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Securing Our Services

API project, authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a user or client, while authorization is the process of determining what actions a user or client is allowed to perform.

Here are some common approaches to implementing authentication and authorization for REST APIs in a TypeScript API project:

  • HTTP Basic Authentication: This is a simple authentication scheme that involves sending the username and password in the Authorization header of an HTTP request. The credentials are encoded using Base64 and the header has the following format: Authorization: Basic base64(username:password). This approach is easy to implement, but it's not very secure because the credentials are transmitted in plain text.

  • HTTP Digest Authentication: This is a more secure variant of HTTP Basic Authentication that involves sending a nonce (i.e., a random value) and a hashed version of the credentials in the Authorization header. The header has the following format: Authorization: Digest username="username", realm="realm", nonce="nonce", uri="uri", response="response". This approach is more secure than HTTP Basic Authentication because the credentials are hashed, but it's still vulnerable to replay attacks.

  • ⭐ Token-based Authentication: This is a popular approach that involves sending a token in the Authorization header of an HTTP request. The token can be a JSON Web Token (JWT), an OAuth2 access token, or another type of token. The header has the following format: Authorization: Bearer token. This approach is more secure than HTTP Basic Authentication and HTTP Digest Authentication because the token is cryptographically signed and can be validated on the server.

To implement authorization in a TypeScript API project, you can use one of the following approaches:

Role-based Access Control (RBAC): This is a common approach that involves assigning permissions to users based on their role. For example, you might have a "admin" role that has full access to all resources and a "user" role that has limited access. You can then check the user's role when they make a request and allow or deny the request based on their permissions.

Policy-based Access Control (PBAC): This is a more fine-grained approach that involves defining policies that specify which users or groups are allowed to access which resources. For example, you might have a policy that allows users in the "admin" group to access all resources, and a policy that allows users in the "user" group to access only their own resources. You can then check the policies when a user makes a request and allow or deny the request based on the policies.