fxa/packages/fxa-auth-server

Firefox Accounts Auth Server

Overview

The Firefox Accounts server provides a shared authentication and management infrastructure for the Mozilla Cloud Services ecosystem. It is a HTTP API through which a user-agent can manage:

• user account details, such as email address and password
• the list of devices connected to the account
• the master encryption keys used by services connected to the account

There is no UI provided by this server. It is expected that user interaction will happen through Firefox or a hosted website, which will use the API provided by this server.

Concepts

Each user of the service creates an account which has a unique id. Access to the account is authenticated by an email/password pair and uses the Secure Remote Password protocol to avoid revealing the password to the server. Note that our SRP protocol ordering is slightly different from the sample on wikipedia, but the variables are the same.

The user connects one or more devices to their account. Each device performs the SRP authentication protocol to obtain one or more opaque authentication tokens, which are then used to make Hawk signed requests when interacting with the server API. This token exchange means the device does not need to keep the the user's password in persistent storage.

Once connected, each device can fetch the user's encryption keys. The server maintains two keys for each account, called kA and kB. kA is known to the server, and is intended for encrypting data that must be recoverable in the event of password reset. kB is stored encrypted by the user's password, and is intended for more secure encryption at the cost of unrecoverability when the password is forgotten.

API

All server functionality is exposed via a HTTP API. It is JSON based and vaguely restful. A detailed description is available here and a prose overview of the design and cryptogaphic details is available here.

Linting

Run lint with:

yarn lint

Linting will also be run for staged files automatically via Husky when you attempt to commit.

Testing

Run tests with:

npm test

Run specific tests with the following commands:

# Test only test/local/account_routes.js
# Note: This command does not work for remote tests.
npm test -- test/local/account_routes.js

# Grep for "SQSReceiver"
NODE_ENV=dev npx mocha -r esbuild-register test/*/** -g "SQSReceiver"

To select a specific glob of tests to run:

npm test -- test/local/account_routes.js test/local/password_*

To run a certain suite of tests (e.g. all remote tests):

npm test -- test/remote

• Note: stop the auth-server before running tests. Otherwise, they will fail with obscure errors.
• You can use LOG_LEVEL, such as LOG_LEVEL=debug to specify the test logging level.

This package uses Mocha to test its code. By default npm test will run a series of NPM test scripts and then lint the code:

Refer to Mocha's CLI documentation for more advanced test configuration.

We also use Chai for making assertions in tests. As of version 4.3.6, Chai truncates error messages by default. To disable truncation for tests in a given file, import chai from the local file /test/chaiWithoutTruncation.js as demonstrated in test/local/senders/emails.ts. If you want more truncation than you get by default (but you do want to put some kind of limit on how much the error message prints out) you can change the truncateThreshold value in chaiWithoutTruncation.js to be the desired number of characters. Setting it to 0 (as we have) disables truncation entirely.

Testing with non-local databases

Executing tests using remote databases (MySQL, Redis) is possible by specifying (and exporting) the following environment variables:

• MySQL:
  • MYSQL_HOST
  • MYSQL_SLAVE_HOST
  • AUTH_MYSQL_HOST
• Redis:
  • REDIS_HOST
  • ACCESS_TOKEN_REDIS_HOST
  • REFRESH_TOKEN_REDIS_HOST
  • METRICS_REDIS_HOST

This also allows to use temporary throw-away Docker containers to provide these.

Mailer and Emails

See the "Emails" page in ecosystem platform for docs on our email stack, including styling and l10n guides.

Storybook

Storybook is set up in the auth-server for FxA and SubPlat emails. See our "emails" documentation for more info.

L10N

Strings are automatically extracted to the fxa-content-server-l10n repo where they reach Pontoon for translations to occur by our l10n team and contributors. This is achieved by concatenating all of our .ftl (Fluent) files into a single auth.ftl file with the merge-ftl grunttask, and the extract-and-pull-request.sh script that runs in fxa-content-server-l10n on a weekly cadence. For more detailed information, check out the ecosystem platform l10n doc.

Brands we have set to message references are stored in libs/shared/l10n/src/lib/branding.ftl. Non-email strings that must be translated are placed directly in lib/l10n/server.ftl. Email strings for translation are placed in a nearby (templates/[templateName]/en.ftl or partials/[partialName]/en.ftl). For more detailed information on l10n in emails with examples, see the ecosystem platform doc email page, l10n section.

Production

Use the FXA_L10N_SHA to pin L10N files to certain SHA. If not set then the master SHA will be used.

Reference Client

fxa-auth-client

Configuration

Configuration of this project is managed by convict, using the schema in config/index.ts.

Default values from this schema can be overridden in two ways:

1. By setting individual environment variables, as indicated by the env property for each item in the schema.

   For example:

   export CONTENT_SERVER_URL="http://your.content.server.org"
   

2. By specifying the path to a conforming JSON file, or a comma-separated list of paths, using the CONFIG_FILES environment variable. Files specified in this way are loaded when the server starts. If the server fails to start, it usually indicates that one of these JSON files does not conform to the schema; check the error message for more information.

   For example:

   export CONFIG_FILES="~/fxa-content-server.json,~/fxa-db.json"
   

Rate-limiting config

Rate-limiting and blocking is handled by fxa-customs-server. By default, these policies are disabled in dev environment via "customsUrl":"none" in fxa-auth-server/config/dev.json. Enabling the customs server allows error messages to be displayed when rate limiting occurs. Default rate-limiting values are found in fxa-customs-server/lib/config/config.js and can be modified with environment variables or by adding a dev.json file to fxa-customs-server/config/.

The customs-server can be enabled for local testing by changing the dev config to "customsUrl":"http://localhost:7000".

Token Pruning

We need to be able to periodically remove old tokens and codes. This can be accomplished via the token pruning script in the scripts directory.

For example to clear out tokens and codes older than 10 days execute the following:

./scripts/prune-tokens.sh —-maxTokenAge='10 days' --maxCodeAge='10 days'

For more info about the script usage execute the following:

./scripts/prune-tokens.sh --help

Note: In the wild, this script will be run periodically by our SRE team as part of database maintenance.

Troubleshooting

Firefox Accounts authorization is a complicated flow. You can get verbose logging by adjusting the log level in the config.json on your deployed instance. Add a stanza like:

"log": {
  "level": "trace"
}

Valid level values (from least to most verbose logging) include: "fatal", "error", "warn", "info", "trace", "debug".

License

MPL 2.0