Question

I’m going to be writing the services for an iPhone app being built by a third party vendor.

I’ll be using ASP.NET MVC to accept posts and also return JSON formatted data.

My question is, how do you secure it?

Just using an API key perhaps? Would that be enough to ensure that only data from the iPhone apps are allowed to hit the specified services?

Answer 1

I’m sort of struggling with the same concepts myself. I think the first thing is to do HTTPS only, so that it’s starting out more secure than not.

Next, it depends on how you’re going to do authentication. If all you need is an API key, (to track which entity is accessing the data) that should be fine. If you also want to track user information, you’ll need some way to associate that specific API keys can access specific types of records, based on a join somewhere.

I’m looking at doing forms auth on my app, and using an auth cookie. Fortunately ASP.NET on IIS can do a lot of that heavy lifting for you.

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Example time: (I’m sure I’ll need to add more to this, but while I’m at work it gives something to gnaw on)

Forms auth:
Send a pair (or more) of fields in a form body. This is POST through and through. There’s no amount of non-reversible hashing that can make this secure. To secure it you must either always be behind a firewall from all intruding eyes (yeah right) or you must be over HTTPS. Simple enough.

Basic auth:
Send a base64 encoded string of “username:password” over the wire as part of the header. Note that base64 is to secure as a screen door is to a submarine. You do not want it to be unsecured. HTTPS is required.

API key:
This says that an app is supposedly XYZ. This should be private. This has nothing to do with users. Preferably is that at the time that the API key is requested, a public key is shared with the API grantor, allowing the API key to be encoded on transit, thus ensuring that it stays private but still proves the source as who they are. This can get complicated, but because there is an application process and because it won’t change from the vendor, this can be done over HTTP. This does not mean per-user, this means per-developing-company-that-uses-your-api.

So what you want to have happen is that for the app accessing your data, that you want to make sure it’s an authorized app, you can do negotiation using private keys for signing at runtime. This ensures that you’re talking to the app you want to talk to. But remember, this does not mean that the user is who they say they are.

HOWEVER.

What you can do is you can use the API key and the associated public/private keys to encode the username and password information for sending them over the wire using HTTP. This is very similar to how HTTPS works but you’re only encrypting the sensitive part of the message.

But to let a user track their information, you’re going to have to assign a token based on login based on a user. So let them login, send the data over the wire using the appropriate system, then return some unique identifier that represents the user back to the app. Let the app then send that information every time that you are doing user specific tasks. (generally all the time).

The way you send it over the wire is you tell the client to set a cookie, and all the httpClient implementations I’ve ever seen know that when they make a request to the server, they send back all cookies the server has ever set that are still valid. It just happens for you. So you set a cookie on your response on the server that contains whatever information you need to communicate with the client by.

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HTH, ask me more questions so we can refine this further.