This naming was introduced in 2016 without explanation [1]. I find it
confusing because:
- It's reminiscent of "_app", which is a Python convention indicating
the variable is internal, so maybe avoid using it.
- It suggests there's some other "app" fixture I should be using (there
isn't, though).
The Python style guide describes using an underscore suffix to avoid
clashes with inbuilt names [1], which is sort of applicable if we need
to import the "app" module [2]. However, we can also avoid clashes by
choosing a different name, without the strange underscore.
[1]: 3b1d521c10
[2]: 78824f54fd/tests/app/main/views/test_forgot_password.py (L5)
We need to re-initialise the webauthn_server module with original
app config, since this state is global across all tests. Since the
behaviour of the original fixture wasn't specific to verifying the
origin, I've renamed the fixture as part of making it global.
In order to keep the fixture simple, I've rewritten the test for
the webauthn_server module, so they don't touch the app fixture.
Previously we would raise a 500 error in a variety of cases:
- If a second key was being registered simultaneously (e.g. in a
separate tab), which means the registration state could be missing
after the first registration completes. That smells like an attack.
- If the server-side verification failed e.g. origin verification,
challenge verification, etc. The library seems to use 'ValueError'
for all such errors [1] (after auditing its 'raise' statements, and
excluding AttestationError [2], since we're not doing that).
- If a key is used that attempts to sign with an unsupported
algorithm. This would normally raise a NotImplemented error as part
of verifying attestation [3], but we don't do that, so we need to
verify the algorithm is supported by the library manually.
This adds error handling to return a 400 response and error message
in these cases, since the error is not unexpected (i.e. not a 500).
A 400 seems more appropriate than a 403, since in many cases it's
not clear if the request data is valid.
I've used CBOR for the transport encoding, to match the successful
request / response encoding. Note that the ordering of then/catch
matters in JS - we don't want to catch our own throws!
[1]: 142587b3e6/fido2/server.py (L255)
[2]: c42d9628a4/fido2/attestation/base.py (L39)
[3]: c42d9628a4/fido2/cose.py (L92)
This links up the `get_webauthn_credentials_for_user` and
`create_webauthn_credential_for_user` methods of the user api client to
notifications-api.
To send data to the API we need strings to be unicode, so we call
decode('utf-8') on base64 objects.
Co-authored-by: Leo Hemsted <leo.hemsted@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk>
This adds Yubico's FIDO2 library and two APIs for working with the
"navigator.credentials.create()" function in JavaScript. The GET
API uses the library to generate options for the "create()" function,
and the POST API decodes and verifies the resulting credential. While
the options and response are dict-like, CBOR is necessary to encode
some of the byte-level values, which can't be represented in JSON.
Much of the code here is based on the Yubico library example [1][2].
Implementation notes:
- There are definitely better ways to alert the user about failure, but
window.alert() will do for the time being. Using location.reload() is
also a bit jarring if the page scrolls, but not a major issue.
- Ideally we would use window.fetch() to do AJAX calls, but we don't
have a polyfill for this, and we use $.ajax() elsewhere [3]. We need
to do a few weird tricks [6] to stop jQuery trashing the data.
- The FIDO2 server doesn't serve web requests; it's just a "server" in
the sense of WebAuthn terminology. It lives in its own module, since it
needs to be initialised with the app / config.
- $.ajax returns a promise-like object. Although we've used ".fail()"
elsewhere [3], I couldn't find a stub object that supports it, so I've
gone for ".catch()", and used a Promise stub object in tests.
- WebAuthn only works over HTTPS, but there's an exception for "localhost"
[4]. However, the library is a bit too strict [5], so we have to disable
origin verification to avoid needing HTTPS for dev work.
[1]: c42d9628a4/examples/server/server.py
[2]: c42d9628a4/examples/server/static/register.html
[3]: 91453d3639/app/assets/javascripts/updateContent.js (L33)
[4]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55971593/navigator-credentials-is-null-on-local-server
[5]: c42d9628a4/fido2/rpid.py (L69)
[6]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12394622/does-jquery-ajax-or-load-allow-for-responsetype-arraybuffer
