[arvados-dev] API Authentication Options from C#

[Tom Morris]

Hi Tom,

[Adding a 3rd Tom to the conversation just to make things even more
confusing]

The whole point of the browser redirect scheme built in to the OAuth2
authentication flow is to prevent the user's password from being exposed to
untrusted code which could snoop it. Authentication is done by Google or
your corporate SSO or whoever controls the actual credentials and that's
the only component that gets to see the password.

Perhaps you could look at using something like the .Net WebBrowser class in
your application? I'm not a C# or .Net expert, so I'm afraid I can't help
out with the details.

Best regards,
Tom (the 3rd)

-- 
Tom Morris
Director, Product Management
Curoverse


On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 2:31 AM, Albrecht, Tom <tom.albrecht at roche.com>
wrote:

> Hi Tom,
>
> thanks so much for taking time to answer my question. As far as I
> understand, you describe the login procedure laid out in
> http://doc.arvados.org/api/tokens.html.
>
> The core of my question actually concerns navigating to
> https://your-apiserver-host/login
> <https://your-apiserver-host/login?return_to=https://your-application-host/any/desired/path>.
> Am I right that this *requires *an actual *web browser* like Internet
> Explorer or Chrome? I am calling the API from a C# application without a UI
> or Web Browser, so ideally I would like to be able to log in without
> actually displaying a web page in an actual browser once I got the username
> and password, e.g. on the command line or a simple .net GUI. Do you see a
> way to do this?
> I saw the suggestion in the documentation to copy-paste the token from the
> work bench to the command line to define an environment variable, but that
> does not seem appropriate for our users. Other APIs offer the option to
> pass https://your-apiserver-host/login
> <https://your-apiserver-host/login?return_to=https://your-application-host/any/desired/path>
> /?username=XXX?password=XXX, but it seems like Arvados purposely does not
> allow this possibility.
>
> Best regards
>
> Thomas
>
> On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 10:22 PM, Tom Clegg <tom at curoverse.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Thomas,
>>
>> Your application can give the user a link/redirect to a URL like this:
>>
>> https://your-apiserver-host/login?return_to=https://your-app
>> lication-host/any/desired/path
>>
>> (Of course the "return_to" value should be suitably escaped.)
>>
>> After a successful login, the user will be redirected to
>> https://your-application-host/any/desired/path?api_token=X, where X is
>> of course the newly issued token, and your application can take it
>> from there -- typically saving X in a session store and redirecting to
>> a cleaned URL so the api_token doesn't remain in the browser's
>> Location bar.
>>
>> This is the same procedure Arvados Workbench uses, so it might be
>> helpful to refer to the Workbench code as examples. Here are some of
>> the relevant bits.
>>
>> https://github.com/curoverse/arvados/blob/master/apps/workbe
>> nch/app/controllers/application_controller.rb#L511
>>
>> https://github.com/curoverse/arvados/blob/master/apps/workbe
>> nch/app/models/arvados_api_client.rb#L232-L244
>>
>> https://github.com/curoverse/arvados/blob/master/apps/workbe
>> nch/app/controllers/application_controller.rb#L586-L597
>>
>> --
>> Tom Clegg
>> Chief Architect
>> Curoverse
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 3:52 AM, Albrecht, Tom <tom.albrecht at roche.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I hope you point me in a direction to achieve an elegant authentication
>> for
>> > my Arvados API application.
>> >
>> > I am developing a plugin for a third-party software to download data
>> from
>> > our Arvados server. The software dictates the language and platform: C#
>> /
>> > .net and Windows. I managed to access the data using .net's
>> > System.Net.HttpWebRequest class. What remains to be done is
>> implementing an
>> > elegant authentication.
>> >
>> > As a workaround, I logged into the Arvados Workbench using my browser
>> and
>> > copy-pasted the authentication token into my application. This works
>> but is
>> > not as user-friendly as I would like it to be. So my question is how to
>> > achieve the authentication more elegantly without a web browser, for
>> > instance by passing username and password to the API up front or using
>> some
>> > kind of single sign-on functionality available in .net.
>> >
>> > Do you have any suggestions?
>> >
>> > Best regards
>> >
>> > Thomas
>> >
>>
>
> --
>
> *Thomas Albrecht, PhD*
>
> Senior Scientist
>
> SIAD Solution Delivery & Architecture, pRED Informatics
>
> Roche Pharma Research and Early Development
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>
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>
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