Where to Perform Authentication in REST API Server?
- by David V
I am working on a set of REST APIs that needs to be secured so that only authenticated calls will be performed. There will be multiple web apps to service these APIs. Is there a best-practice approach as to where the authentication should occur?
I have thought of two possible places.
Have each web app perform the authentication by using a shared authentication service. This seems to be in line with tools like Spring Security, which is configured at the web app level.
Protect each web app with a "gateway" for security. In this approach, the web app never receives unauthenticated calls. This seems to be the approach of Apache HTTP Server Authentication. With this approach, would you use Apache or nginx to protect it, or something else in between Apache/nginx and your web app?
For additional reference, the authentication is similar to services like AWS that have a non-secret identifier combined with a shared secret key. I am also considering using HMAC. Also, we are writing the web services in Java using Spring.
Update: To clarify, each request needs to be authenticated with the identifier and secret key. This is similar to how AWS REST requests work.
