Issues while using couchdb http cookie auth

[Mahendra M <ma...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I was trying to setup and use couchdb http cookie auth. I could
not find any "official" documentation for the same. A bit of searching around
gave me these.

1. http://pierrel.posterous.com/securing-couchdb (seems new)
2. http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@couchdb.apache.org/msg02631.html (2009)
3. http://www.jasondavies.com/blog/2009/05/27/secure-cookie-authentication-couchdb

My requirement is this.
* Have one db with user related docs.
* The key of the doc is the userid
* The sha1 hashed password for each user is stored in his doc.
* I want to issue cookies based on a userid and password posted to couchdb.

Originally, I was trying on writing my own show function to do an
auth. Then I saw
that couchdb itself has support for doing this.

The methods discussed in the above thread(s) are really good and I wanted to
try it out. However, it is not working even after following both the examples.

I keep getting an error
{"error":"unauthorized","reason":"Name or password is incorrect."}

The debug logs also don't give out much information.

Looks like I have not set up things properly and the above docs are a bit
confusing. Also, could not find anything on the couchdb wiki.

So, I wanted to check if there is any other documentation on how to make
use of http cookie auth.

Or has anyone tried and got it working ?

In link(1), it explains how to setup a single auth scheme for a couchdb node and
making use of /_session to get a cookie.

In link(2), it looks like adding _login and _logout handlers to each
db. Does this
mean that each db can have it's own user/password sets ? Also, what parameters
must be passed to _login ? Also, this says that the "users" view
values must have
a member "password" whereas the previous link asks for a member "password_sha".

Which is the correct approach to follow ? or are both valid ?
I am a bit confused as of now :-)

Regards,
Mahendra

http://twitter.com/mahendra

Re: Issues while using couchdb http cookie auth

[Nils Breunese <N....@vpro.nl>]

Mahendra M wrote:

> So, I wanted to check if there is any other documentation on how to make
> use of http cookie auth.

These links may help:

http://books.couchdb.org/relax/reference/security
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Security_Features_Overview

Nils.

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Re: Issues while using couchdb http cookie auth

[Mahendra M <ma...@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 10:41 PM, J Chris Anderson <jc...@apache.org> wrote:
> This is pretty much how the built-in auth works. Jan is working on a document here:
>
> http://wiki.couchapp.org/page/authn-preview

Thanks for this link. It really helped.

> The other thing to do is just use the signup and login buttons on Futon to do the same thing. Look in the lower right corner of http://localhost:5984/_utils/

Yes, I thought about using that code. I actually wanted an API with
which my other modules could login to couchdb. I was sort of trying to
get ejabberd, drupal etc. to use couchdb's user database. Sort of a
single sign-on thingy.

Regards,
Mahendra

http://twitter.com/mahendra

Re: Issues while using couchdb http cookie auth

[J Chris Anderson <jc...@apache.org>]

On Aug 5, 2010, at 7:11 AM, Mahendra M wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I was trying to setup and use couchdb http cookie auth. I could
> not find any "official" documentation for the same. A bit of searching around
> gave me these.
> 
> 1. http://pierrel.posterous.com/securing-couchdb (seems new)
> 2. http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@couchdb.apache.org/msg02631.html (2009)
> 3. http://www.jasondavies.com/blog/2009/05/27/secure-cookie-authentication-couchdb
> 
> My requirement is this.
> * Have one db with user related docs.
> * The key of the doc is the userid
> * The sha1 hashed password for each user is stored in his doc.
> * I want to issue cookies based on a userid and password posted to couchdb.
> 

This is pretty much how the built-in auth works. Jan is working on a document here:

http://wiki.couchapp.org/page/authn-preview

The other thing to do is just use the signup and login buttons on Futon to do the same thing. Look in the lower right corner of http://localhost:5984/_utils/

I have code here that also does signup and login (using the jquery plugin that ships with couch)

http://github.com/couchapp/couchapp/blob/master/vendor/evently/account/doSignup.js


> Originally, I was trying on writing my own show function to do an
> auth. Then I saw
> that couchdb itself has support for doing this.
> 
> The methods discussed in the above thread(s) are really good and I wanted to
> try it out. However, it is not working even after following both the examples.
> 
> I keep getting an error
> {"error":"unauthorized","reason":"Name or password is incorrect."}
> 
> The debug logs also don't give out much information.
> 
> Looks like I have not set up things properly and the above docs are a bit
> confusing. Also, could not find anything on the couchdb wiki.
> 
> So, I wanted to check if there is any other documentation on how to make
> use of http cookie auth.
> 
> Or has anyone tried and got it working ?
> 
> In link(1), it explains how to setup a single auth scheme for a couchdb node and
> making use of /_session to get a cookie.
> 
> In link(2), it looks like adding _login and _logout handlers to each
> db. Does this
> mean that each db can have it's own user/password sets ? Also, what parameters
> must be passed to _login ? Also, this says that the "users" view
> values must have
> a member "password" whereas the previous link asks for a member "password_sha".
> 
> Which is the correct approach to follow ? or are both valid ?
> I am a bit confused as of now :-)
> 
> Regards,
> Mahendra
> 
> http://twitter.com/mahendra