Question

I create js app with Backbone and RequireJS for registred or non registred users. To retrive data from database I use simple JSON web service and of course some of methods are not avaiable for quest. Problem is that I don’t know where or how I should store auth data retrive from server without reloading it in every view. Should I use cookies ?

Answer 1

I guess it depends on your authentication, authorization methods as well as the kind of security you need to consider for your users. If you’re trying to be RESTful, you can’t have sessions to save state (at least server-side). You could, but it wouldn’t be RESTful due to saving of state on the server, if that matters to you. I’ve heard that it is okay to save state client-side but from what I’ve read, I’m not sure how the community feels about certain implementations that take this approach. (Like cookies, I’ll revisit this later.)

Say you have someone login with username and password. You can hold that information in your Backbone app, maybe you have a model called AUTH that does this. Each time you make a request to the server you’d send that data each trip at which point the server authenticates and gives or rejects access to given resources. If you use Basic Auth this information would be in the header I think. Using SSL mitigates some of the major security concerns surrounding the sending of this information over the wire and for the rest of the discussion let’s assume this is what we are using.

The other way that you could do this is to use encrypted cookie, encrypted cookie sessions. This is what I do with my current application. Honestly, I don’t know if this is considered a violation of RESTful principles or not. The general chatter on the web seems to be a lot of “cookies bad, sessions bad” with some people saying, “get real.” Using cookies would expose you to cookie hijacking if someone had access to the users computer, but depending on your application and the security needs it might not be an unreasonable option. It works for me and if it isn’t RESTful, I like to call it RESTLike.

To close I’ll just describe my setup. It would be nice to get your thoughts as well as the Stack’s opinions on this also.

Basically I have a setup where when someone goes to the main page, the server checks for the encrypted cookie session. If the cookie session is invalid or non-existent, it gives the user the regular page with a chance to login. When they login, I send that information over POST so it’s in the body of the request rather than the URI. (This is technically a violation of the REST HTTP verb concept since you use POST to save a resource.) When that information is processed, check the username, pass hash created by a unique salt, then the server creates an encrypted session cookie and passes it back to the user. Now, each time my user hits a route that requires authentication, the server checks the cookie to make sure it is still valid (time limit, user information, etc.) and if so – allows access. If not, it destroys the cookie information and sends back an appropriate status code. The backbone app reacts to this by resetting any view and data that shouldn’t be in the hands of an unauthenticated user and shows them the login screen.

Hope this gives you an idea. This is the answer to how I do it, but if someone has criticisms or better ideas I’d be happy to upvote them instead.