Tutorial: Build a Basic CRUD App with Symfony 4 and Vue
If you’re a web developer in 2018, then you already know that the expectations are high and the tools are many. Users want progressive web applications and seamless experiences across every device. The focus is shifting from monolithic code to APIs built as microservices and consumed by multiple frontends, and finding our way through the ecosystem of ever-changing tools can be a daunting task even for the most experienced of us. If you’re looking for...
Secure Your Spring Boot Application with Multi-Factor Authentication
OAuth 2.0 has quickly become an industry standard for third party authentication for web applications. It’s a super secure strategy, when implemented properly, but getting it right can be hard. Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone. Okta has done it for you. This is one place where it’s definitely not worth re-inventing the wheel. And further, with all of the cybersecurity attacks today, just using a password, even a hard password, is not...
How to Prevent Your Users from Using Breached Passwords
Not too long ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) officially recommended that user-provided passwords be checked against existing data breaches. Today I’m going to show you how you can easily add this functionality to any website you run using PassProtect, an open-source developer library we created specifically for this purpose. Why Check User Passwords? The new NIST recommendations mean that every time a user gives you a password, it’s your responsibility as...
Add Authentication to Any Web Page in 10 Minutes
× Heads up... this blog post is old! For updated instructions on adding authentication using the Okta Sign-in Widget, see Embedded Okta Sign-In Widget fundamentals. Adding authentication to web pages can be pretty annoying. While I’d like to say that over the course of my programming tenure I’ve learned to easily add authentication to any app I create, my attempts tend to devolve into me bickering with myself endlessly over a User schema and the...
Static Sites vs CMS
There’s a frequent debate amongst development and marketing teams at companies around the world about whether or not their blog or website should be managed through a content management system (CMS) like Wordpress, Drupal, Squarespace, etc. or through a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo. I’ve been blogging since 2006, writing websites since 2002, and I’ve built just about every possible type of website. Today I’d like to explain why static sites are the...
Secure a Node API with OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials
Securing server-to-server API services can be tricky. OAuth 2.0 is an excellent way to offload user authentication to another service, but what if there is no user to authenticate? In this article, I’ll show you how you can use OAuth 2.0 outside the context of a user, in what is also known as the Client Credentials Flow. Instead of storing and managing API keys for your clients (other servers), you can use a third-party service...
Add Authentication to Your Vanilla JavaScript App in 20 Minutes
“Sometimes nothing is good enough” is a phrase that software engineers don’t speak or hear often. In the fast-changing world of web development, there is no shortage of bleeding-edge JavaScript frameworks promising to make your life easier or inch out its predecessors. You may ask yourself if it is even possible to build a modern web application without one of these frameworks, let alone add secure authentication. Well, it is! Vanilla JavaScript is frequently used...
Build a Basic CRUD Application with Grails and Okta
Grails and Groovy can be a great alternative to Spring Boot, in some specific use cases. In this post, we’ll start with that basic Grails app that already has secure authentication via Okta, and add some additional features. In this tutorial you will: Define a simple data model Create domain classes for the models Create the necessary controllers and views Configure logging Configure the database so that the data is persisted between sessions Add some...
What is the OAuth 2.0 Implicit Grant Type?
The Implicit Grant Type is a way for a single-page JavaScript app to get an access token without an intermediate code exchange step. It was originally created for use by JavaScript apps (which don’t have a way to safely store secrets) but is only recommended in specific situations. This post is the second in a series where we explore frequently used OAuth 2.0 grant types. Previously we covered the Authorization Code grant type. If you...
Announcing PassProtect - Proactive Web Security
If you’re reading this article you probably care about web security. You probably use a password manager to manage your passwords, you’ve probably got multi-factor authentication setup for all of your services, and you’re probably already subscribed to Have I Been Pwned? so you’re alerted when one of your logins have been involved in a data breach. But you’re not most people. Most web users are completely disconnected from the incredible advancements that have been...