Authentication for a Symfony2 api (for mobile app use)

Question

I've developed a REST api for my Symfony2 application. This api will be used by a mobile app. Much of the functionality is done in the context of the currently authenticated user, ie:

$this->container->get('security.context')->getToken()->getUser()

I'm hoping that the mobile app will be able to post to the login action just like a traditional web form. If the credentials check out then Symfony2 does it's thing and sets a cookie (does this even work in the context of a mobile app accessing an api?). Then later api requests from that mobile phone will (hopefully) work with the native symfony2 security.context service container.

Would this work? I need to figure out this authorization process before I take the API to the mobile developers. If possible I'd obviously like to be able to use the native security.context service instead of building out a new auth system for the api that uses xAuth or something similar.

Thanks

Filmore

Answer 1

I think you should do it stateless (without cookie).

I had the same problem, what i did:

• in your app/config/security.yml, add:

security:
    ...
    firewalls:
        rest_webservice:
            pattern: /webservice/rest/.*
            stateless: true
            http_basic:
                provider: provider_name
    ...

• Now you can make a request to your webservice:

class AuthTest extends WebTestCase 
{
    public function testAuthenticatedWithWebservice() 
    {
        $client = $this->createClient();

        // not authenticated
        $client->request('GET', '/webservice/rest/url');
        $this->assertEquals(401, $client->getResponse()->getStatusCode());

        // authenticated
        $client->request('GET', '/webservice/rest/url', array(), array(), array(
            'PHP_AUTH_USER' => 'username', 
            'PHP_AUTH_PW' => 'password'
        ));
        $this->assertEquals(200, $client->getResponse()->getStatusCode());
    }
}

Sensorium

Hmm interesting. I'm not quite sure I follow everything here. Could you walk through a full example case? ie user foo provides their username/password to the mobile app. The app then includes that username and password with every request to the API? In plaintext? Is that secure? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding something here! – Filmore

As dondlero said you have to disabled cookies, that's why i add stateless parameter to true. Personnaly i don't like digest authentication because it's very hard to implement. Http basic method is easy and works fine. username and password are visible in every request. You have to use a SSL certificat. – Sensorium

Strange, I'm still receiving Set-Cookie headers even after setting stateless: true. Any idea why that might happen? – Catacomb

@AdamMonsen, late response, did you rebuild your caches? – Noonberg

@OwenBeresford better late than never! I don't recall, but I probably did. I think I usually tried that when I used to do Symfony2 dev. – Catacomb

Answer 2

Here you are, How to create a custom Authentication Provider awesome article.

To Authentication to a Symfony2 application through api, you need use: WS-Security

Pains

Answer 3

Yes Marc, jules is pointing to an example just to show you how to test authentication with http_basic.

To be RESTful you should avoid using cookies, otherwise just call it an API. About how secure is your authentication system you can go with http_digest over https or more secure signed request with api_key/api_secret approach.

Have a look here http://wiki.zanox.com/en/RESTful_API_authentication

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