Angular Security Masterclass (With Free E-Book) (updated 10/2022)

Practical Guide to Angular Security - Add Authentication / Authorization (from scratch) to an Angular / Node App

What you'll learn
Code in Github repository with downloadable ZIP files per section
Get a solid foundation in Web Security Fundamentals
Perform the attacks yourself manually, in order to fully understand them
Understand and Defend an Application against common security attacks, such as Dictionary Attacks, Cross-Site Request Forgery, etc.
Understand JWT in-depth, including the multiple signature types
Design and Implement Application Authentication and Authorization from scratch
Know how to add Authentication to an Angular Application using JWTs (and traditional Server Sessions)
Know how to add RBAC (Role based Access control) Authorization to an Angular application
Requirements
Just some previous knowledge of Angular and Typescript
Description
The course is an Web Application Security Fundamentals Course, where the application will use the Angular/Node stack.All the server code is in Typescript, but the security concepts explained in it are applicable to other technology stacks.This course includes an auxiliary Ebook - The Typescript Jumpstart EbookWe will use several MIT licensed Angular and Node packages from Auth0 (that you could use in your application), and we will also include a demo of how to use Auth0 for doing Application User Management.Its important to realize that this is NOT an Auth0 specific course. Auth0 will be the source of a couple of open source packages we will use, and will be doing a quick demo of it to show how JWT makes it simple to delegate authentication to a third-party system, which could be developed in-house as well.Security - A Fundamental Step in a Software Development CareerSecurity is probably the number one advanced topic that Software Developers are expected to master when going forward in their software development careers.Security knowledge is hard to come by but its essential for advancing to more senior software development positions, like for example Application Architect or similar.Learning Web Security Fundamentals, knowing how to design an application for security, and knowing how to recognize and fix security issues is an essential skill for a senior developer.But the problem is that security knowledge is orthogonal to most other topics and it typically takes years to learn.The good news is that once you have it, Security knowledge has a much longer shelf live than most software development knowledge in general.Most of the vulnerabilities and fixes that you will learn in this course were useful 10 years ago, and will (very likely) still be useful 10 years from now - Angular and Node are just an example of one stack, to make the course examples more practical.Security is seen as something really hard to master - this is actually not the case! Application Security is much more approachable than you might think, depending on how you learn it.What Is The Best Way To Learn Security in a Fun and Practical Way?Here is what we will do: we are going to take the skeleton of a running application that has no security yet, and we are going to secure the application step-by-step.Using a couple of MIT packages from Auth0 (that you would be able to use in any project), we are going to implement the Sign-Up and Login functionality from scratch, and because security cannot be enforced only at the client-side, we will implement both the frontend in Angular and the backend in Node.As we secure the application, and we are going to periodically attack the application many times during the course, to prove that the vulnerabilities are real!!By doing so, we will learn along the way the fundamentals of Authentication and Authorization, we will become familiar with common vulnerabilities like Dictionary Attacks, CSRF and others, and we will get familiar with commonly used cryptographic tools like Hashing, Salting, JWT, password storage recommendations and more.Please don't be intimidated by these concepts: The focus in this course will not be on the internals of each of the cryptographic tools that we will use, but instead on understanding on a high-level what problems do these tools solve, when to use each and why.We will also learn how to design our application for security, and we will learn how in many situations application design is ou best defense.Course OverviewWe will start at the beginning: we will see the proper way of doing User Management and Sign Up: we will learn how to store passwords in a database, and we will introduce cryptographic hashes in an approachable way.Once we have the Sign-Up functionality in place, we will implement Login and understand the need for a temporary identity token. Our first implementation will be stateful login, where the token is kept at the server level.And at this point we could think we have authentication in place, but we decide to prepare our application for scalability, so we decide to try a JWT (JSON Web Tokens) based approach, because we know that this is what services like Firebase and Auth0 use.We will use a couple of Auth0 packages to quickly refactor our Login to be JWT based, and learn the advantages of using JWT, and some potential disadvantages as well.We will then see how its also possible to do Authentication using a third-party JWT-based service like Auth0, effectively removing all authentication logic from both our codebase and our database, and delegating it to a third-party service.Note that this Auth0-specific part is only a small part of the course, and its main goal is to show how its possible at an enterprise level to delegate authentication to a centralized service, whithout having to introduce direct communication between applications and the centralized authentication service.This means that if you can't use Auth0 at your company, you can apply the same design principles and design a JWT-solution that delegates authentication to a centralized server behind the firewall.We will then cover how to do UI-level role-based functionality in Angular using the Angular Router, and a custom directive for showing or hiding certain parts of the UI depending on the role of the user. We will learn why the Router cannot enforce actual security.We will also talk about server-side Authorization, and we will implement a commonly needed security-related Admin Level functionality: The Login As User service, that allows an admin to login as any user, to investigate a problem report. We can see why we would need to secure this functionality!At the end of all these vulnerabilities and security fixes, we will have a well secured application and we will have learned a ton of security-related concepts along the way in a fun and practical way!What Will you Learn In this Course?With this course, you will have a rock-solid foundation on Web Application Security Fundamentals, and you will have gained the practical experience of applying those concepts by defending an application from a series of security attacks. You will have done so by actually performing many of the attacks!You will have learned these concepts in the context of an Angular/Node application, but these concepts are applicable to any other technology stack.You will learn what built-in mechanisms does Angular provide to defend against security problems, and what vulnerabilities it does NOT defend against and why.You will be familiar with best practices for password storage, custom authentication service design and implementation, you will know the essentials about cryptographic hashes, be familiar with JWT and several commonly used open source Auth0 packages.You will be familiar with the following security vulnerabilities: Dictionary attacks, identity token highjacking techniques, the browser same-origin policy, how to combine cookies with JWTs and why, Cross–Site Request Forgery or CSRF, common design vulnerabilities, and more.You will know common practical solutions for securing both enterprise and public internet applications, such as how to use JWT to delegate authentication to a centralized service, which could be Auth0 or a in-house developed service that follows similar principles.You will know how to implement UI-level authorization and use client-side constructs like Router guards to implement it and even build your own authorization-related UI directives.You will also learn about server side authorization, and how to implement a commonly needed backend service that is only accessible to Admins - Login As User.What Will You Be Able to do at the End Of This Course?This course could help you take your development career to a more senior level, where the knowledge about web application security is essential and a key differentiating factor.If you are a private internet business owner or thinking of launching your own platform, this course will contain most of what you need in practice to secure your own online platform in a robust and effective way.With this course, you will have the knowledge necessary for evaluating many third-party security-related solutions, and you will know where to look for vulnerabilities in your application.You will be able to understand most application-level vulnerability reports that come out of security audits done by third party companies, and you will be able to understand and fix the most commonly reported problems.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Angular Security Course Helicopter View

