Saltar al contenido principal

What's new in version 2 (part 3/4)

· 4 min de lectura
Loïc Poullain

Banner

This article presents some improvements introduced in version 2 of FoalTS:

  • the JWT utilities to manage secrets and RSA keys,
  • the JWT utilities to manage cookies,
  • and the new stateless CSRF protection.

This article is the part 3 of the series of articles What's new in version 2.0. Part 2 can be found here.

New JWT utilities

Accessing config secrets and public/private keys

Starting from version 2, there is a standardized way to provide and retrieve JWT secrets and RSA public/private keys: the functions getSecretOrPublicKey and getSecretOrPrivateKey.

Using secrets

In this example, a base64-encoded secret is provided in the configuration.

.env

JWT_SECRET="Ak0WcVcGuOoFuZ4oqF1tgqbW6dIAeSacIN6h7qEyJM8="
settings:
jwt:
secret: "env(JWT_SECRET)"
secretEncoding: base64

Both getSecretOrPublicKey and getSecretOrPrivateKey functions will return the secret.

In the case a secretEncoding value is provided, the functions return a buffer which is the secret decoded with the provided encoding.

Using public and private keys

const { Env } = require('@foal/core');
const { readFileSync } = require('fs');

module.exports = {
settings: {
jwt: {
privateKey: Env.get('RSA_PRIVATE_KEY') || readFileSync('./id_rsa', 'utf8'),
publicKey: Env.get('RSA_PUBLIC_KEY') || readFileSync('./id_rsa.pub', 'utf8'),
}
}
}

In this case, getSecretOrPublicKey and getSecretOrPrivateKey return the keys from the environment variables RSA_PUBLIC_KEY and RSA_PRIVATE_KEY if they are defined or from the files id_rsa and id_rsa.pub otherwise.

Managing cookies

In version 2, Foal provides two dedicated functions to manage JWT with cookies. Using these functions instead of manually setting the cookie has three benefits:

  • they include a CSRF protection (see section below),
  • the function setAuthCookie automatically sets the cookie expiration based on the token expiration,
  • and cookie options can be provided through the configuration.

Example

api.controller.ts

import { JWTRequired } from '@foal/jwt';

@JWTRequired({ cookie: true })
export class ApiController {
// ...
}

auth.controller.ts

export class AuthController {

@Post('/login')
async login(ctx: Context) {
// ...

const response = new HttpResponseNoContent();
// Do not forget the "await" keyword.
await setAuthCookie(response, token);
return response;
}

@Post('/logout')
logout(ctx: Context) {
// ...

const response = new HttpResponseNoContent();
removeAuthCookie(response);
return response;
}

}

Cookie options

settings:
jwt:
cookie:
name: mycookiename # Default: auth
domain: example.com
httpOnly: true # Warning: unlike session tokens, the httpOnly directive has no default value.
path: /foo # Default: /
sameSite: strict # Default: lax if settings.jwt.csrf.enabled is true.
secure: true

Stateless CSRF protection simplified

In version 1, providing a CSRF protection was quite complex. We needed to provide another secret, generate a stateless token, manage the CSRF cookie (expiration, etc), use an additional hook, etc.

Starting from version 2, the CSRF protection is all managed by @JWTRequired, setAuthCookie and removeAuthCookie.

The only thing that you have to do it to enable it through the configuration:

settings:
jwt:
csrf:
enabled: true

When it is enabled, an additional XSRF-TOKEN cookie is sent to the client at the same time as the auth cookie (containing your JWT). It contains a stateless CSRF token which is signed and has the same expiration date as your JWT.

When a request is made to the server, the @JWTRequired hooks expects you to include its value in the XSRF-TOKEN header.