Re: [aerogear-dev] iOS Basic/Digest Thoughts

Thanks for the clarification. I think I didn't get it. Indeed it should be well documented as you would expect a login action (ie doing an actual login on endpoint) when sending a login message. saveLoginCredentials would be the correct message but I guess we rather stick to AGAuthenticationModuleAdapter protocol. +1 Corinne On 29 May 2013 11:13, Matthias Wessendorf <matzew(a)apache.org <mailto:matzew@apache.org>> wrote: On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Christos Vasilakis <cvasilak(a)gmail.com <mailto:cvasilak@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi, iOS platform provides built-in implementations for authenticating against HTTP endpoints that support Basic / Digest authentication (among others). The workflow when iOS tries to authenticate against those endpoints is basically: a) A credential storage singleton object <https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Fo... provided by the system is consulted for authentication credentials. If credentials are found, the system proceeds with authentication. Understandably for this to work, the developer has to initially push the credentials to the system object (and remove when done). b) If credentials are NOT found, the system tries to call the delegate method e.g. 'connection:didReceiveAuthenticationChallenge <http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Foundation/Reference...;, giving a chance for the user to provide the credentials, by calling the appropriate methods on the authentication challenge object passed in. AeroGear library, currently has a notion of pluggable authentication modules providing an interface for clients to implement 'login', and 'logout' methods, depending on the authentication scenarios that they try to support. This fits nicely with singleton credential storage approach, in the sense when doing 'login' and 'logout', we simply edit the credential storage adding or removing credentials appropriately. A branch for this work can be found here <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios/tree/basic.digest.auth>;. For usage, have a look at our integration test <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios-integration/blob/basic.digest.au... For testing purposes, another branch <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios/tree/basic.digest.nsurlcredentia... was created, this time letting the user to directly pass <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios-integration/blob/basic.digest.ns... an NSURLCredential <http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#Documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Fou... object initialised with the username/password combination during the Pipe configuration. Those credentials are internally stored and given back to the system by implementing the necessary callback <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios/blob/basic.digest.nsurlcredentia...;. A usage example can be found in our integration test <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios-integration/blob/basic.digest.ns... advantages of using the singleton approach: - fits nicely with the authentication mechanism we have in place (as an extension HTTPBasicDigestAuthenticationModule <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios/blob/basic.digest.auth/AeroGear-...>) so user familiarity when looking to add basic/digest support to the Pipe. - we control the credential type e.g. 'NSURLCredentialPersistenceForSession'. This eliminates errors of using 'NSURLCredentialPersistencePermanent' and having the user to explicitly clear the keychain when trying to login with a different combination. For my search, many errors occurs because of this. disadvantages of using the singleton approach: - not sure if many iOS dev will like the fact of creating an Authenticator object instead of using directly an NSURLCredential object that are used to. --- advantages of using the 'nsurlcredential' directly: - users familiarity with the object. - not explicit login logout request. disadvantages of using the 'nsurlcredential' directly: - error credential type can lead to errors. With discussions with Matthias, we are more keen in following the HTTPBasicDigestAuthenticationModule <https://github.com/cvasilak/aerogear-ios/blob/basic.digest.auth/AeroGear-... approach instead of providing the NSURLCredential <http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#Documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Fou... configuration option on the Pipe. Surely enough, in the documentation we will explicitly state that "login"/ "logout" methods, serve as a mean to setup internally the iOS authentication system so users don't have too (instead of calling remote endpoints) While the "NSURLCredential" better fits the meanings of BASIC/DIGEST (no explicit login/logout against a server), however that will cause all sorts of issues, since the APP_DEVELOPER is reponsible for providing the NSURLCredential; If we uses a _permanent_ storage, all sorts of errors may occur (like Christos was already indicating). I (currently) like the "auth_module" approach better. However, as Christos mentioned, we need to state (in API docs) that login/logout is JUST applying/removing the credentials. The doc needs to say that on LOGIN (for instance) no request is hit against the server. -Matthias Wdyt? Thanks, Christos _______________________________________________ aerogear-dev mailing list aerogear-dev(a)lists.jboss.org <mailto:aerogear-dev@lists.jboss.org> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-dev -- Matthias Wessendorf blog: http://matthiaswessendorf.wordpress.com/ sessions: http://www.slideshare.net/mwessendorf twitter: http://twitter.com/mwessendorf _______________________________________________ aerogear-dev mailing list aerogear-dev(a)lists.jboss.org <mailto:aerogear-dev@lists.jboss.org> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-dev _______________________________________________ aerogear-dev mailing list aerogear-dev(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-dev