So I’ve had this idea for an API for a while but the problem I keep coming back to is authentication. I’m using rocket to actually code it. I looked through the rocket docs and it looks like the closest thing to API key authentication it has are cookies.
I then went and looked at some other APIs to see if I can copy their layouts and it looks like a lot of them use an API key and then a secret API key for authentication. Did some more googling and stackoverflow said that it’s more secure to use a pair like that.
So that leaves me with the actual question: how do you actually implement this feature? Do you just generate API keys and throw them a database to be looked up later? Should they be written/read to a file to be used later(probably not a good option I’d guess).
Just for reference I’m using rocket, sqlx and postgres.
That depends on scale. For our IOT device, we just had a private key on the device and gave the customer an encrypted packet that had their privileges spelled out, and set a field on their user account appropriately. That wouldn’t be secure at scale, but it worked really well for our B2B app.
If I were doing something at scale, I’d follow suggestions from others here.
I mean, that sounds sorta like JWTs which are used commonly enough for this type of thing
If you are looking to do something like Github’s Personal Access Tokens (PAT) then it is easiest to just think about it like a password:
- Create a high entropy (secure) string
- Store the hash of the string in a database table
- Store the permissions and other metadata with the PAT’s hash
- Validate the PAT (permissions, revoke status, etc) on each request to the server
Storing the hash of the token, like you do with passwords, is a good practice in case your db is ever compromised as it wont leave the tokens accessible and reusable without a lot of effort.
Don’t forget to add some salt to that hash.
I’d recommend switching away from Rocket if you can. It is not very actively maintained and Axum has become the better choice.
Thanks for the update, I wrote using rocket a few years ago so I figured everyone was still using that!
