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I am developing a hobby project using Firebase and some Node.JS running on Google App Engine as backend. I am a real newbie in this area, and also just hear about Firebase a month ago.

My question relates to how various "things" can be secured from user actions, even though Firebase is running as JS on client-side.

I am aware that the DB and Storage can be secured using logical rules - that is in place.

My question rather concerns the actions an user can perform with firebase.auth() and similar, such as:

  • firebase.auth().createUserWithEmailAndPassword()
  • firebase.auth().currentUser.delete()
  • firebase.auth().currentUser.link()

As I have understood it from the question linked below, there is no solution - user will always be able to call these functions, and it is considered low-risk since they cannot touch other user accounts. "prevent firebase user from deleting himself"

My concern with not being able to block users from these actions is that I cannot perform the relevant changes to the DB. For some basic use cases I assume it is easy to set up a nightly batch-job to clean up, but I am afraid of future more complex issues.

My current solution for making atomic actions, e.g. delete user account and delete user data in DB, is to send a request to my back-end Node.JS server. That works fine, but a user could, as I understand, by pass this and request e.g. currentUser.delete() by himself/herself. Another case is when a user unlinks a google account. I would like the user to be logged out by, but with the premises the user can unlink with the follow up action.

Question: Have I misunderstood anything? Can this be easily prevented, or is it so that all the available actions are consider harmless and it is up to me to perform clever clean-up etc.? If it cannot be prevented, do you have any more suggestions more clever than nightly batch jobs?

Community
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Sam Henriksson
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1 Answers1

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With Cloud functions for firebase you could for example trigger a function on user deletion. That way every time a user is deleted, you can run your code to do the clean up. No matter how the user deletion is invoked.

exports.removeUserFromDatabase = functions.auth.user().onDelete(function(event) {
    // Get the uid of the deleted user.
    var uid = event.data.uid;

    // Remove the user from your Realtime Database's /users node.
    return admin.database().ref("/users/" + uid).remove();
});

The same goes for "onCreate". Check out their documentation https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/extend-with-functions

Clinton
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