coolaj86
https://github.com/coolaj86
•
Apr 23
#indieauth
-
What we really need is federated authentication, but that doesn't exist yet.
This sounds like a great use case for IndieAuth. w3.org/TR/indieauth
IndieAuth is an OAuth 2.0 extension, which avoids the centralized problems with existing OAuth solutions by using DNS for "registration" of client IDs and user IDs. Every user account is identified by a URL (for Gitea this could be your Gitea user page), and client IDs are also URLs (would be the Gitea instance home page in this case.)
To log in to your Gitea instance, I would enter my own Gitea profile URL. Your instance would then do discovery on my URL to find where to send me to authorize the login on my own OAuth server (my Gitea server), which would then send me back to your Gitea where it would be able to verify the authorization code against my Gitea instance.
I'd be happy to walk through this in more detail if you're interested!
-
Just finished beta support for email and PGP auth on https://indielogin.com! Please give it a try and let me know if you find any bugs! Here are the setup docs: https://indielogin.com/setup
This means it's now feature complete with https://indieauth.com, so I can now start switching over my apps to use it. With any luck I'll be able to switch the https://indieweb.org wiki to it before IndieWeb Summit! -
Dropping Twitter Support on IndieAuth.com
I've made the difficult decision to drop support for Twitter authentication on IndieAuth.com. Some time last week, Twitter rolled out a change to the website which broke how IndieAuth.com verifies that a website and Twitter account belong to the same person.
Since I am already in the process of replacing IndieAuth.com with two new websites (lots of discussion on the wiki), it is not worth the effort to do what it would take to fix this for IndieAuth.com.
What Changed on Twitter.com
In order to verify that you are the person behind the URL you initially type in, IndieAuth.com checks your website to find a link to a Twitter profile, then checks that Twitter profile to see if it links back to your website. If there is a match, then you'll see the green button for Twitter on IndieAuth.com.
Twitter rolled out a change that prevents normal HTTP requests from returning actual HTML on Twitter profiles. I'm assuming this is part of their effort to fight bots, but it's unfortunate this use case got caught up in that mess. If you visit your Twitter profile in a browser and click "view source", you'll see something like this now.
This is a delightful bit of HTML that sets a cookie via Javascript and then reloads the page. Presumably this happens so quickly that normally you won't notice it.
Fetching a profile URL with curl now returns an empty HTTP body.
Even if I go through the hoops to make IndieAuth.com set cookies and refresh the page, there's no guarantee that they won't just change this again next week. I don't like playing these games, so instead I am just shutting off Twitter support in IndieAuth.com.
Replacing IndieAuth.com
The new version that you'll eventually use to sign in to the IndieWeb wiki is called IndieLogin.com. It is currently in beta, and is not available to other developers, but you can try signing in to the test page there right now. This new version gets around this Twitter problem by not even attempting to fetch Twitter profile pages in the first place.
The new login flow works like this:
-
You enter your website on IndieLogin.com
- IndieLogin.com finds your Twitter profile by checking all rel=me links for one matching twitter.com
- IndieLogin.com shows you a button to authenticate with Twitter immediately (rather than first checking that your Twitter profile links back)
- After you authenticate on Twitter and are redirected back to IndieLogin.com, it fetches your Twitter profile from the Twitter API
- If your Twitter profile as reported by the API includes the initial website you started with, then you're authenticated
This avoids the problem because IndieLogin.com never tries to fetch your Twitter profile HTML. Instead, it uses the API directly. This does mean that you can get into a situation where IndieLogin.com may prompt you with a Twitter button that can fail (if you are logged in to a different Twitter account than the one your website links to). However, it also speeds up the initial login prompt since it doesn't have to go check Twitter before showing you the login button first.
Hopefully I'll be able to launch IndieLogin.com soon so that the lack of Twitter support on IndieAuth.com isn't too annoying. In the mean time, you can authenticate via GitHub or email on IndieAuth.com.
-
You enter your website on IndieLogin.com
-
hosting Homebrew Website Club SF tonight @MozSF!
RSVP http://tantek.com/2018/080/e1
Special guest @aaronpk will demo his #IndieWeb reader setup!
https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader built on #openweb standards #WebSub #Microsub #microformats2 #IndieAuth #MicroPub #Webmention #Webhooks -
IndieAuth-Client-PHP 0.3.1
This release includes two new methods for quickly developing an IndieAuth client.
The library can now handle all the boilerplate work of generating a state parameter, URL canonicalization, and state management between the request and callback.
