data (both at-rest and in-transit) and aren't doing anything egregiously stupid (plaintext passwords, single shared password for everyone, literally selling patient data on the Dark Web, etc.) you should have a pretty hard time violating HIPAA, and you'll already be on-par with most extant medical systems. Any further hardening on the authentication front (e.g. specific session management strategies) will just be icing on the security cake.<p>If you haven't already, I'd suggest reviewing NIST's guidelines for system security; most official HIPAA reference materials point toward NIST guidelines, and most hospitals will tend toward that direction as well.
If your plan is to connect other services then I'd suggest using LDAP for central authentication.<p>It can easily be connected to any API without much "glue". And most common open source services already support it as auth backend.<p>It's also easier to audit than any custom service you might concoct on your own because auditors already have experience with it through Active Directory.
I have been using JWT[1] since it's initial push as a mainstream authentication method. There's plenty of libraries that support it and make it easier to use[2]. There's even 0Auth[3] that is a company based around offering authentication services. Simply check for a valid token in the Authorization header, check out the introduction [4].<p>The library I've linked brings up a good point to make sure that you know the difference between decoding and verifying the token, but after that it's fairly plain sailing.<p>[1]: <a href="https://jwt.io" rel="nofollow">https://jwt.io</a>
[2]: <a href="https://github.com/auth0/node-jsonwebtoken" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/auth0/node-jsonwebtoken</a>
[3]: <a href="https://auth0.com" rel="nofollow">https://auth0.com</a>
[4]: <a href="https://jwt.io/introduction/" rel="nofollow">https://jwt.io/introduction/</a>
We use a local version of UAA (<a href="https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/concepts/architecture/uaa.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/concepts/architecture/uaa.html</a>) he behaves like a google or facebook authentication where the user concedes the permission to the apps using OAuth 2.0 protocol.<p>We have 10+ web clients, 2 mobile apps and one internet gateway. Spring Security make it very easy to integrate everything.<p><a href="https://oauth.net/2/" rel="nofollow">https://oauth.net/2/</a>
Auth0 is the best documentation to learn about oauth: <a href="https://auth0.com/docs/protocols/oauth2" rel="nofollow">https://auth0.com/docs/protocols/oauth2</a><p>The best part of using Oauth is that you can change your authentication server (UAA, Auth0, etc) without changing your app code (only configurations)
If I do a MVP with React.js, my go to solution is Firebase. [0] Authorization is possible as well. [1] If I need to scale this MVP, I would eventually migrate to a self-hosted backend solution. In my case, it would be Node.js with a GraphQL interface that enables authentication with JWT [2]. Alternatives could be Passport.js and Auth0.<p>- [0] <a href="https://www.robinwieruch.de/complete-firebase-authentication-react-tutorial/" rel="nofollow">https://www.robinwieruch.de/complete-firebase-authentication...</a><p>- [1] <a href="https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-firebase-authorization-roles-permissions/" rel="nofollow">https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-firebase-authorization-rol...</a><p>- [2] <a href="https://www.robinwieruch.de/graphql-apollo-server-tutorial/" rel="nofollow">https://www.robinwieruch.de/graphql-apollo-server-tutorial/</a>
Check out <a href="https://github.com/sysgears/apollo-universal-starter-kit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sysgears/apollo-universal-starter-kit</a><p>Fullstack JS, Apollo GraphQL, numerous client types, batteries included. Has auth implemented plus a number of other things you will find useful in the graphql world.<p>If you are in healthcare, you may want to find an auth system like DEX that can talk to several backends like LDAP & Active Directory, as each hospital or institution will likely want to reuse what they currently have implemented. You'll need to hook into them. (This is on our roadmap)
I'm using a selfmade system atm as as excuse to learn the subject for a MEAN app, but I would use OKTA or some similar service if I was 'playing for keeps.' Just boring client side sessions using Mozilla's client-sessions library with bcrypt for passwords.<p>I'm finding it hard to get information above the 'follow these steps to use this library' level, yet beneath 'here's how to make a cryptosystem from scratch'. I'm about to read some RFCs unless I find a better intro resource.
All new apps I’m building are based on password-less auth [1] & bearer token.
NoPassword is just so much more comfortable than having to remember passwords. And boy, people are really bad at coming up with passwords - you might have seen it this Christmas at your parents’.
[1] <a href="http://notes.xoxco.com/post/27999787765/is-it-time-for-password-less-login" rel="nofollow">http://notes.xoxco.com/post/27999787765/is-it-time-for-passw...</a>
Truth about side-projects is most never get to the finish line. I'd like to encourage you to get there, and for that, you'll need to use a third party for auth, at least till you finish your API and seek feedback/scale. You can always roll your own after you've validated the viability of your API.<p>You can choose firebase or AWS Cognito. They offer readymade sever and client SDKs for a wide variety of targets. Firebase is always free, and AWS free for 50,000 users<p>They offer authorization based on roles
We use SAML set up for our customers' identity providers (most of the time, Office365 Azure AD or Google Suite), from a NuGet package.<p>From there, it's a bearer token encoded in JWT format for ease of debugging. From another NuGet.<p>We also support username and public key authentication for our SFTP server.<p>We do support username and password if necessary.
