magic.lambda.auth 14.5.5

Authentication and Authorization with Magic and Hyperlambda

This project contains authentication and authorization helper slots for Magic. The project allows you to create and consume JWT tokens, to secure your magic installation. The project contains the following slots.

• [auth.ticket.get] - Returns the JWT token's payload as a lambda structure, and also verifies the token in the process
• [auth.ticket.create] - Creates a new JWT token, that you can return to your client, any ways you see fit
• [auth.ticket.refresh] - Refreshes a JWT token. Useful for refreshing a token before it expires, which would require the user to login again
• [auth.ticket.verify] - Verifies a JWT token, and that the user is logged in, in addition to (optionally) that he belongs to one roles supplied as a comma separated list of roles
• [auth.ticket.in-role] - The same as [auth.ticket.verify], but returns true or false, depending upon whether or not user is in any of the roles provided or not

Notice, you will have to modify your auth:secret configuration setting, to provide a unique salt for your installation. If you don't do this, some adversary can easily reproduce your tokens, and impersonate your users. Example of an "appsettings.json" secret you could apply can be found below (don't use the exact same salt, the idea is to provide a random salt, unique for your installation)

However, during installation, Magic will automatically create a random secret for you. Below is an example of how this might look like.

{
  "auth": {
    "secret":"some-rubbish-random23545456-characters-goes-hereqwertygfhdfSDFGFDdfgh45fDFGH"
  }
}

The idea is that your SymmetricSecretKey is based upon the above configuration setting, implying you should keep it safe the same way you'd keep the pin code to your ATM card safe.

Below is an example of how to create a new JWT ticket.

auth.ticket.create
   username:foo
   roles
      .:howdy
      .:world

The above will return something resembling the following, minus the carriage returns, which are added for clarity.

eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1bmlxdWVfbmFtZSI6ImZvbyIsInJvbGUiOlsiaG93ZHkiLCJ3b3Js
ZCJdLCJuYmYiOjE2MTc5NDQyMzYsImV4cCI6MTYxNzk1MTQzNiwiaWF0IjoxNjE3OTQ0MjM2fQ.
9eYROea_r-TJGT5k4H0DaGDW6LziHhEsK4on-uc-ECc

Typically Magic takes care of authentication for you, by exposing an authenticate endpoint for you, where you can submit a username and a password, for then to have your JWT token returned accordingly. You can also associate any claims you wish with your JWT token, by adding a key/value [claims] argument to your invocation as you create your JWT token. Below is an example.

auth.ticket.create
   username:foo
   roles
      .:howdy
      .:world
   claims
      id:578
      ssid:xyzqwerty67

All additional (non-roles) claims will have their values converted to string though, which is more of a restriction from .Net and the JWT standard then a restriction of Magic.

Notice - Also notice that if you create a JWT token with a user belonging to only one role, the roles claims will not be an array, but simply a string. Yet again, this is simply how .Net works, and there is little we can do about this. Hence, remember to check in your frontend as you retrieve your roles if the roles claims is a string or an array of strings before associating your user with a role in your client logic.

JWT tokens internals

A JWT token is actually just 3 JSON objects, that have been base64 encoded, and afterwards each entity is separated by a period (.). In fact, you can inspect a JWT token at for instance JWT.io to inspect its internals. A JWT token has 3 parts.

• The header providing meta information
• The payload being the actual data of the token
• The signature which is basically just a HASH based upon your token's payload, salted with your auth secret

Unless an adversary knows your auth secret, it becomes impossible to create a valid JWT token. However, your token is still vulnerable for being stolen, so make sure you only return it over a secure HTTP connection.

Using your JWT token

Magic expects the token to be specified as a Bearer token in your HTTP invocation's Authorization HTTP header. To use the token therefor implies adding an HTTP Authorization header, and setting its value to something resembling the following.

Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.xyz.qwerty

You can see how Magic does this internally by inspecting what the Magic dashboard transmits to the backend after having authenticated using e.g. Chrome Developer Tools.

Refreshing your token

JWT tokens have an expiration date. This is typically configured in your "appsettings.json" file in your Magic backend as magic:auth:valid-minutes, and once this time has passed, the token will no longer be considered valid, and using the token after this period, will result in an "Access Denied" being returned from the server. However, since JWT token are just JSON, and the expiration time is just a Unix timestamp, you can parse the JWT token in your frontend, calculate the expiration date, and make sure you refresh your token before the expiration date is reached, and replace your existing token with the new token returned by Magic. Magic contains a refresh token endpoint to achieve this. Internally this endpoint will use the [auth.ticket.refresh] slot to create a new token, where the only difference between your old and your new token is that it has a new expiration date.

Securing your endpoints

To secure an endpoint, and for instance require the user to belong to a specific role in order to be allowed to invoke an endpoint, you might add something such as the following to the top of your Hyperlambda files.

auth.ticket.verify:root, admin, user

The above will throw an exception unless the endpoint is given a valid JWT token, and the user belongs to one of the roles that you pass in as a comma separated list of role in its invocation. In fact, you can try this out, by pasting the following into your Hyperlambda evaluator in your dashboard and execute it.

auth.ticket.verify:non-existing-role

Inspecting your token's payload

The following slots allows you to inspect the token's payload.

• [auth.ticket.get] - Returns the username and the roles the user belongs to
• [auth.ticket.in-role] - Convenience slot returning true if user belongs to the specified role(s)

Below is an example of how these are used.

auth.ticket.in-role:foo, root
auth.ticket.get

The first slot return true because your root user belongs to one of the roles you supplied as a comma separated list of roles. The second slot above returns the username, and all the roles the user belongs to as a structured lambda object. As a general rule of thumb though, you'd not want to secure your endpoints using the above slots, but rather the verify slot above, to avoid having errors in your code resulting in that an unauthorized user gains access to invoke an endpoint he should not be allowed to invoke. The [auth.ticket.get] slot will also return any custom claims you have associated with your JWT token as it was created.

Project website

The source code for this repository can be found at github.com/polterguy/magic.lambda.auth, and you can provide feedback, provide bug reports, etc at the same place.

Quality gates