We have been directly using U2F on our auth web app with the hostname as our app ID (https://auth.company.com) and that's working fine. However, we'd like to be able to authenticate with the auth server from other apps (and hostnames, e.g. https://customer.app.com) that communicate with the auth server via HTTP API.
I can generate the sign requests and what-not through API calls and return them to the client apps, but it fails server-side (auth server) because the app ID doesn't validate (clients are using their own hostnames as app ID). This is understandable, but how should I handle this? I've read about facets but I cannot get it to work at all.
The client app JS is like:
var registerRequests = // ...
var signRequests = // ...
u2f.register('http://localhost:3000/facets', registerRequests, signRequests, function(registerResponse) {
if (registerResponse.errorCode) {
return alert("Registration error: " + registerResponse.errorCode);
}
// etc.
});
This gives me an Error code 5 (timeout error) after a while. I don't see any request to /facets . Is there a way around this or am I barking up the wrong tree (or a different forest)?
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Okay, so after a few hours of researching this; I'm pretty sure this fiendish bit of the Firefox U2F plugin is the source of some of my woes:
if (u.scheme == "http")
if (url2str(u, true) == url2str(ou, true))
return resolve(challenge);
else
return reject("Not matching appID");
https://github.com/prefiks/u2f4moz/blob/master/ext/appIdValidator.js#L106-L110
It's essentially saying, if the appID's scheme is http, only allow it if it's exactly the same as the page's host (it goes on to do the behaviour for fetching the trusted facets JSON but only for https).
Still not sure if I'm on the right track though in how I'm trying to design this.
I didn't need to worry about facets for my particular situation. In the end I just pass the client app hostname through to the Auth server via the secure API interface and it uses that as the App ID. Seems to work okay so far.
The issue I was having with facets was due to using http in dev and the Firefox U2F plugin not permitting that with JSON facets.