Geoip: Native NodeJS Implementation Of MaxMind's GeoIP API

GeoIP-lite

A native NodeJS API for the GeoLite data from MaxMind.

introduction

MaxMind provides a set of data files for IP to Geo mapping along with opensource libraries to parse and lookup these data files. One would typically write a wrapper around their C API to get access to this data in other languages (like JavaScript).

GeoIP-lite instead attempts to be a fully native JavaScript library. A converter script converts the CSV files from MaxMind into an internal binary format (note that this is different from the binary data format provided by MaxMind). The geoip module uses this binary file to lookup IP addresses and return the country, region and city that it maps to.

Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are supported, however since the GeoLite IPv6 database does not currently contain any city or region information, city, region and postal code lookups are only supported for IPv4.

philosophy

I was really aiming for a fast JavaScript native implementation for geomapping of IPs. My prime motivator was the fact that it was really hard to get libgeoip built for Mac OSX without using the library from MacPorts.

why geoip-lite

geoip-lite is a fully JavaScript implementation of the MaxMind geoip API. It is not as fully featured as bindings that use libgeoip. By reducing scope, this package is about 40% faster at doing lookups. On average, an IP to Location lookup should take 20 microseconds on a Macbook Pro. IPv4 addresses take about 6 microseconds, while IPv6 addresses take about 30 microseconds.

synopsis

var geoip = require('geoip-lite');

var ip = "207.97.227.239";
var geo = geoip.lookup(ip);

console.log(geo);
{ range: [ 3479298048, 3479300095 ],
  country: 'US',
  region: 'TX',
  eu: '0',
  timezone: 'America/Chicago',
  city: 'San Antonio',
  ll: [ 29.4969, -98.4032 ],
  metro: 641,
  area: 1000 }

installation

1. get the library

$ npm install geoip-lite

2. update the datafiles (optional)

Run cd node_modules/geoip-lite && npm run-script updatedb license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY to update the data files. (Replace YOUR_LICENSE_KEY with your license key obtained from maxmind.com)

You can create maxmind account here

NOTE that this requires a lot of RAM. It is known to fail on on a Digital Ocean or AWS micro instance. There are no plans to change this. geoip-lite stores all data in RAM in order to be fast.

API

geoip-lite is completely synchronous. There are no callbacks involved. All blocking file IO is done at startup time, so all runtime calls are executed in-memory and are fast. Startup may take up to 200ms while it reads into memory and indexes data files.

Looking up an IP address

If you have an IP address in dotted quad notation, IPv6 colon notation, or a 32 bit unsigned integer (treated as an IPv4 address), pass it to the lookup method. Note that you should remove any [ and ] around an IPv6 address before passing it to this method.

var geo = geoip.lookup(ip);

If the IP address was found, the lookup method returns an object with the following structure:

{
   range: [ <low bound of IP block>, <high bound of IP block> ],
   country: 'XX',                 // 2 letter ISO-3166-1 country code
   region: 'RR',                  // Up to 3 alphanumeric variable length characters as ISO 3166-2 code
                                  // For US states this is the 2 letter state
                                  // For the United Kingdom this could be ENG as a country like “England
                                  // FIPS 10-4 subcountry code
   eu: '0',                       // 1 if the country is a member state of the European Union, 0 otherwise.
   timezone: 'Country/Zone',      // Timezone from IANA Time Zone Database
   city: "City Name",             // This is the full city name
   ll: [<latitude>, <longitude>], // The latitude and longitude of the city
   metro: <metro code>,           // Metro code
   area: <accuracy_radius>        // The approximate accuracy radius (km), around the latitude and longitude
}

The actual values for the range array depend on whether the IP is IPv4 or IPv6 and should be considered internal to geoip-lite. To get a human readable format, pass them to geoip.pretty()

If the IP address was not found, the lookup returns null

Pretty printing an IP address

If you have a 32 bit unsigned integer, or a number returned as part of the range array from the lookup method, the pretty method can be used to turn it into a human readable string.

    console.log("The IP is %s", geoip.pretty(ip));

This method returns a string if the input was in a format that geoip-lite can recognise, else it returns the input itself.

Built-in Updater

This package contains an update script that can pull the files from MaxMind and handle the conversion from CSV. A npm script alias has been setup to make this process easy. Please keep in mind this requires internet and MaxMind rate limits that amount of downloads on their servers.

You will need, at minimum, a free license key obtained from maxmind.com to run the update script.

Package stores checksums of MaxMind data and by default only downloads them if checksums have changed.

Ways to update data

#update data if new data is available
npm run-script updatedb license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

#force udpate data even if checkums have not changed
npm run-script updatedb-force license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

You can also run it by doing:

node ./node_modules/geoip-lite/scripts/updatedb.js license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

Ways to reload data in your app when update finished

If you have a server running geoip-lite, and you want to reload its geo data, after you finished update, without a restart.

Programmatically

You can do it programmatically, calling after scheduled data updates

//Synchronously
geoip.reloadDataSync();

//Asynchronously
geoip.reloadData(function(){
    console.log("Done");
});

Automatic Start and stop watching for data updates

You can enable the data watcher to automatically refresh in-memory geo data when a file changes in the data directory.

geoip.startWatchingDataUpdate();

This tool can be used with npm run-script updatedb to periodically update geo data on a running server.

