Conveniently Build and Efficiently Render JSON API Resources in Ruby

jsonapi-serializable

Ruby gem for building and rendering JSON API documents.

Status

Resources

Chat: gitter
Twitter: @jsonapirb
Docs: jsonapi-rb.org

Installation

# In Gemfile
gem 'jsonapi-serializable'

then

$ bundle

or manually via

$ gem install jsonapi-serializable

Usage and documentation

See jsonapi-rb.org/guides.

License

jsonapi-serializable is released under the MIT License.

Author: jsonapi-rb
Source code: https://github.com/jsonapi-rb/jsonapi-serializable
License: MIT license

#ruby #ruby-on-rails

Easy Activity Tracking for Models, Similar to Github's Public Activity

PublicActivity

public_activity provides easy activity tracking for your ActiveRecord, Mongoid 3 and MongoMapper models in Rails 3 and 4.

Simply put: it can record what happens in your application and gives you the ability to present those recorded activities to users - in a similar way to how GitHub does it.

!! WARNING: README for unreleased version below. !!

You probably don't want to read the docs for this unreleased version 2.0.

For the stable 1.5.X readme see: https://github.com/chaps-io/public_activity/blob/1-5-stable/README.md

About

Here is a simple example showing what this gem is about:

Example usage

Tutorials

Screencast

Ryan Bates made a great screencast describing how to integrate Public Activity.

Tutorial

A great step-by-step guide on implementing activity feeds using public_activity by Ilya Bodrov.

Online demo

You can see an actual application using this gem here: http://public-activity-example.herokuapp.com/feed

The source code of the demo is hosted here: https://github.com/pokonski/activity_blog

Setup

Gem installation

You can install public_activity as you would any other gem:

gem install public_activity

or in your Gemfile:

gem 'public_activity'

Database setup

By default public_activity uses Active Record. If you want to use Mongoid or MongoMapper as your backend, create an initializer file in your Rails application with the corresponding code inside:

For Mongoid:

# config/initializers/public_activity.rb
PublicActivity.configure do |config|
  config.orm = :mongoid
end

For MongoMapper:

# config/initializers/public_activity.rb
PublicActivity.configure do |config|
  config.orm = :mongo_mapper
end

(ActiveRecord only) Create migration for activities and migrate the database (in your Rails project):

rails g public_activity:migration
rake db:migrate

Model configuration

Include PublicActivity::Model and add tracked to the model you want to keep track of:

For ActiveRecord:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked
end

For Mongoid:

class Article
  include Mongoid::Document
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked
end

For MongoMapper:

class Article
  include MongoMapper::Document
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked
end

And now, by default create/update/destroy activities are recorded in activities table. This is all you need to start recording activities for basic CRUD actions.

Optional: If you don't need #tracked but still want the comfort of #create_activity, you can include only the lightweight Common module instead of Model.

Custom activities

You can trigger custom activities by setting all your required parameters and triggering create_activity on the tracked model, like this:

@article.create_activity key: 'article.commented_on', owner: current_user

See this entry http://rubydoc.info/gems/public_activity/PublicActivity/Common:create_activity for more details.

Displaying activities

To display them you simply query the PublicActivity::Activity model:

# notifications_controller.rb
def index
  @activities = PublicActivity::Activity.all
end

And in your views:

<%= render_activities(@activities) %>

Note: render_activities is an alias for render_activity and does the same.

Layouts

You can also pass options to both activity#render and #render_activity methods, which are passed deeper to the internally used render_partial method. A useful example would be to render activities wrapped in layout, which shares common elements of an activity, like a timestamp, owner's avatar etc:

<%= render_activities(@activities, layout: :activity) %>

The activity will be wrapped with the app/views/layouts/_activity.html.erb layout, in the above example.

Important: please note that layouts for activities are also partials. Hence the _ prefix.

Locals

Sometimes, it's desirable to pass additional local variables to partials. It can be done this way:

<%= render_activity(@activity, locals: {friends: current_user.friends}) %>

Note: Before 1.4.0, one could pass variables directly to the options hash for #render_activity and access it from activity parameters. This functionality is retained in 1.4.0 and later, but the :locals method is preferred, since it prevents bugs from shadowing variables from activity parameters in the database.

Activity views

public_activity looks for views in app/views/public_activity.

For example, if you have an activity with :key set to "activity.user.changed_avatar", the gem will look for a partial in app/views/public_activity/user/_changed_avatar.html.(|erb|haml|slim|something_else).

Hint: the "activity." prefix in :key is completely optional and kept for backwards compatibility, you can skip it in new projects.

If you would like to fallback to a partial, you can utilize the fallback parameter to specify the path of a partial to use when one is missing:

<%= render_activity(@activity, fallback: 'default') %>

When used in this manner, if a partial with the specified :key cannot be located it will use the partial defined in the fallback instead. In the example above this would resolve to public_activity/_default.html.(|erb|haml|slim|something_else).

If a view file does not exist then ActionView::MisingTemplate will be raised. If you wish to fallback to the old behaviour and use an i18n based translation in this situation you can specify a :fallback parameter of text to fallback to this mechanism like such:

<%= render_activity(@activity, fallback: :text) %>

i18n

Translations are used by the #text method, to which you can pass additional options in form of a hash. #render method uses translations when view templates have not been provided. You can render pure i18n strings by passing {display: :i18n} to #render_activity or #render.

Translations should be put in your locale .yml files. To render pure strings from I18n Example structure:

activity:
  article:
    create: 'Article has been created'
    update: 'Someone has edited the article'
    destroy: 'Some user removed an article!'

