How to implement a secure REST API with node js

Question

I start planning a REST API with node js  express and mongodb  The API provides data for a website  public and private area  and maybe later a mobile app  The frontend will be developed with AngularJS   For some days I read a lot about securing REST APIs  but I don   t get to a final solution  As far as I understand is to use HTTPS to provide a basic security  But how I can protect the API in that use cases    Only visitors users of  the website app are allowed to get data for the public area of the website app Only authenticated and authorized users are allowed to get data for private area  and only data  where the user granted permissions    At the moment I think about to only allow users with a active session to use the API  To authorize the users I will use passport and for permission I need to implement something for myself  All on the top of HTTPS   Can somebody provide some best practice or experiences  Is there a lack in my    architecture

User · Answer

If you want to have a completely locked down area of your webapplication which can only be accessed by administrators from your company, then SSL authorization maybe for you. It will insure that no one can make a connection to the server instance unless they have an authorized certificate installed in their browser. Last week I wrote an article on how to setup the server: Article

This is one of the most secure setups you will find as there are no username/passwords involved so no one can gain access unless one of your users hands the key files to a potential hacker.

User · Answer

I just finished a sample app that does this in a pretty basic  but clear way   It uses mongoose with mongodb to store users and passport for auth management     https   github com Khelldar Angular-Express-Train-Seed

User · Answer

I would like to contribute this code as an structural solution for the question posed  according  I hope so  to the accepted answer   You can very easily customize it       ------------------------------------------------------    server js                                                                 requires var fs   require  fs    var express   require  express     var myBusinessLogic   require     businessLogic businessLogic js                                                                   security options     1  Generate a self-signed certificate-key pair openssl req -newkey rsa 2048 -new -nodes -x509 -days 3650 -keyout key pem -out certificate pem  2  Import them to a keystore  some programs use a keystore  keytool -importcert -file certificate pem -keystore my keystore     var securityOptions         key  fs readFileSync  key pem        cert  fs readFileSync  certificate pem        requestCert  true                                                                   create the secure server  HTTPS   var app   express    var secureServer   require  https   createServer securityOptions  app       ------------------------------------------------------    helper functions for auth                                                      true if req    GET  login   function isGETLogin  req        if  req path      login     return false        if   req method     GET      return false        return true                                                               your auth policy  here     true if req does have permissions     you may check here permissions and roles      allowed to access the REST action depending     on the URI being accessed   function reqHasPermission  req           decode req accessToken  extract         supposed fields there  userId roleId expiryTime        and check them         for the moment we do a very rigorous check     if  req headers accessToken     you-are-welcome             return false            return true              ------------------------------------------------------    install a function to transparently perform the auth check    of incoming request  BEFORE they are actually invoked  app use  function req  res  next        if    isGETLogin  req              if    reqHasPermission  req                 res writeHead 401       unauthorized             res end                return     don t call next                   else           console log      is a login request               next       continue processing the request         ------------------------------------------------------    copy everything in the req body to req body  app use  function req  res  next        var data         req setEncoding  utf8        req on  data   function chunk            data    chunk              req on  end   function             req body   data          next                     ------------------------------------------------------    REST requests    ------------------------------------------------------                                                                authenticating method    GET  login user xxx amp password yyy  app get   login   function req  res       var user   req query user      var password   req query password          rigorous auth check of user-passwrod     if  user     foobar     password     1234             res writeHead 403       forbidden       else              OK  create an access token with fields user  role and expiry time  hash it            and put it on a response header field         res setHeader   accessToken    you-are-welcome            res writeHead 200              res end                                                                        regular  methods  just an example     newBook      PUT  book  app put   book   function  req res       var bookData   JSON parse  req body        myBusinessLogic newBook bookData  function  err            if  err                res writeHead 409               res end                return                       no error          res writeHead 200           res end                                                                                main     secureServer listen  8081     This server can be tested with curl   echo  ----   first  do login   curl -v  https   localhost 8081 login user foobar amp password 1234  --cacert certificate pem    now  in a real case  you should copy the accessToken received before  in the following request  echo  ----  new book  curl -X POST  -d    id    12341324    author    Herman Melville    title    Moby-Dick     https   localhost 8081 book  --cacert certificate pem --header  accessToken  you-are-welcome

