I'm building a mashup app for Android Wear, using speech recognition so I can post to Fitbit's API. Single-purpose and pretty simple. I generated the OAuth 1.0 credentials with the excellent Temboo library and granted access in a desktop browser, then naively hard-coded those keys and tokens into my app and let Temboo take care of the HTTP requests and API calls to Fitbit.
I've gotten errors from Fitbit stating that my requests are being refused by Temboo's server because of invalid OAuth signature (Fitbit uses OAuth 1.0). I've come to the realization that I probably need to have the user grant access on the wearable app itself. I'll need to launch the mobile browser and pass it the authorization URL from Temboo in a WebView, then have the user grant access, and then pass this approved data back to the watch.
Is there a pattern for doing this in order to allow access to third-party web service APIs already? I've not seen documentation on it so far. Does anyone have a tip on how the authorization process would flow for a wearable watch app?
Thanks much!
There is no web browser or direct internet connection on Android Wear devices - all web connections must be done on the phone part of your app and then forwarded to your Wearable app via the various Data Layer API methods - using messages is an easy way to send information in a lightweight, time sensitive manner.
Therefore your phone app should do all of the OAuth dance as part of an initial setup.
Related
Is there any mail sending api/service for android applications apart from Java mail API?
Right now I am using javamail API and after testing it I thought its working fine but actually its getting blocked when used from some other network despite of allowing access for less secured apps in Gmail setting of that particular account.
I don't mind even if some paid service is available for few bucks.
This is not required for bulk mails. Required for functionality like feedback of app.(I don't want to use firebase and all because there is no mechanism for login in my app)
Thanks
It's a bad idea to embed mail server credentials in your app, it's too easy to abuse them. Better to create a web service to accept the feedback and then use JavaMail on the server to send it, if you still even need email. You can limit the functionality of the web service to make it harder to abuse.
We have a Phonegap app (Android and iOS) and web app with web API that need to use Google plus authorization. We can't figure out how to implement that. So far we only accomplished to obtain access token from mobile app and send it to server, but that's not how it's supposed to be done for several reasons.
What we are trying to accomplish is to obtain authorization code from mobile app, send it to web component and get access token and refresh token there, which is the right way, and that's how it's done using native iOS and Android SDK, but for some reason it either can't be done using Phonegap, or we just can't figure it out. For web app it woks normally. If someone has experience with this that would be very useful.
The important thing is that user can log in from different devices and that API can recognise him and use refresh token to authorize.
It would also be nice if we could use the same app id for all clients.
I have a web based service (running for years) that works with google apis.
Now I would like to create an android and iphone ui (using xamarin) that uses my web services which in turn talks to google apis.
Given that I don't talk directly to google apis from the phone, do I need to use a web browser control to let the user login, or can I authenticate my server and establish a session natively on the phone?
I'm afraid I need to use a browser window, and I don't think it's user friendly to have to login to a google account in a browser window on the phone.
(I want to keep the logic on the server, so that the phone apps and the web ui uses the exact same code for it's calculations.)
EDIT: It seems Cross-client identity is what I'm looking for.
It can be done natively. See this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wAx39s10yw which explains all of the procedure using cross-platform authentication.
I'm planning to develop an Android application with an app-engine backend.
However I would like to refrain from using authentication (either with Google accounts or Open ID). Since the data will be sent only from my app and not any other client, and will be over SSL connection, I consider the data safe and trusted.
So my question is two-fold:
Is there any security issue I'm missing here ?
All the examples I found use some sort of authentication. Is it at all possible to use the android appengine infrastructure (RequestFactory, etc) without authenitcation ?
An app engine application is just a regular web application deployed on app engine. If you need to authenticate your users, do so. If you don't need to, then don't.
You're missing something, though: once a web app is deployed on app engine, it's accessible from anywhere on the web, and so anyone (and not just your app) could send requests to this application, whether you use SSL or not. SSL will just make the communication encrypted, and ensure the client that they're talking to your web app, and not to a rogue web app maskerading as yours.
What is the best solution to secure a REST service provider (assume a java servlet running on google appengine) by allowing requests only from iOS or Android device from a specific app?
Assume I have a servlet running on google appengine that does some processing and responds to a GET request with some JSON data. And I want to restrict this access to my app that runs on Android and iOS.
My current solutions are:
Use if(tokenValue ==
request.getHeader(tokenKey)) on the
appengine servlet. And
response.addHeader(tokenKey,
tokenValue) on the mobile apps'
code. So basically only my app would
know the token key.
Use HTTP(s) for the above solution, appengine supports this
Use oAuth - but I need to have the user sign-on to some oAuth provider from the app, which complicates the app
Suggest other useful approaches to tackle this problem. Assume this servlet only serves GET requests and maybe use Restlet or Jackson
Only 3 would be an appropriate solution if security is important to you. This is because anyone using the application can intercept the traffic and just replay the values against your web service. SSL offers some protection but a good attacker can work out how to capture data if they control the device. With OAuth the damage done by an attacker is limited to a single user (as long as they are not an app admin).
How about using a client SSL certificate? I haven't tried this, but I'm considering it. Here's a page that describes the approach, with some sample code:
http://blog.crazybob.org/2010/02/android-trusting-ssl-certificates.html