Developing an IndieAuth client now requires just setting a few configuration variables and deciding how to show error messages in your application. See the code below for an example of using the new features!
index.php
<form action="/login.php" method="post"> <input type="url" name="url"> <input type="submit" value="Log In"> </form>login.php
<?php require('vendor/autoload.php'); if(!isset($_POST['url'])) { die('Missing URL'); } // Start a session for the library to be able to save state between requests. session_start(); // You'll need to set up two pieces of information before you can use the client, // the client ID and and the redirect URL. // The client ID should be the home page of your app. IndieAuth\Client::$clientID = 'https://example.com/client/'; // The redirect URL is where the user will be returned to after they approve the request. IndieAuth\Client::$redirectURL = 'https://example.com/client/redirect.php'; // Pass the user's URL and your requested scope to the client. // If you are writing a Micropub client, you should include at least the "create" scope. // If you are just trying to log the user in, you can omit the second parameter. list($authorizationURL, $error) = IndieAuth\Client::begin($_POST['url']); // or list($authorizationURL, $error) = IndieAuth\Client::begin($_POST['url']); // Check whether the library was able to discover the necessary endpoints if($error) { echo "<p>Error: ".$error['error']."</p>"; echo "<p>".$error['error_description']."</p>"; } else { // Redirect the user to their authorization endpoint header('Location: '.$authorizationURL); }redirect.php
<?php require('vendor/autoload.php'); session_start(); IndieAuth\Client::$clientID = 'https://example.com/client/'; IndieAuth\Client::$redirectURL = 'https://example.com/client/redirect.php'; list($user, $error) = IndieAuth\Client::complete($_GET); if($error) { echo "<p>Error: ".$error['error']."</p>"; echo "<p>".$error['error_description']."</p>"; } else { // Login succeeded! // If you requested a scope, then there will be an access token in the response. // Otherwise there will just be the user's URL. echo "URL: ".$user['me']."<br>"; if(isset($user['access_token'])) { echo "Access Token: ".$user['access_token']."<br>"; echo "Scope: ".$user['scope']."<br>"; } } -
WebSub and IndieAuth Published on w3.org!
Today, we published the last of the two W3C specs I am editing! WebSub was published as a W3C Recommendation, and IndieAuth was published as a Working Group Note.
WebSub
WebSub is a standardized way for publishers to notify subscribers when new content is available. It was formerly known as PubSubHubbub, which was hard to say, so I'm glad we renamed it.
https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ One of our goals with WebSub was to ensure that existing PubSubHubbub implementations would still be compliant, so there are already lots of implementations in the wild! If you're publishing content online, want to receive realtime updates when feeds are updated, or are building a tool to facilitate either of these, WebSub is a great fit! You can use the tool at websub.rocks while building your implementation to get immediate feedback!
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the spec, and especially my co-editor Julien!
IndieAuth
IndieAuth is an identity layer on top of OAuth 2.0, and used by Micropub clients. Micropub was published as a W3C Recommendation in May of last year. Today, IndieAuth was published as a W3C Working Group Note.
https://www.w3.org/TR/indieauth/ The Social Web Working Group did not set out with the goal to standardize any sort of authentication mechanism, but since almost all of the Micropub implementations already supported the same mechanism, we decided to publish a "Note" to that effect. (The Micropub implementations that don't use IndieAuth use hard-coded tokens as a shortcut.) Notes are quite different from Recommendations in the eyes of the W3C, as described by this sentence: "The publication of a NOTE by the Consortium implies no endorsement of any kind." The goal of publishing this Note was to capture the current state of interoperable implementations.
One of the things I like most about the W3C standardization process is that specs are published after they describe things that are working, rather than published as an aspirational blueprint. We kind of pushed that definition to an extreme with IndieAuth, since there have been live interoperable IndieAuth implementations for several years now. Previously, I had written up several guides for how to implement the various roles in the IndieAuth flow, but never written it down as its own spec. The guides were certainly useful, as was clearly demonstrated by the fact that people were following them to build out various parts of the ecosystem. But there is also a need for a spec to lay things out and remove any ambiguities along the way.
Thanks to everyone who helped iron out the details of the language in the spec! We made a lot of good progress over the last few months!
What's Next?
So with these two specs published today, we've taken quite a lot of the IndieWeb building blocks through the W3C process!
