Category Archives: Known

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During the work I’ve previously done around OpenID Connect and Federation, I ran into the need to be able to mutate Entities.

Every Entity in Known has a type, and internally this corresponds to a PHP Class when loaded from data storage. Each Class has its own abilities and methods, and in general you’re not going to want to turn one into another.

However, I did.

This occurred when a User (which corresponds to a User) object logs in to a site after they’ve already used the federated API (which would create a RemoteUser object internally).

When that occurs, we want to convert the RemoteUser account into a full fat User. We can’t simply delete and recreate the user as that would lose all their history, and remove any posts they have made, etc.

So, we need a mechanism to mutate them.

This should be safe, since RemoteUser is a child of User, so they’re not vastly different things.

So, as of recent builds of Known, RemoteUser implements the interface Mutable, which defines a method mutate that accepts a class name to mutate to. On success it’ll return the newly mutated object. This object will have the same ID and data.

For convenience, there’s also a Trait Mutate that you can mix in, which provides a reference implementation of this interface. That implementation will check to see that the class you’re wanting to mutate and the class you’re wanting to mutate to are both related, and if so will perform the necessary incantations on the database.

Useful tool, but “with great power…” etc.

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I’ve previously written about how Known has built in support for OAuth2 and Open ID connect (both as a client and as a server). Well, over the past few weeks I’ve been doing some work to make this even more useful.

So, I thought I’d quickly jot down some notes as to what you can do with this functionality, and why you might find it cool.

Turn your Known site into an identity provider

The first thing you can do is use the OAuth2 server built in to Known to turn your site into an identity provider.

This means you will be able to create “apps”, allowing users on your site to be able to use third party applications and apps to make authenticated API calls.

It also means you can easily create a “login with” button, allowing your users to log into other sites using their Known profile on your site.

Connect your Known site to an identity provider

The next thing you can do is connect your site to another third party IDP using OAuth2, and allow those users to log in to your site.

This third party IDP could be your organisation’s single sign on service, a third party one, or another Known site.

If the IDP you’re connecting to supports OpenID connect, you can also enable the Federation feature.

What this does is let users with a valid OpenID Token retrieved from the IDP to make authenticated API calls on any Known sites that share that IDP, regardless of whether the user has used that site before.

Primarily, this functionality is designed for a modern micro service architecture world – so for example, you might have a React front end that needs to talk to one or more data sources over GraphQL, including getting blog data from a Known site. All of these services live in different containers, in distributed locations, with different local databases.

But…

Federation…

Something I’ve been pondering recently is whether this functionality might be able to let you do something pretty neat.

Consider, a Known site can be both a client and a server, and both issue and receive public key signed and verifiable OpenID Connect tokens for their users.

Each token knows where it comes from and can state who issued it.

This raises the possibility of being able to establish reciprocal links between sites – each Known (or other site – it’s an open protocol after all) could be both a client and server of each other.

With a bit of UX massaging, this could potentially let the users of each of these sites flow between each site in the network, and getting all the functionality of the local users.

Sure I’m not the first to be thinking this way, but it’s something to play with, and certainly will work a lot more seamlessly than the previously mooted PGP signed login (although I still think that’s pretty cool).

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OpenID connect (OIDC) is a simple extension to the OAuth2 protocol, which lets a server include more information about the authenticated user (canonical ID, username, email, etc).

At the very simple level, this lets you quickly populate a new user account without making additional requests. However, since these ID tokens are signed, it lets you do a whole lot more.

For example, you can pass these tokens around when making API requests in a modern micro service environment – each micro service will be able to securely authenticate the user that is making the request independently.

Known has had OAuth support (client and server) for a while now, but recently I’ve extended both to support OIDC.

The client will validate and use OIDC tokens when authenticating against a server, and the Known OAuth server will now generate OIDC tokens for users authenticating against a Known OAuth2 application.

Requesting OIDC from the client

OIDC tokens are not automatically provided, so you need to request them. Do this by adding openid to your list of scopes. I also suggest you add email and profile to your scopes too, so you get some actually useful information about the authenticating user.

You’ll also need to provide a URL for where to get the public key for the issuing server. This isn’t terribly slick, but I intend to improve this going forward with some nice auto discovery.

» Visit the project on Github...

Issuing OIDC from the server

All new applications will have the necessary information to start issuing OIDC tokens.

A new key pair will automatically be generated, and you’ll be able to get public key information from:

https://mysite.com/oauth2/CLIENTID/key/

» Visit the project on Github...