Security & best practices#

Authentication#

Some Silverstripe CMS resources have permission requirements to perform CRUD operations on, for example the Member object in the previous examples.

If you are logged into the CMS and performing a request from the same session then the same Member session is used to authenticate GraphQL requests, however if you are performing requests from an anonymous/external application you may need to authenticate before you can complete a request.

Default authentication#

The MemberAuthenticator class is configured as the default option for authentication, and will attempt to use the current CMS Member session for authentication context.

If you are using the default session-based authentication, please be sure that you have not disabled the CSRF Middleware. (It is enabled by default).

HTTP basic authentication#

Silverstripe CMS has built-in support for HTTP basic authentication.

There is a BasicAuthAuthenticator which can be configured for GraphQL that will only activate when required. It is kept separate from the Silverstripe CMS authenticator because GraphQL needs to use the successfully authenticated member for CMS permission filtering, whereas the global BasicAuth does not log the member in or use it for model security. Note that basic auth will bypass MFA authentication so if MFA is enabled it is not recommended that you also use basic auth for GraphQL.

When using HTTP basic authentication, you can feel free to remove the CSRF Middleware, as it just adds unnecessary overhead to the request.

In graphiQL#

If you want to add basic authentication support to your GraphQL requests you can do so by adding a custom Authorization HTTP header to your GraphiQL requests.

If you are using the GraphiQL macOS app this can be done from "Edit HTTP Headers".

The /dev/graphql/ide endpoint in silverstripe/graphql-devtools does not support custom HTTP headers at this point.

Your custom header should follow the following format:

# Key: Value
Authorization: Basic aGVsbG86d29ybGQ=

Basic is followed by a base64 encoded combination of your username, colon and password. The above example is hello:world.

Note: Authentication credentials are transferred in plain text when using HTTP basic authentication. We strongly recommend using TLS for non-development use.

Example:

php -r 'echo base64_encode("hello:world");'
# aGVsbG86d29ybGQ=

Defining your own authenticators#

You will need to define the class under SilverStripe\GraphQL\Auth\Handlers.authenticators. You can optionally provide a priority number if you want to control which authenticator is used when multiple are defined (higher priority returns first).

Authenticator classes need to implement the AuthenticatorInterface interface, which requires you to define an authenticate() method to return a Member or false, and and an isApplicable() method which tells the Handler whether or not this authentication method is applicable in the current request context (provided as an argument).

Here's an example for implementing HTTP basic authentication:

SilverStripe\GraphQL\Auth\Handler:
  authenticators:
    - class: SilverStripe\GraphQL\Auth\BasicAuthAuthenticator
      priority: 10

Further reading#