-
Webmention - enables direct site-to-site commenting and other interactions
- Post Type Discovery - once you receive a Webmention, this algorithm helps your site know what to do with the contents
- Micropub - enables apps to create content on a website
-
WebSub - enables real-time subscriptions to web pages and feeds
- IndieAuth - a way to log in to sites with your domain name, and allow Micropub apps to post to your site
- jf2 - a post serialization format used by some Webmention services and other tools
So here's a few specs and tools that I'm working in the immediate future:
IndieAuth test suite - Like webmention.rocks, micropub.rocks and websub.rocks, I plan to make a tool that will help test your IndieAuth implementation. It will do things like throw tricky situations at your client to ensure you're handling the edge cases properly.
Finally finish renaming indieauth.com - I never should have called it that, since it's doing two completely separate things. You can read about the details here.
Microsub - Microsub is currently an early draft spec. The goal of Microsub is to do for reader interfaces what Micropub did for publishing interfaces. A Microsub server provides a standardized API that reader clients can use to show content. This will help make developing IndieWeb readers a lot easier, and also allows you to keep your subscription list in a server that you control rather than letting the reader own the list.
Monocle - Monocle is my Microsub implementation. It subscribes to feeds and presents a them as a Microsub server so that I can use any Microsub client to view everything. There's still a lot of work ahead for me here, but it's my goal to finally stop using IRC as a reader by getting Monocle to the point of being functional enough to cover all my use cases.
As always, you can help me and the rest of the IndieWeb out by adding support for any of these specs on your own website! We are always excited to welcome new people to the IndieWeb chat if you have any questions!
-
Webmention - enables direct site-to-site commenting and other interactions
-
This spec intentionally doesn't specify how users authenticate themselves to their server, it only deals with how third-party clients can authenticate users where their domain name is their identity.
The analogous version of this in RelMeAuth, with Google as an example, is such: as far as the RelMeAuth client is concerned, it sends the user over to Google, and expects Google to handle authenticating the user. This might involve entering their password, optionally followed by a 2fa mechanism like a Yubikey or TOTP code. That is all invisible to the site they're logging in to.
Similarly, IndieAuth clients do not know how users authenticate to their own server, the client just expects to send them off to the authorization endpoint and get back a response later that can be verified.
It is not a good idea for a spec to require any sort of authentication mechanism between the user and their own authorization server, which is something that the OAuth 2.0 spec has also made clear.
Now, the rest of this conversation is essentially continuing the naming debate of indieauth.com vs IndieAuth the spec vs other options we've considered.
I agree with many of @tantek's points, like
... should be it "just works" even if you only setup rel=me
However, that is describing RelMeAuth, not this spec. And as @Zegnat pointed out, even just adding rel=me isn't necessarily going to guarantee that you can sign in to an arbitrary site that supports RelMeAuth, since you need to add a rel=me link to a service that the site you're signing in to supports, which requires that site to register an OAuth application and deal with that service's API.
I'm in the middle of renaming indieauth.com, the goal is that the wiki will redirect users to indielogin.com to authenticate them using the existing mechanisms: RelMeAuth, email, PGP, and IndieAuth. Nowhere in that flow will users see the term "IndieAuth" unless they include a
rel=authorization_endpointlink on their website to an IndieAuth server of their choosing.I definitely agree that signing in to the wiki needs to be as simple as possible. That's the reason I added so many OAuth providers as well as alternate methods to indieauth.com (soon indielogin.com) in the first place. We've even had some people who want to sign in to the wiki but don't have a Twitter or GitHub account and don't want one, which is why I added things like email and PGP authentication options, which were not described by RelMeAuth.
This is all to say that it's not the goal of this spec to include RelMeAuth. This spec is intended to be just the URL-based extension to OAuth 2.0. If "IndieAuth" is not the right name for this spec, that's a different issue.
-
Announcing the IndieAuth Spec!
It's been a long time coming, but I've finally published a proper IndieAuth spec!
IndieAuth has been around for years, and is even referenced by the Micropub spec. But until now, there wasn't a canonical version of the spec all in one place. Previously it existed as a series of how-to guides on the IndieWeb wiki. Arguably it's actually more useful that way, since the whole point of specs is to communicate a consistent way of implementing something. But it did make it awkward to refer to it formally.
So I'm happy to say that there is finally a spec for IndieAuth, at https://indieauth.net/spec/
This document captures the current state of what has been implemented, and incorporates much of the feedback we've gathered over the years. Most of the document is split up into authentication and authorization sections, for when you are trying to just identify users for sign-in in vs when a Micropub client is trying to get an access token to post to the user's site. Formally it's an extension to OAuth 2.0, and makes several decisions that were left un-specified in the OAuth 2.0 core spec.
If you've implemented any part of this spec, or are thinking about it, I'd appreciate any feedback! Feel free to comment on this post, file an issue on GitHub, or drop a note in the IndieWeb chat!