User · Answer

I ve had the same problem you describe  The web site I m building can be accessed from a mobile phone and from the browser so I need an api to allow users to signup  login and do some specific tasks  Furthermore  I need to support scalability  the same code running on different processes machines   Because users can CREATE resources  aka POST PUT actions  you need to secure your api  You can use oauth or you can build your own solution but keep in mind that all the solutions can be broken if the password it s really easy to discover  The basic idea is to authenticate users using the username  password and a token  aka the apitoken  This apitoken can be generated using node-uuid and the password can be hashed using pbkdf2  Then  you need to save the session somewhere  If you save it in memory in a plain object  if you kill the server and reboot it again the session will be destroyed  Also  this is not scalable  If you use haproxy to load balance between machines or if you simply use workers  this session state will be stored in a single process so if the same user is redirected to another process machine it will need to authenticate again  Therefore you need to store the session in a common place  This is typically done using redis   When the user is authenticated  username password apitoken  generate another token for the session  aka accesstoken  Again  with node-uuid  Send to the user the accesstoken and the userid  The userid  key  and the accesstoken  value  are stored in redis with and expire time  e g  1h   Now  every time the user does any operation using the rest api it will need to send the userid and the accesstoken   If you allow the users to signup using the rest api  you ll need to create an admin account with an admin apitoken and store them in the mobile app  encrypt username password apitoken  because new users won t have an apitoken when they sign up   The web also uses this api but you don t need to use apitokens  You can use express with a redis store or use the same technique described above but bypassing the apitoken check and returning to the user the userid accesstoken in a cookie   If you have private areas compare the username with the allowed users when they authenticate  You can also apply roles to the users   Summary     An alternative without apitoken would be to use HTTPS and to send the username and password in the Authorization header and cache the username in redis

User · Answer

There are many questions about REST auth patterns here on SO  These are the most relevant for your question    Securing my Node js app  39 s REST API  RESTful Authentication   Basically you need to choose between using API keys  least secure as the key may be discovered by an unauthorized user   an app key and token combo  medium   or a full OAuth implementation  most secure

User · Answer

If you want to secure your application  then you should definitely start by using HTTPS instead of HTTP  this ensures a creating secure channel between you  amp  the users that will prevent sniffing the data sent back  amp  forth to the users  amp  will help keep the data exchanged confidential   You can use JWTs  JSON Web Tokens  to secure RESTful APIs  this has many benefits when compared to the server-side sessions  the benefits are mainly   1- More scalable  as your API servers will not have to maintain sessions for each user  which can be a big burden when you have many sessions   2- JWTs are self contained  amp  have the claims which define the user role for example  amp  what he can access  amp  issued at date  amp  expiry date  after which JWT won t be valid   3- Easier to handle across load-balancers  amp  if you have multiple API servers as you won t have to share session data nor configure server to route the session to same server  whenever a request with a JWT hit any server it can be authenticated  amp  authorized  4- Less pressure on your DB as well as you won t have to constantly store  amp  retrieve session id  amp  data for each request  5- The JWTs can t be tampered with if you use a strong key to sign the JWT  so you can trust the claims in the JWT that is sent with the request without having to check the user session  amp  whether he is authorized or not  you can just check the JWT  amp  then you are all set to know who  amp  what this user can do   Many libraries provide easy ways to create  amp  validate JWTs in most programming languages  for example  in node js one of the most popular is jsonwebtoken  Since REST APIs generally aims to keep the server stateless  so JWTs are more compatible with that concept as each request is sent with Authorization token that is self contained  JWT  without the server having to keep track of user session compared to sessions which make the server stateful so that it remembers the user  amp  his role  however  sessions are also widely used  amp  have their pros  which you can search for if you want   One important thing to note is that you have to securely deliver the JWT to the client using HTTPS  amp  save it in a secure place  for example in local storage    You can learn more about JWTs from this link

[node.js] How to implement a secure REST API with node.js

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