We use Truedentity (<a href="https://www.truedentity.de" rel="nofollow">https://www.truedentity.de</a>) which is pretty robust with smartcard and palm vein pattern to make access secure. It uses EJBCA as backend for PKI and it's possible to configure redundancy with it.
Ignoring the body of your question and answering just the title, I'm developing <a href="https://accountd.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://accountd.xyz/</a> as a system for mixing and linking identities (email, twitter, github, trello, indieauth for now) and using that for <a href="https://trackingco.de/" rel="nofollow">https://trackingco.de/</a>, <a href="https://listhub.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://listhub.xyz/</a> and <a href="https://sitios.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://sitios.xyz/</a>.<p>In theory anyone can use it, it works automatically and you don't have to register or anything like that, but I don't know if people are interested in it.
I wonder why macaroons [1] are not even mentioned in this discussion yet.<p>They have all the upsides of cookies, but also can be narrowed down to be handed to third parties (good for APIs), caveats, and have a standardized and implemented [2] verification scheme.<p>I wonder why they don't see wider use. Do they have significant downsides?<p>[1]: <a href="http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/05/16/macaroons-are-better-than-cookies/" rel="nofollow">http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/05/16/macaroons-are-bette...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/rescrv/libmacaroons" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rescrv/libmacaroons</a>
I'm mostly a backend developer (batch processing, systems integration etc) and it still amazes me there's no turney solution for different languages. I work in a large enterprise so we hook into our SSO for any kind of Auth for our web apps, though I haven't personally had to deal with this since my college days. If I remmebr.NET had something out of the box.<p>Anyways, when I dabbled a few years back, I uses stormpath but they closed down. Les Hazelwood, the creator or Apache Shiro works at Okta now... Which seems to provide enterprise security.<p>Can anyone comment on their experience with Shiro, or Okta in general, and if it would help OP.
U2F + a password or biometric.<p>What I wish is Apple and co would give the consumer choices. I am a low threat target; I don't need to enter a pw to unlock the SIP. So presenting a fingerprint + a hardware key would be a huge security improvement and a reasonable defense against 99.9999999% of the threats I face. Unfortunately, Apple assumes we're all being targeting by physical attacks from the NSA, decreasing my convenience level for a non-existant threat.
I'm in the same boat (SaaS app in the health sector) and opted for Auth0 after using it a fair bit in the finance sector with work. I'd say start with that and once your app outgrows it then you can roll out a solution of your own but I'd suggest you don't try to reinvent that particular wheel when you're starting out.
We did the bakeoff and AWS Cognito is the by far the cheapest. It's not as well documented but supports Open Id Connect just like all the other 3rd party auth solutions. The downside is that Cognito does not support a Resource Owner Password Flow (not recommended anyhow. see RFC6749).
Echoing the others telling you to hire a professional. If you have the money Okta has a professional services division that will set everything up for you. Use them. If you don't have the money us Auth.0. Don't try to handroll everything you will regret it.
If you have the budget for it just use auth0 or similar. You will likely spend less time wiring it up than coming up with a solution yourself.<p>Going off your question only, this will also likely end up being the most secure implementation for you (relying on a third party service)
> healthcare<p>> OIDC<p>Nooope. Not a good idea. OIDC is pretty damn complicated to implement as a server. And it doesn't help at all with anything around revocation etc. To make that possible, you have to add a load of extra work and you basically lose most of the benefits of using JWTs.<p>First, as others have said, if you don't know what you're doing on this, you have no business trying to secure health data. Bring in someone who does know what they're doing and then pentest it aggressively.<p>Second, I'd suggest you'd be better keeping it super simple. Just have a token in a table, refer to the token by its ID and then attach a 32 byte crypto random to it which gets checked before the existence of the token is acknowledged. Compare it with constant timing. If you don't know what that is, again, you shouldn't be doing it with health data - best to learn on a project with less sensitive info.
imho github.com/casbin/casbin is the go to solution when it comes to authorization, it supports ACL, RBAC, ABAC, it's optimized for performance, it's pretty language agnostic, backed by tencent
You can use meteor’s healthcare track, specifically designed for healthcare apps: <a href="http://clinical.meteorapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://clinical.meteorapp.com</a>
There are seriously dangerous attitudes in this thread regarding what constitutes token invalidation. Hire someone skilled at secure auth architecture. You should have at least 2-3 senior engineers who are very well versed in this if this company is serious about doing anything related to protected patient healthcare data. One person's opinion should never end up being the only input for super critical decisions like you are trying to make.
Well, we build and use Scatter (<a href="http://get-scatter.com" rel="nofollow">http://get-scatter.com</a>), which is both a desktop app and a JS and C# library. This allows you to use the EOS or Tron blockchains and their account systems. Our users have local access to remote accounts on those networks. It's pretty amazing software, and it is really fun building something totally new.
in the healthcare space really helps. great detail for this question. honestly, not many people are good at asking questions.<p>you need an expert, someone that doesn’t need to ask this question.
Once we lost the user account DB at a startup to database data loss and some other day, someone logged into mongodb and dropped all the tables and backups were not test before, so they did not work.<p>After that we no longer store these details.<p>We've been using amazon cognito with lambda authorizers.