Lecture 2 IMPORTANT

Lecture 3 The Typescript Jumpstart Ebook

Lecture 4 Installing Git, Node, NPM and Choosing an IDE

Lecture 5 Installing The Lessons Code - Learn Why Its Essential To Use NPM 5

Lecture 6 How To Run Node In TypeScript With Hot Reloading

Lecture 7 Guided Tour Of The Sample Application

Section 2: Sign Up Service - Initial Client and Server-Side Implementation

Lecture 8 Client Side Authentication Service - API Design

Lecture 9 Client Authentication Service - Design and Implementation

Lecture 10 The New Angular HTTP Client - Doing a POST Call To The Server

Lecture 11 User Sign Up Server-Side Implementation in Express

Section 3: Password Storage - Hashing and Salting

Lecture 12 Introduction To Cryptographic Hashes - A Running Demo

Lecture 13 Some Interesting Properties Of Hashing Functions - Validating Passwords

Lecture 14 Learn Offline Dictionary Attacks - Why Use Cryptographic Salting?

Lecture 15 Password Key Derivation Functions and The Node Crypto Module

Lecture 16 Using the Argon 2 Hashing Function In Our Sign Up Backend Service

Lecture 17 How To Implement a Password Policy

Lecture 18 Displaying Client-Side Password Validation Errors - What's Next?

Section 4: User Session Management

Lecture 19 Switch Branches And User Session Management Section Introduction

Lecture 20 Node Util Promisify - How to Convert Callback Based APIs to Promise-based

Lecture 21 Introduction To Node Async Await - Creating a User Session Id

Lecture 22 Modeling a User Session - Classes Or Interfaces?

