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BV-BRC Authentication Support

About this module

Authentication in the BV-BRC system uses oauth style bearer tokens. This module defines routines that wrap these tokens in more user- and developer-friendly interfaces.

This module is a component of the BV-BRC build system. It is designed to fit into the dev_container infrastructure which manages development and production deployment of the components of the BV-BRC. More documentation is available here.

Basic token access

The current interface uses Bio::KBase::AuthToken. It is highly configurable, but is rarely configured. It also includes validation machinery, including a cache of signer keys.

Little of this is needed in normal usage. Thus we define a simple token object:

   use P3AuthToken;

   my $token = P3AuthToken->new();

There is a default search path for finding tokens:

  1. P3_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable. Holds string of bearer token.

  2. File .patric_token in user's home directory

This module does not attempt to retrieve a token based on username information or to perform validation. It is purely a lightweight mechanism for retrieving a token from the standard location.

Parameters to new:

  • token
    Initialize this token object with the given token string. Used in services that have obtained a token by other means (e.g. HTTP headers) and need to create a token object.

  • ignore_environment
    Don't try to read an environment variable for oobtaining token data. Used in command line login scripts.

  • ignore_authrc
    Don't try to read any flat file for obtaining token data. Used on backend services to ignore the execution environment of the userid that happens to be running the service.

Token validation

On the server side we need to validate client tokens. This is provided by the module Bio:P3::Auth::Validate module which exports the single function validate(token-object).

Token generation

There are several ways to generate new tokens.

  1. Via one of the Globus-style token generation services. The original one was at globus.org but we do not use that. The RAST project has one that allows RAST credentials to be generated.

  2. Via the PATRIC user service.

Each of these options has a module that encapsulates the code.

P3AuthLogin::login_patric takes a PATRIC username and password and generates a token.

P3AuthLogin::login_rast takes a RAST username and password and generates a token.

P3AuthLogin::login attempts a PATRIC login if the username ends with @patricbrc.org; otherwise it attempts a RAST login.p