This structure is valid for activities with keys "activity.article.create" or "article.create". As mentioned before, "activity." part of the key is optional.

Testing

For RSpec you can first disable public_activity and add require helper methods in the rails_helper.rb with:

#rails_helper.rb
require 'public_activity/testing'

PublicActivity.enabled = false

In your specs you can then blockwise decide whether to turn public_activity on or off.

# file_spec.rb
PublicActivity.with_tracking do
  # your test code goes here
end

PublicActivity.without_tracking do
  # your test code goes here
end

Documentation

For more documentation go here

Common examples

Set the Activity's owner to current_user by default

You can set up a default value for :owner by doing this:

Include PublicActivity::StoreController in your ApplicationController like this:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include PublicActivity::StoreController
end

Use Proc in :owner attribute for tracked class method in your desired model. For example:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  tracked owner: Proc.new{ |controller, model| controller.current_user }
end

Note: current_user applies to Devise, if you are using a different authentication gem or your own code, change the current_user to a method you use.

Disable tracking for a class or globally

If you need to disable tracking temporarily, for example in tests or db/seeds.rb then you can use PublicActivity.enabled= attribute like below:

# Disable p_a globally
PublicActivity.enabled = false

# Perform some operations that would normally be tracked by p_a:
Article.create(title: 'New article')

# Switch it back on
PublicActivity.enabled = true

You can also disable public_activity for a specific class:

# Disable p_a for Article class
Article.public_activity_off

# p_a will not do anything here:
@article = Article.create(title: 'New article')

# But will be enabled for other classes:
# (creation of the comment will be recorded if you are tracking the Comment class)
@article.comments.create(body: 'some comment!')

# Enable it again for Article:
Article.public_activity_on

Create custom activities

Besides standard, automatic activities created on CRUD actions on your model (deactivatable), you can post your own activities that can be triggered without modifying the tracked model. There are a few ways to do this, as PublicActivity gives three tiers of options to be set.

Instant options

Because every activity needs a key (otherwise: NoKeyProvided is raised), the shortest and minimal way to post an activity is:

@user.create_activity :mood_changed
# the key of the action will be user.mood_changed
@user.create_activity action: :mood_changed # this is exactly the same as above

Besides assigning your key (which is obvious from the code), it will take global options from User class (given in #tracked method during class definition) and overwrite them with instance options (set on @user by #activity method). You can read more about options and how PublicActivity inherits them for you here.

Note the action parameter builds the key like this: "#{model_name}.#{action}". You can read further on options for #create_activity here.

To provide more options, you can do:

@user.create_activity action: 'poke', parameters: {reason: 'bored'}, recipient: @friend, owner: current_user

In this example, we have provided all the things we could for a standard Activity.

Use custom fields on Activity

Besides the few fields that every Activity has (key, owner, recipient, trackable, parameters), you can also set custom fields. This could be very beneficial, as parameters are a serialized hash, which cannot be queried easily from the database. That being said, use custom fields when you know that you will set them very often and search by them (don't forget database indexes :) ).

Set `owner` and `recipient` based on associations

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked owner: :commenter, recipient: :commentee

  belongs_to :commenter, :class_name => "User"
  belongs_to :commentee, :class_name => "User"
end

Resolve parameters from a Symbol or Proc

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked only: [:update], parameters: :tracked_values
  
  def tracked_values
   {}.tap do |hash|
     hash[:tags] = tags if tags_changed?
   end
  end
end

Setup

Skip this step if you are using ActiveRecord in Rails 4 or Mongoid

The first step is similar in every ORM available (except mongoid):

PublicActivity::Activity.class_eval do
  attr_accessible :custom_field
end

place this code under config/initializers/public_activity.rb, you have to create it first.

To be able to assign to that field, we need to move it to the mass assignment sanitizer's whitelist.

Migration

If you're using ActiveRecord, you will also need to provide a migration to add the actual field to the Activity. Taken from our tests:

class AddCustomFieldToActivities < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    change_table :activities do |t|
      t.string :custom_field
    end
  end
end

Assigning custom fields

Assigning is done by the same methods that you use for normal parameters: #tracked, #create_activity. You can just pass the name of your custom variable and assign its value. Even better, you can pass it to #tracked to tell us how to harvest your data for custom fields so we can do that for you.

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked custom_field: proc {|controller, model| controller.some_helper }
end

Help

If you need help with using public_activity please visit our discussion group and ask a question there:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/public-activity

Please do not ask general questions in the Github Issues.

Author: public-activity
Source code: https://github.com/public-activity/public_activity
License: MIT license

#ruby #ruby-on-rails

Domingo Jakubowski

1595396220

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Autumn Blick

1601381326

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
Other notes were made to support future research.
You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

‎Andres Gallo‎

1604399880

An API-First Approach For Designing Restful APIs | Hacker Noon

I’ve been working with Restful APIs for some time now and one thing that I love to do is to talk about APIs.

So, today I will show you how to build an API using the API-First approach and Design First with OpenAPI Specification.

First thing first, if you don’t know what’s an API-First approach means, it would be nice you stop reading this and check the blog post that I wrote to the Farfetchs blog where I explain everything that you need to know to start an API using API-First.

Preparing the ground

Before you get your hands dirty, let’s prepare the ground and understand the use case that will be developed.

Tools

If you desire to reproduce the examples that will be shown here, you will need some of those items below.

NodeJS
OpenAPI Specification
Text Editor (I’ll use VSCode)
Command Line

Use Case

To keep easy to understand, let’s use the Todo List App, it is a very common concept beyond the software development community.

#api #rest-api #openai #api-first-development #api-design #apis #restful-apis #restful-api

Doyle Aufderhar

1659232560