Simple authentication extension for Yii 2

Yii 2 extension that provides simple authentication based on a secret key.

The extension provides components for easy authenticate and validate the HTTP request. Each request gets its own unique token with the expiration time, so no passwords or keys are sent with the request - it should be safer than basic access authentication when you don't use https.

Installation

The preferred way to install this extension is through composer.

Either run

php composer.phar require rob006/yii2-simple-auth

or add

"rob006/yii2-simple-auth": "^1.0"

to the require section of your composer.json file.

Usage

Configuration

You can configure default secret key used by this extension by setting param in your config in config/web.php and/or in config/console.php:

return [
	...
	'params' => [
		...
		'simpleauth' => [
			'secret' => 'mysecretkey',
		],
	],
];

This is optional - you can always explicitly specify the key for authentication/validation.

Authentication (client side)

Authentication when using official yii2-httpclient extension

You can simply authenticate Request object from official Yii 2 httpclient by using yii2-simple-auth-yii-authenticator extension.

Authentication any request

You can use Authenticator to authenticate any request, even if you don't use yii2-httpclient package. For example, authentication cURL request by GET param:

use rob006\simpleauth\Authenticator;

$ch = curl_init();
$url = 'http://api.example.com/user/list/?ids=1,2,3,4';
$url .= '&' . Authenticator::PARAM_NAME . '=' . Authenticator::generateAuthToken($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Authentication cURL request by header:

use rob006\simpleauth\Authenticator;

$ch = curl_init();
$url = 'http://api.example.com/user/list/?ids=1,2,3,4';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [
	Authenticator::HEADER_NAME . ': ' . Authenticator::generateAuthToken($url),
]);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Validation (server side)

To check whether the request has a valid token simply add action filter to your controller:

use rob006\simpleauth\ActionFilter;

class MyController extends \yii\web\Controller {

	public function behaviors() {
		return [
			...
			'simpleauth' => [
				'class' => ActionFilter::className(),
			],
		];
	}

	...
}

You can also configure some settings for ActionFilter:

use rob006\simpleauth\ActionFilter;
use rob006\simpleauth\Authenticator;

class MyController extends \yii\web\Controller {

	public function behaviors() {
		return [
			...
			'simpleauth' => [
				'class' => ActionFilter::className(),
				// allow authentication only by header
				'allowedMethods' => [
					Authenticator::METHOD_HEADER,
				],
				// set token timeout to 1 hour (by default it is 5 minutes)
				'tokenDuration' => 3600,
				// override default header used for authentication
				'headerName' => 'X-My-Custom-Header',
				// override params names used for send authentication token
				'postParamName' => 'my_custom_token_param_name',
				'getParamName' => 'my_custom_token_param_name',
				// custom secret used for validate authentication
				'secret' => 'my-custom-secret-key',
			],
		];
	}

	...
}

Final comments

Make sure that you generate token for final URL and no redirections are performed for the request. Token is generated for the exact address, so tokens for:

• http://example.com/user/list/
• https://example.com/user/list/
• http://www.example.com/user/list/
• http://example.com/user/list

will be completely different.

Be careful when using POST request. Authenticator and ActionFilter takes into account only the URL, all POST data is ignored during the authentication and validation. This means that one token may be used many times for different requests with different POST data if refer to the same URL.