Caveats

This package includes the GeoLite database from MaxMind. This database is not the most accurate database available, however it is the best available for free. You can use the commercial GeoIP database from MaxMind with better accuracy by buying a license from MaxMind, and then using the conversion utility to convert it to a format that geoip-lite understands. You will need to use the .csv files from MaxMind for conversion.

Also note that on occassion, the library may take up to 5 seconds to load into memory. This is largely dependent on how busy your disk is at that time. It can take as little as 200ms on a lightly loaded disk. This is a one time cost though, and you make it up at run time with very fast lookups.

Memory usage

Quick test on memory consumption shows that library uses around 100Mb per process

    var geoip = require('geoip-lite');
    console.log(process.memoryUsage());
    /**
    * Outputs:
    * {
    *     rss: 126365696,
    *     heapTotal: 10305536,
    *     heapUsed: 5168944,
    *     external: 104347120
    * }
    **/

This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://maxmind.com/

Alternatives

If your use-case requires doing less than 100 queries through the lifetime of your application or if you need really fast latency on start-up, you might want to look into fast-geoip a package with a compatible API that is optimized for serverless environments and provides faster boot times and lower memory consumption at the expense of longer lookup times.

References

• Documentation from MaxMind
• ISO 3166 (1 & 2) codes
• FIPS region codes

Copyright

geoip-lite is Copyright 2011-2018 Philip Tellis philip@bluesmoon.info and the latest version of the code is available at https://github.com/bluesmoon/node-geoip

Author: Geoip-lite
Source Code: https://github.com/geoip-lite/node-geoip 
License: View license

#node #api 

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How native is React Native? | React Native vs Native App Development

If you are undertaking a mobile app development for your start-up or enterprise, you are likely wondering whether to use React Native. As a popular development framework, React Native helps you to develop near-native mobile apps. However, you are probably also wondering how close you can get to a native app by using React Native. How native is React Native?

In the article, we discuss the similarities between native mobile development and development using React Native. We also touch upon where they differ and how to bridge the gaps. Read on.

A brief introduction to React Native

Let’s briefly set the context first. We will briefly touch upon what React Native is and how it differs from earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is a popular JavaScript framework that Facebook has created. You can use this open-source framework to code natively rendering Android and iOS mobile apps. You can use it to develop web apps too.

Facebook has developed React Native based on React, its JavaScript library. The first release of React Native came in March 2015. At the time of writing this article, the latest stable release of React Native is 0.62.0, and it was released in March 2020.

Although relatively new, React Native has acquired a high degree of popularity. The “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019” report identifies it as the 8th most loved framework. Facebook, Walmart, and Bloomberg are some of the top companies that use React Native.

The popularity of React Native comes from its advantages. Some of its advantages are as follows:

• Performance: It delivers optimal performance.
• Cross-platform development: You can develop both Android and iOS apps with it. The reuse of code expedites development and reduces costs.
• UI design: React Native enables you to design simple and responsive UI for your mobile app.
• 3rd party plugins: This framework supports 3rd party plugins.
• Developer community: A vibrant community of developers support React Native.

Why React Native is fundamentally different from earlier hybrid frameworks

Are you wondering whether React Native is just another of those hybrid frameworks like Ionic or Cordova? It’s not! React Native is fundamentally different from these earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is very close to native. Consider the following aspects as described on the React Native website:

• Access to many native platforms features: The primitives of React Native render to native platform UI. This means that your React Native app will use many native platform APIs as native apps would do.
• Near-native user experience: React Native provides several native components, and these are platform agnostic.
• The ease of accessing native APIs: React Native uses a declarative UI paradigm. This enables React Native to interact easily with native platform APIs since React Native wraps existing native code.

Due to these factors, React Native offers many more advantages compared to those earlier hybrid frameworks. We now review them.

#android app #frontend #ios app #mobile app development #benefits of react native #is react native good for mobile app development #native vs #pros and cons of react native #react mobile development #react native development #react native experience #react native framework #react native ios vs android #react native pros and cons #react native vs android #react native vs native #react native vs native performance #react vs native #why react native #why use react native

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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
4. Other notes were made to support future research.
5. 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

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

What Are Good Traits That Make Great API Product Managers

As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Many of the current practices of API product management have carried over from other products and platforms like web and mobile, but API products have their own unique set of challenges due to the way they are marketed and used by customers. While it would be rare for a consumer mobile app to have detailed developer docs and a developer relations team, you’ll find these items common among API product-focused companies. A second unique challenge is that APIs are very developer-centric and many times API PMs are engineers themselves. Yet, this can cause an API or developer program to lose empathy for what their customers actually want if good processes are not in place. Just because you’re an engineer, don’t assume your customers will want the same features and use cases that you want.

This guide lays out what is API product management and some of the things you should be doing to be a good product manager.

#api #analytics #apis #product management #api best practices #api platform #api adoption #product managers #api product #api metrics