Secure your API with Maskinporten

This how-to guides you through the steps required to secure your API using Maskinporten:

1. Define the scopes that you want to expose to other organizations
2. Grant access to scopes for other organizations
3. Validate tokens in requests from external consumers

Prerequisites

• Expose your application to consumers at a publicly accessible domain.

Define scopes

A scope represents a permission that a given consumer has access to.

Declare all the scopes that you want to expose in your application's NAIS manifest:

nais.yaml

spec:
  maskinporten:
    enabled: true
    scopes:
      exposes:
        - name: "some.scope.read"
          enabled: true
          product: "arbeid"
        - name: "some.scope.write"
          enabled: true
          product: "arbeid"

See the scope naming reference for details on naming scopes.

See the NAIS application reference for the complete specifications with all possible options.

Grant access to consumers

Grant the external consumer access to the scopes by specifying their organization number:

nais.yaml

spec:
  maskinporten:
    enabled: true
    scopes:
      exposes:
        - name: "some.scope.read"
          ...
          consumers:
            - orgno: "123456789"

Now that you have configured the scopes in Maskinporten, consumers can now request tokens with these scopes. You will now need to validate these tokens in your application.

Validate tokens

Verify incoming requests from the external consumer(s) by validating the Bearer token in the Authorization header.

Always validate the signature and standard time-related claims. Additionally, perform the following validations:

Issuer Validation

Validate that the iss claim has a value that is equal to either:

1. the MASKINPORTEN_ISSUER environment variable, or
2. the issuer property from the metadata discovery document. The document is found at the endpoint pointed to by the MASKINPORTEN_WELL_KNOWN_URL environment variable.

Scope Validation

Validate that the scope claim contains the expected scope(s). The scope claim is a string that contains a whitespace-separated list of scopes.

The semantics and authorization that a scope represents is up to you to define and enforce in your application code.

Audience Validation

The aud claim is not included by default in Maskinporten tokens and does not need to be validated. It is only included if the consumer has requested an audience-restricted token.

Only validate the aud claim if you want to require your consumers to use audience-restricted tokens. The expected audience value is up to you to define and must be communicated to your consumers. The value must be an absolute URI (such as https://some-provider.no or https://some-provider.no/api).

Signature Validation

Validate that the token is signed with a public key published at the JWKS endpoint. This endpoint URI can be found in one of two ways:

1. the MASKINPORTEN_JWKS_URI environment variable, or
2. the jwks_uri property from the metadata discovery document. The document is found at the endpoint pointed to by the MASKINPORTEN_WELL_KNOWN_URL environment variable.

Other Token Claims

Other claims may be present in the token. Validation of these claims is optional.