[V5] Socket.io Authentication

[M4gie]

Hey 👋,

I'm looking for a way to authenticate users wich is not relying on an HTTP request, I'm currently using API Guard. Do you know a way to do it?

Thanks for your help!

[mwpb]

Hello! Firstly: thanks for creating a nice framework! Secondly: I am also interested in this. In particular I have set up socket.io as described here:

https://preview.adonisjs.com/blog/socketio-with-adonisjs-v5

and everything works ok. Also I can see that I can get an IncomingRequest object from socket.io as socket.request where socket is of type Socket from socket.io. So essentially we need to figure out if adonis has a function which transforms this IncomingMessage into an HttpContextContract which we then know how to use.

Then we could use this function as socket.io middleware in a similar way to:

https://socket.io/docs/v3/middlewares/#Compatibility-with-Express-middleware

Of course if there is a completely different approach to socket auth in adonis then I'm keen to hear about that also. Many thanks,

[M4gie]

I'm using API guard and I managed authentication with this

function urlDecode(encoded) {
  return Buffer.from(encoded, 'base64').toString('utf-8');
}

function generateHash(token) {
  return crypto.createHash('sha256').update(token).digest('hex');
}

function parseToken(token) {
  const parts = token.split('.');
  /**
   * Ensure the token has two parts
   */
  if (parts.length !== 2) {
    throw new Error('E_INVALID_API_TOKEN');
  }

  /**
   * Ensure the first part is a base64 encode id
   */
  const tokenId = urlDecode(parts[0]);

  if (!tokenId) {
    throw new Error('E_INVALID_API_TOKEN');
  }

  const parsedToken = generateHash(parts[1]);
  return {
    token: parsedToken,
    tokenId,
  };
}

async function checkToken(token: string): Promise<User> {
  const parsedToken = parseToken(token);
  const apiToken = await ApiToken.query()
    .select('userId')
    .where('id', parsedToken.tokenId)
    .andWhere('token', parsedToken.token)
    .preload('user')
    .first();
  if (!apiToken) {
    throw new Error('E_INVALID_API_TOKEN');
  }
  return apiToken.user as User;
}

async function authenticate(socket: Socket): Promise<void> {
  const token = socket.handshake?.query?.token;

  if (!token || typeof token !== 'string') {
    throw new Error(SocketErrors.MissingParameter);
  }

  try {
    const user = await checkToken(token);
  } catch (error) {
    throw new Error(SocketErrors.BadCredentials);
  }
}

async function connection(socket: Socket): Promise<void> {
  try {
    await authenticate(socket);
  } catch (error) {
    // handle errors
  }
}

[mwpb]

Hi, thanks for letting me know about the solution involving the API guard. I'm using a session cookie based approach and was hoping to avoid manually reading the cookie and looking things up. (Somewhere in adonis there must be a function that does this but I couldn't find it a few weeks ago.) If I get back to this project and find a solution I'll be sure to post it here. Thanks again,

[fuxinko]

I am using web auth with cookie as session driver:

import sessionConfig from 'Config/session'
import Encryption from '@ioc:Adonis/Core/Encryption'
import Request from '@ioc:Adonis/Core/Request'

const getSocketUser = (socket) => {
  // @ts-ignore
  const SocketRequest = new Request(socket.request, null, Encryption, {})
  const sessionId = SocketRequest.cookie(sessionConfig.cookieName)

  if(!sessionId) {
    return null
  }
  const session = SocketRequest.encryptedCookie(sessionId)
  if(!session || !session.auth_web) {
    return null
  }
  return session.auth_web
}

[tnga]

Thanks for the tips 👍 ! session.auth_web return the current authenticated user id. await User.find(session.auth_web) can also be returned to get the user details from database.

[hlozancic]

@fuxinko thank you for this tip! I struggled to get this to work...

Just one thing:

 // @ts-ignore
  const SocketRequest = new Request(socket.request, null, Encryption, {})
  const sessionId = SocketRequest.cookie(sessionConfig.cookieName)

If someone hates to use ts-ignore like me, you can code this using cookie parser like this:

 // @ts-ignore
  import Encryption from '@ioc:Adonis/Core/Encryption'
  import { CookieParser } from '@adonisjs/http-server/build/src/Cookie/Parser'
  const cookieParser = new CookieParser(<string>socket.handshake.headers.cookie, Encryption)
  const sessionId = cookieParser.unsign(sessionConfig.cookieName)

[joris-gallot]

nobody gets an empty object as a session returned by SocketRequest.encryptedCookie(sessionId) ?
I don't understand why I don't have auth_web in the object, i also use web auth with cookie as session driver

[sn0rcha]

I'm using Redis as the session driver and I can get the sessionId, but when I use:

const session = SocketRequest.encryptedCookie(sessionId)

It always returns null, any ideas? The sessionId exists in Redis so I'm not sure what's going on.

[taslangraham]

Here's another way to authenticate in socket.io when your application has API guard.

 const ctx = HttpContext.create("/", {}, socket.request);
 // My token is stored in an HttpOnly cookie. Update this logic as needed 
 const token = ctx.request.cookie(String(Env.get("API_TOKEN_COOKIE_NAME")));
 ctx.request.headers().authorization = `Bearer ${token}`;

 const auth = AuthManager.getAuthForRequest(ctx as any);
 await auth.use("api").authenticate();

[momar3632]

This is a very cool code but I have a problem because version 6 does not work with it. Can you tell me how to make this code work in version 6? Thank you very much

[taslangraham]

Can you share a minimal project or code snippet of what you've attempted? I haven't used v6 as yet as I'm still on v5

[momar3632]

I found a solution here
https://github.com/nedois/adonis-chat-demo

But it uses api token, not (seasion or cookie)