Question

I have a main website running on AppEngine. It’s on a subdomain like main.example.com. This main application is a content portal for our customers. It offers an Ajax application built on YUI. Customers can upload data to it. Users authenticate using Federated Login.

The Ajax application on it allows users to process the data previously uploaded. To do it it should use an webservice running on other subdomain like service.example.com. The webservice does not run on AppEngine but on our services – it’s CPU heavy and built on other set of technologies. It would need to download the data on main application – but the downloading service – like everything on the main application – is behind the authentication wall.

I could programatically always allow the service to download wharever it wishes but I think this can turn into a major security problem.

How can I reuse the OpenID authentication “token” to allow it (the service) to appears to the main application as the authenticated user so it can download data? Or If I can do this what would be the best way to accomplish what I intend to do?

Answer 1

You can’t really reuse the authentication token. What you should use is something akin to OAuth, though since you control both ends you can make it somewhat simpler:

1. Generate a shared secret, accessible by both main.example.com and service.example.com
2. When a user accesses service.example.com for the first time (no authentication cookie), redirect them to main.example.com/auth?continue=original_url (where original_url is the URL they attempted to access)
3. When you receive a request to main.example.com/auth, first log the user in the regular way (if they’re not already). Then, take their user ID or other relevant credentials, and generate an HMAC from them, using the shared secret you established in step 1. Redirect the user to service.example.com/finish_auth, passing the computed HMAC, the authentication details such as user ID, and any parameters you were passed in such as the continue URL.
4. When you receive a request to service.example.com/finish_auth, compute the HMAC as above, and check it matches the passed in one. If it does, you know the request is a legitimate one. Set an authentication cookie on service.example.com containing any relevant details, and redirect the user back to their original URL.

This sounds complicated, but it’s fairly straightforward in implementation. This is a standard way to ‘pass’ credentials between mutually trusting systems, and it’s not unlike what a lot of SSO systems use.