[Aerogear-users] Aerogear Unified Push registration through a server backend

Tue May 19 03:40:14 EDT 2015

Hi Erik, thanks for answering so quickly. I still have some gaps in my 
mind; I'm sure that is because my inexperience in that area. Maybe I was 
wrong choosing UPS for covering use case that was not designed for but I 
still think (correct me if I'm wrong) that this scenario is possible:

Our Learning Management System (LMS) Sakai distributes users into 
"sites" corresponding to courses. Each student belong to many sites. An 
instructor from a course can send announcements, messages, upload 
resources, etc to a particular course site and those are only visible to 
the members of the site.

We would like to reproduce that behaviour with UPS. When a user sends an 
announcement to site (and a checkbox is marked) it sends the 
notification to the Messaging backend who automatically sends the 
notification with an array of alias filled with the "username" of 
members of that site. It helps to us to limit who receives a 
notification from which site ...

Our intention with our APP is to authenticate first, to be sure that is 
an student of our university, so registration to the UPS must be done 
when auth succeed (don't let anybody who downloaded the app register to 
the UPS if don't belong to our institution).

Any time, user can choose to disconnect his account from the APP, so we 
developed that when user disconnects their account from the APP it calls 
to unregister, because we don't want that the APP receives more 
notifications. (Maybe that is our first mistake?)

I'm not familiarized yet with iOS, we started with android but I still 
see those security problems (I guess that is produced by my 
inexperience). We are developing the APP using Ionic framework, so we 
use cordova client to do operations. The way we are setting up with a 
JSON where in the "android"
config: {
...
...
     pushServerURL: "..."
     andorid: {
         senderID: "project id",
         variantID: "...",
         varaintSecret: "..."
     }
}

The way the hybrid technology stack is built makes very easy for a user 
to connect the phone to a computer and see all the JS stuff just using 
chrome utilities. So those values are exposed and can be used to fake 
registration process.

I don't know how the UPS protects from another app to use the same 
projectID to register to the service (I'll dive deeper to be sure I'm 
doing things well), but I can't imagine another way to prevent  that a 
user with our APP manipulate the calls to UPS with other alias or 
categories, exposing the notifications created from other LMS sites. I 
know that it's not a critical situation because notifications should be 
not used to send sensitive data, but we would like to prevent it in some 
way.

Thanks,

Alex.

El 18/05/15 a les 14:47, Erik Jan de Wit ha escrit:
> The problem is that you don't want/need to call unregister in a normal
> flow. Unregister is used for instance when a new version of you app
> drops support for push notifications.
>
> I don't get why you are proxy-ing the requests to UPS, because you
> cannot have 2 applications receiving the same push notifications. On
> iOS the bundle id makes sure of that, and on android there is the
> unique project id. So even if a second app would register with UPS it
> will not get the push notifications.
>
> On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Alex Ballesté
> <alexandre.balleste at udl.cat> wrote:
>> Hi, I'm developing a mobile app for android and ios for our University. It
>> will use AeroGear Unified Push Server to send notifications to students when
>> a new announcement is sent in our LMS.
>>
>> We are developing the app with ionic framework and we are using the register
>> and unregister process through a custom backend service instead of direct
>> from device.
>>
>> We use the cordova plugin and we call registers and unregister JS methods,
>> but we don't point to the push server endpoint, but backend server instead.
>> Once the Backend server gets the requests it creates a new request to Push
>> server providing variantSecret and variantID; the response received is sent
>> back to the app.
>>
>> We would like to use this flow for security reasons. We want to avoid that
>> the users do their own apps and use those values to register and supply
>> alias to get users notifications. So backend handles the security (tokens,
>> deviceids, usernames, ... ) and if everything is ok then proxies then
>> backend generates a new request fullfilling alias and real authentication
>> parameters and the received parameters from app. We achieved the registation
>> and unregistration, but when unregistration process is done if we do a new
>> re-registration then we got a success response, but then notification didn't
>> arrive.
>>
>> Has anybody did something similar to this approximation? Do you have any
>> advise or trick that would be useful for us?
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>>
>> Alex
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Alexandre Ballesté Crevillén alexandre.balleste at udl.cat
>> ====================
>> Universitat de Lleida
>>
>> Àrea de sistemes d'Informació i Comunicacions
>>
>> Analista/Programador
>>
>>
>> University of Lleida
>>
>> Information and Communication Systems Service
>>
>>
>> Tlf: +34 973 702148
>>
>> Fax: +34 973 702130
>>
>> =====================
>>
>> Avís legal/Aviso legal/Avertiment legal/Legal notice
>>
>>
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>
>

-- 

Alexandre Ballesté Crevillén alexandre.balleste at udl.cat
====================
Universitat de Lleida

Àrea de sistemes d'Informació i Comunicacions

Analista/Programador

University of Lleida

Information and Communication Systems Service

Tlf: +34 973 702148

Fax: +34 973 702130

=====================

Avís legal/Aviso legal/Avertiment legal/Legal notice 
<http://www.imatge.udl.cat/avis_legal_lopd.html>

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