In an API I have there’s a requirement to use an authentication method other than OAuth2 or any kind of token generation which requires making an extra HTTP call.

With this in mind there’s this https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/12/17/dive.html
I’ve only stored passwords as hashes and used functions like password_verify to know the user sent the proper credentials without actually knowing the password stored in DB.
WSSE requires to encrypt with SHA1 the credentials being sent, which means the API needs to retrieve the password in plain text to recreate the digest and compare it to the one sent by the user.
So, how should I be storing this password if the code needs it to recreate the hash?
Should I have something like a master password and store them encrypted instead of hashed?

Most of the information I’ve found about WSSE is very very old, and some implementations have it marked as deprecated, do you know any other type of standard authentication where the user can generate the token instead of having to make an extra HTTP call?

  • DeprecatedCompatV2
    1·
    1 year ago

    Here’s a simple approach:

    • Basic auth via a custom header, like X-Auth
    • JWT auth on Authorization header
    • uuid on the JWT (as a claim) that gets stored temporarily (until it expires) to allow the server to revoke the token

    Initial request -> server looks for Authorization header, falls back to X-Auth header -> generates JWT and sends back to client in Authorization header (or whatever makes sense)

    Subsequent request -> server looks for Authorization header -> checks JWT against revocation database/table and that it isn’t expired

    Subsequent request with expired token -> server returns 401, client retries using X-Auth header -> server sends back JWT on Authorization header -> client updates locally-stored JWT for future requests

    There are probably ways to make this more standard or optimal, but this is a simple approach.