Alisa Duncan
All Posts by Alisa Duncan
Add Step-up Authentication Using Angular and NestJS
The applications you work on expect good authentication as a secure foundation. In the past, we treated authentication as binary. You are either authenticated or not. You had to set the same authentication mechanism for access to your application without a standard way to change authentication mechanisms conditionally. Consider the case where sensitive actions warrant verification, such as making a large financial transaction or modifying top-secret data. Those actions require extra scrutiny! Use Step Up...
Flexible Authentication Configurations in Angular Applications Using Okta
Are you ready to hear about the ultimate flexibility in configuring authentication properties in the Okta Angular SDK? You’ll want to check out this excellent new feature and walk through the steps of adding authentication using Okta to Angular applications. Configuring authentication properties using Okta in Angular applications There are three main ways you can add configuration information to Angular applications: Define the value within the app - The easiest, most straightforward route is directly...
Why You Should Migrate to OAuth 2.0 From Static API Tokens
Static API tokens have long been used to call external APIs and access the resources of third parties such as software vendors. As API standards have evolved, OAuth 2.0 emerged as the option offering more robust security, greater flexibility, and a better developer experience. Let’s explore the advantages of moving away from static tokens in favor of OAuth 2.0. Table of Contents Static API token landscape Shift from static API tokens to OAuth 2.0 for...
We're Living in a Passwordless World
Passwords? Bah! Who wants to remember all those letter, number, and special character combinations? Password managers and password manager browser extensions can help us, but what if we stopped using passwords entirely? What if we stopped using authentication factors, such as SMS one-time passwords (OTP), that pose risks where malicious actors can access sensitive authentication information (phishing)? What if authentication was so seamless that we could use built-in device hardware capabilities instead? Seamless, easy-to-use authentication...
How to Get Going with the On-Demand SaaS Apps Workshops
Having an enterprise-ready SaaS application means your application supports authentication best practices, can scale across multiple customers and users, has automated means to re-create environments, and can securely add enhancements and value-adds your customers expect. Join this free virtual workshop series where we take your SaaS application on a journey of enterprise-ready identity — you’ll wear the hat of a SaaS developer preparing your Todo application to support enterprise-level customers who want to use your...
How to Build an Enterprise-Ready MVP SaaS App
Understanding what enterprise customers look for in a SaaS app is step one, but how do you achieve it? What steps do you take to support enterprise-ready identity in your app? Posts in the enterprise-ready Devday23 presentation series 1. What Does It Mean to Be Enterprise Ready: Devday23 Keynote Enterprise Readiness 2. What Enterprises Look For: Devday23 Enterprise Customer Perspectives 3. How to Build an Enterprise-Ready MVP SaaS App Enterprise-ready identity What do enterprise customers...
What Enterprises Look For: Devday23 Enterprise Customer Perspectives
You have a great SaaS application, and know everyone will find your app so productive and wonderful. But you’re ready to move beyond a B2C or a B2B for small companies. You want to go enterprise! But are enterprise customers a different breed? And what sort of things are they looking for? Welcome to the second step of becoming enterprise ready. Join us as we help you prepare your application for enterprise customers. Posts in...
What Does It Mean to Be Enterprise Ready: Devday23 Keynote
What makes a SaaS application ready for enterprise customers when it comes to identity? Between handling application security, user onboarding, and scalable, secure authentication practices, there’s much to consider and prepare before determining your app is “enterprise ready.” Posts in the enterprise-ready Devday23 presentation series 1. What Does It Mean to Be Enterprise Ready: Devday23 Keynote Enterprise Readiness 2. What Enterprises Look For: Devday23 Enterprise Customer Perspectives 3. How to Build an Enterprise-Ready MVP SaaS...
Selecting the Best Authorization for Your API Integrations
Integrating with an API lets you power up your code by knowing what the API knows and doing what the API can do. The catch is that most APIs can’t and shouldn’t let just anybody access your important resources. Just as humans log in to access resources, programs accessing APIs must obtain proper authorization. Your application can use two types of authorization mechanisms when calling Okta APIs from your Okta integration, each with its pros...
Join Us for Developer Day 2023
We’re thrilled to bring back Developer Day in 2023! Developer Day is an event for developers designed by developers. This year we’re happy to announce this event is a free, two-day virtual event, so you can join us wherever you are! The event focuses on using identity to power secure applications, so join us to create a safer world for your application users. Check out more in this teaser video Developer Day 2023 event Authentication...
How Authentication and Authorization Work for SPAs
Adding authentication to public clients such as Single Page Applications (SPA) and JavaScript applications can be a source of confusion. Identity Providers like Okta try to help you via multiple support systems. Still, it can feel like a lot of work. Especially since you’re responsible for way more than authentication alone in the applications you work on! As part of authentication, your client application makes multiple calls to an authorization server, and you get back...
Streamline Your Okta Configuration in Angular Apps
The Okta Angular SDK supports a new and improved configuration method to pass in the required properties for incorporating Okta in your Angular applications. Now, you can add Okta to your Angular application using the forRoot pattern! The forRoot pattern in Angular The forRoot pattern helps ensure services defined in NgModules aren’t duplicated across the application. This is especially noteworthy if you have a module that both provides services and also has component and directive...
A Secure and Themed Sign-in Page
Creating secure applications requires authentication. Delegating all the tedious details of the sign-in process to Okta is the most secure method to authenticate, not to mention speedier for development. So you’ll see us advocating for and using the Okta-hosted sign-in page in our blog posts. But the default sign-in page can look too different from the personality you have in your application. And the login URL redirects to a domain outside your application, which is...