-
William Narmontas
https://www.scalawilliam.com/
•
Jul 8
Number of sign-ins per month since 2012. If that info is not available, then just monthly number of hits on the site until now would suffice -
#IndieAuth is SO MUCH easier than OAuth! https://indieauth.com/developers
No secret keys, etc, etc. Works against localhost! -
Getting a head start on IndieWebCamp Nürnberg on the train with @sebsel, editing wiki pages about IndieAuth and indieauth.com
-
Greg McVerry
http://jgregorymcverry.com/
•
Mar 23
we were looking at indieauth to include in thimble but passportjs warns folks not to use: http://bit.ly/2ns1xSV still true? #indieweb@jgmac1106 I don't know the state of that plugin, but you could just do it manually: https://indieauth.com/developers or https://indieweb.org/indieauth-for-login -
Day 86: Updating IndieAuth Docs #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Beginning a slow project of updating the docs about the IndieAuth spec, today I started by updating a few pages on the wiki. Right now, most of the docs about IndieAuth (the spec), and how to use it, live across a variety of pages on the wiki, grouped together at https://indieweb.org/Category:IndieAuth.
My goal with the spec IndieAuth is to make it an extension of the OAuth 2.0 spec. It has always been based off of the OAuth 2.0 spec, but I've never written it up properly as an extension. It's always been just a series of how-to guides. Additionally, I had originally started by specifying all of the responses being form-encoded responses, whereas the OAuth 2.0 spec says all responses must be JSON format. I've been slowly converting my various apps that use IndieAuth to support both, based on the HTTP Accept header, although I haven't publicized this much yet.
Today's project was updating the existing IndieAuth documentation on the wiki to explicitly include the JSON versions as a valid response format.
Eventually I hope to write up IndieAuth as a formal extension to OAuth 2.0, in the same format that something like the Device Flow is an extension.
-
Day 81: Removing SMS and Clef from IndieAuth.com #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Sadly, Clef is shutting down in a couple months. If you haven't heard of it, it was a clever way to use your email and a mobile app to sign in to websites. I had integrated Clef logins to indieauth.com as one way to authenticate your email address. Since they are shutting down in June, I am proactively removing it from the website right now.
The other method for authenticating your email address is is to receive a verification code sent to your address, which I will of course continue to support.
While I was in the code, I figured it was about time to retire SMS authentication as well. While conceptually receiving a code via SMS or email are equivalent, in practice this is not true. SMS is actually a pretty insecure protocol, and it's possible (and not that expensive) to intercept SMS messages to all phones in a nearby area if you have the right hardware.
So as of today, SMS authentication is no longer an option for indieauth.com, and you will have to receive verification codes sent to your email instead of using the Clef app. I may bring back SMS support in indieauth.com as a second factor authentication in the future.
Here is my list of providers I use now.
-
Day 73: Updated Documentation for indieauth.com #100DaysOfIndieWeb
Today I updated the documentation for indieauth.com to include a setup guide for using indieauth.com as your OpenID provider, and added more prominent links to the OpenID and PGP instructions in various places on the site.
The header bar and footer now include direct links to PGP and OpenID setup instructions. The main setup page also now links to the PGP setup page and includes an example of linking to your PGP key along with the other example providers.
I wrote a setup guide for configuring indieauth.com as an OpenID provider.
At this point, OpenID 1 is almost completely gone. There are only a few sites that still consume it, and most of the former major providers have all shut down. Quite a lot of people have migrated to using indieauth.com as their provider since it's one of the few remaining services online. Hopefully this new setup guide will make it even easier to find for people looking to migrate.
-
Joel Purra
https://joelpurra.com
•
Jan 9
Almost none, but still some; might selfhost =) Like the distributed concept, would like to see more usage! https://lwn.net/Articles/708151/@joelpurra I like the concept too! My goal with #indieauth is to use domains as identities (like OpenID) but using OAuth 2.0 techniques. -
Joel Purra
https://joelpurra.com
•
Jan 9
Will consider #indieauth, but negatively angled "why not #openid" info had (has) me thinking otherwise https://indieweb.org/OpenID@joelpurra There also seem to be almost no OpenID providers left except indieauth.com, since myopenid shut down.
-
Joel Purra
https://joelpurra.com
•
Jan 9
Will consider #indieauth, but negatively angled "why not #openid" info had (has) me thinking otherwise https://indieweb.org/OpenID@joelpurra Well I would never suggest anyone use OpenID 1 for anything new, but I can see how that's confusing. Will see if I can rephrase.
