Angularjs and php as backend

Question

I've created a angularjs app which uses php for handling the database queries and enforcing an authentication schema.

When the user logs in into the app, he does so in php and php fetches the user data into a session. Then angularjs issues a http post request to a php page to read the fetched data. After that, whenever a user asks for data, angular issues a post to a php page.

I'm considering using a framework for doing the authentication and the database queries in a better way. My security knowledge is primitive and I fear that I have mistakes in my code.

After doing a research I found laravel which seems straightforward and easy. Now my questions are:

1. Can a php framework such as laravel do these things for me?
2. Is there something else I could use to have people authenticate and making sure that they are doing the CRUD operations they are authorized to do?
3. What are the keywords I'm searching about, is it routing, is it php restful? I'm asking in order to do further research on the matter.
4. Is there any other way in which a SPA could work with CRUD operations and Authenticating in a "safe" manner using php?

I know that the above questions are not programming questions per se, but I don't know where to ask (because I feel I cannot communicate what I want to learn about/ *that's why the keywords question above).

Thank you

Answer 1

There's basically two kinds of relevant "routing" both based on URLs, either client side or server side. AngularJS has the $routeProvider which you can configure so when the location changes (handled by $location) the client side template and controller being used also change. On the server side you may have redirects or "routes" that map a URL to a particular PHP file (or Java method) where at the destination it parses the incoming URL to get extra information/parameters.

1. I know nothing about laravel, but googling laravel and authentication came back with this which looks promising: http://bundles.laravel.com/category/authentication I also know things like Zend framework provide many similar options for plugging in some authentication code.
2. Ultimately if you're writing the CRUD operations something in your code is going to have to do deal with the role based execution of code or access to data.

3. RESTful is it's own thing. At a very basic level a RESTful interface uses HTTP "verbs/vocuabulary" like PUT, POST, DELETE, GET (part of the request headers which is just data that comes before any body data in the request) are given special meaning like update an entry etc. It's mostly orthogonal to the issue of authentication though if you do true REST I'm not sure if using the SESSION for maintaining authentication would be allowed since it's not completely stateless in that case (anyhow just an academic argument). Point being you can use the other ideas of REST or use some implementation that is "RESTful" and it can be written in any language or you can choose not to do this, either way you still have the issue of controlling resources (functions/methods/data) that you want to control and this issue is not the same as choosing RESTful or not RESTful (if you wanted to keep true to REST for reasons of scalability across a cluster of servers etc. you could follow guidance here How do I authenticate user in REST web service?). Also to note here the $resource in AngularJS provides an abstraction above $http specifically for handling restful services.

   IMHO you should be searching for two things

   1 php security/authentication

   2 php hacking/hacks/vulnerabilities

4. You can simply write your own authentication mechanism using a session to keep track of the signed in user. http://php.net/manual/en/features.sessions.php There is no difference in a SPA vs a traditional web app as far as the server is concerned, these are simply differences in the client side code.

Any security you intend on putting in place is really only as good as your understanding of that security. I wouldn't trust someone else's plugin from the internet to handle authentication for me unless time was an extremely critical factor and security not so much. One thing that you hadn't mentioned but I think is worth looking into and necessary for any of this to really be secure is SSL. If you don't have your data encrypted there is always a possibility of a man in the middle attack (someone getting the plaintext username and password as their submitted to the database) or session hijacking (someone getting the sessionid of an active session then using that to act as the original user). Basically I would suggest you keep doing research regarding best practices and personally look over any code you plan to use to be sure you understand how it's working and what kind of security it provides you with.

I also wanted to mention, though it's a bit off topic languages wise, that Java Spring has some really nice stuff for dealing with authentication and handling access to services and data. If security is a major concern I would probably strongly consider running a Java server (not to say Java has never had it's issues or that it's automatically more secure but there's a lot of production code that has withstood the test of time). There's the free Tomcat J2EE Server or IBM WebSphere if you need to massively distribute an application. If interested search for Java, Spring, Hibernate (ORM), MyBatis, Data Access Objects. Those are all the parts (some optional) I can think of you would need to put together a service layer in Java. Good intro in the video on the left of this page: http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/index.html

Also SSL isn't a silver bullet, but every layer of security helps.

Kevin Mitnick said in one of his books that lots of places have "hard-shell candy security" (paraphrasing) where breaking the outer layer means you get to all the mushy goodness inside. Any direct answer I would bank will result in this type of security.

Depending on the scope of the project it might be necessary to have security professionals do penetration testing on the system to determine if there are vulnerabilities so they can be plugged.