Lecture 23 Browser Cookies - How To Use Them For User Session Management

Lecture 24 Attack Scenario - User Identity Theft Attack Using A Third-Party Server

Lecture 25 How To Better Protect The Session Id Using HTTP Only Cookies

Lecture 26 HTTPS Secure Cookies - Running the Angular CLI in HTTPS Mode

Lecture 27 Client-Side User Session Management - Retrieve User Data From Session

Lecture 28 An Ancient Vulnerability - JSON Hijacking, Securing REST Endpoint

Lecture 29 Implementing Logout - Destroying The User Session

Lecture 30 User Login - Step-by-Step Implementation

Lecture 31 Finish Login Functionality and Section Conclusion

Section 5: Introduction To JSON Web Tokens

Lecture 32 JSON Web Tokens - Section Introduction

Lecture 33 Creating Your First JWT - What Does It Look Like?

Lecture 34 JSON Web Tokens In a Nutshell

Lecture 35 JSON Web Tokens In Detail - The Header and the Payload

Lecture 36 JWT Signature With HS256 - How Does It Work? Learn What is an HMAC Code

Lecture 37 JWT Signature With RS256 - Learn The Advantages Compared to HS256

Lecture 38 Creating a JWT User Session - Setting Subject and Expiration

Section 6: JWT In Practice - Step-by-Step Authentication With JSON Web Tokens

Lecture 39 User Sign Up With JWT - Learn How To Combine Cookies and JWTs

Lecture 40 Server-Side User Identification Via a Custom Express Middleware

Lecture 41 User Retrieval Express Middleware - Error Handling With Async Await

Lecture 42 Finishing The Implementation Of User Identification Middleware

Lecture 43 Backend JWT-based Security Using an Express Middleware

Lecture 44 JWT-based Authentication - Section Conclusion and What's Next

Section 7: CSRF - Cross Site Request Forgery

Lecture 45 Understanding CSRF - Step-by-Step Attack Simulation

Lecture 46 CSRF In Detail - Understanding Attack Limitations

Lecture 47 Implementing the CSRF Double Submit Cookie Defense - Server Implementation

Lecture 48 How To Defense Our Application Against CSRF - Client And Server Defenses

Section 8: JWT-based Authentication With Auth0

Lecture 49 Auth0 Section Introduction - Using JWTs to Delegate Authentication To 3rd Party

Lecture 50 Integrating a 3rd Party Authentication Provider - Auth0

Lecture 51 Setting Up an Auth0 Externally Hosted Login Page

Lecture 52 How does Auth0 Authentication Work? Logging In a User

Lecture 53 Receiving The Auth0 JWT at Application Startup with parseHash

Lecture 54 Storing the Auth0 JWT In Local Storage

Lecture 55 Adapting the UI To the User Login Status

Lecture 56 Angular HTTP Interceptor - Build an Authentication Interceptor

Lecture 57 JWT Authentication with express-jwt and JSON Web Key Set - Backend Design

Lecture 58 Auth0 JWT-based Authentication - Backend Implementation

Lecture 59 User Sign Up -Requesting Permission to Use Users Email

Lecture 60 User Signup and User Preferences - Frontend Implementation

Lecture 61 User Signup and User Profile - Server-Side Implementation

Lecture 62 Section Summary - The Main Benefit of JWTs

Section 9: RBAC Role-Based Authorization

Lecture 63 RBAC Role-Based Authorization - Section Introduction

Lecture 64 Setting Up The RBAC Solution - Adding Roles to our JWT

Lecture 65 Angular RBAC Authorization - Solution Overview

Lecture 66 Backend Express Authorization Route - Design Overview

Lecture 67 Backend Express Authorization Route - Implementation and Demo

Lecture 68 The Admin Login As User Backend Service

Lecture 69 UI RBAC Authorization With The rbacAllow Structural Directive

Lecture 70 The rbacAllow Structural Directive - Final Implementation and Demo

Lecture 71 Authorization Router Guard - Initial Implementation

Lecture 72 Authorization Router Guard Completed - Configuring a Factory Provider

Section 10: Conclusion

Lecture 73 Bonus Lecture

Lecture 74 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Angular Developers looking to learn in-depth Web Application Security in the specific context of an Angular Application