Practical Uses of Dependency Injection in Angular
Angular has an extensive system that uses *providers” to add and configure dependencies to the application you’re building. To create providers, you use the built-in Dependency Injection (DI) system. This post will cover Angular’s powerful DI system at a high level and demonstrate a few practical use cases and strategies for configuring your dependencies. Let’s get practical! Table of Contents Quick overview of Dependency Injection Angular’s Dependency Injection system Injection tokens in Angular Configuring providers...
Protect Your Angular App From Cross-Site Scripting
In the last post of this SPA security series, we covered Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and how Angular helps you with a mitigation technique. Posts in the SPA web security series 1. Defend Your SPA From Security Woes 2. Defend Your SPA From Common Web Attacks 3. Protect Your Angular App From Cross-Site Request Forgery 4. Protect Your Angular App From Cross-Site Scripting Next, we’ll dive into Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and look at the built-in...
Protect Your Angular App From Cross-Site Request Forgery
Previously, I wrote about web security at a high level and the framework-agnostic ways to increase safety and mitigate vulnerabilities. Posts in the SPA web security series 1. Defend Your SPA from Security Woes 2. Defend Your SPA from Common Web Attacks 3. Protect Your Angular App From Cross-Site Request Forgery 4. Protect Your Angular App From Cross-Site Scripting Now, I want to dive a little deeper into the vulnerabilities. In this short post, we’ll...
Defend Your SPA from Common Web Attacks
This is the second post in a series about web security for SPAs. In the last post, we laid the groundwork for thinking about web security and applying security mechanisms to our application stack. We covered the OWASP Top Ten, using secure data communication with SSL/TLS, using security headers to help enhance built-in browser mechanisms, keeping dependencies updated, and safeguarding cookies. Posts in the SPA web security series 1. Defend Your SPA from Security Woes...
Defend Your SPA from Security Woes
There’s a lot of information floating out there about web security. But when I read through the material, I noticed some information wasn’t up to date, or it was written specifically for traditional server-rendered web applications, or the author recommended anti-patterns. In a series of posts, I will cover web security concerns that all web devs should be aware of, emphasizing client-side applications, namely Single Page Applications (SPAs). Furthermore, I’m not going to get into...
Secure and Deploy Micro Frontends with Angular
Micro frontends continue to gain interest and traction in front-end development. The architecture models the same concept as micro services - as a way to decompose monolithic front-end applications. And just like with micro services, micro frontends have complexities to manage. This post is part two in a series about building an e-commerce site with Angular using micro frontends. We use Webpack 5 with Module Federation to wire the micro frontends together, demonstrate sharing authenticated...
How to Build Micro Frontends Using Module Federation in Angular
The demands placed on front-end web applications continue to grow. As consumers, we expect our web applications to be feature-rich and highly performant. As developers, we worry about how to provide quality features and performance while keeping good development practices and architecture in mind. Enter micro-frontend architecture. Micro frontends are modeled after the same concept as microservices, as a way to decompose monolithic frontends. You can combine micro-sized frontends to form a fully-featured web app....
Three Ways to Configure Modules in Your Angular App
Configurations are part of a developer’s life. Configuration data is information your app needs to run and may include tokens for third-party systems or settings you pass into libraries. There are different ways to load configuration data as part of application initialization in Angular. Your requirements for configuration data might change based on needs. For example, you may have one unchanging configuration for your app, or you may need a different configuration based on the...
Boost Your Productivity Using Okta CLI with Fig
CLIs are great. I love the speed and productivity increases I get when using a CLI, but memorizing commands – especially when commands need arguments, options, flags, and so on – can be daunting. Luckily, there are tools available for CLI fans out there, and one tool I’ve been enjoying is Fig. Fig powers up your CLI productivity Fig adds autocompletion to supported terminals, which makes using CLIs so much easier. Using Git? You’ll see...
Using Azure Cognitive Services in a .NET App
Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of cloud-based AI products from Microsoft Azure to add cognitive intelligence into your applications quickly. With Azure Cognitive Services, you can add AI capabilities using pre-trained models, so you don’t need machine learning or data science experience. Azure Cognitive Services has vision, speech, language, and decision-making services. In this article, you will learn how to use the Vision Face API to perform facial analysis in a .NET MVC application...
Loading Components Dynamically in an Angular App
Businesses have unique and complex needs. In addition to the user or organization-specific data to show, there might be a need to display different views and content conditionally. The conditions might include the user’s role or which department they belong to. The information about a user might be part of the authenticated user’s ID token as a profile claim. In Angular, you can show different components or even parts of templates conditionally using built-in directives...
What You Need to Know about Angular v13
Angular v13 has arrived! And with it come a lot of exciting new features and updates. Angular continues to improve runtime performance, decrease compilation time, promote good software development practices, enhance developer experience, and keep up to date with dependencies such as TypeScript and RxJS. Is anyone else excited about RxJS v7?! 🤩 Let’s take a look at a few of the many new exciting features in Angular v13 with some code examples using authentication....
The Things to Keep in Mind about Auth
There’s a lot of information out there about adding authentication to your app, which is helpful! But also overwhelming. It can be hard to find relevant and up-to-date information. Security best practices and technologies change, so refreshing your understanding and keeping up with current best practices is a good thing. Here are some notes I took while I reviewed my knowledge and applied my experience implementing auth. Prefer OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect If you’re...
Flying Into Okta
“Just follow your heart and keep smiling.” – Kiki’s Delivery Service I’m embarking on a new adventure and entering the wide world of Developer Advocacy at Okta! Much like Kiki setting out on her journey, I’m full of enthusiasm and curiosity and am ready to fly. I’m thrilled to be here at Okta and looking forward to everything. Now, I just need to get a talking cat… “Smile. We have to make a good first...