Authentication

composer require quillstack/auth

PackagistSource PHP ^8.1

Authentication for APIs: a route says what reaching it requires, and one place enforces it.

Where the users are kept, and what a user is, belong to the application. What belongs here is the part which is easy to get subtly wrong: comparing secrets in constant time, hashing what is stored, and making sure a rule written once is applied everywhere.

Requirements

• PHP 8.1 or newer

Installation

composer require quillstack/auth

Usage

Saying which routes are guarded

$router->get('/orders', OrdersController::class)->requireAuthentication();
$router->delete('/orders/:id', DeleteOrderController::class)->requireAuthentication('admin');

The route is the one place that decides, and the middleware is the one place that enforces. A rule kept in each controller instead is a rule which is one day not kept — and the day it is not kept, nothing says so.

Nothing is guarded unless it says so, and any one of the roles named will do.

Saying who somebody is

The application owns this, because only it knows where the tokens are:

use Quillstack\Auth\Identity;
use Quillstack\Auth\IdentityProviderInterface;
use Quillstack\Auth\Token;

final class Users implements IdentityProviderInterface
{
    public function __construct(private readonly Orm $orm)
    {
    }

    public function findByToken(string $token): ?Identity
    {
        $tokens = $this->orm->repository(ApiToken::class);
        $found = $tokens->one($tokens->query()->where('hash', '=', Token::hash($token)));

        return $found === null
            ? null
            : new Identity($found->userId, $found->roles, ['email' => $found->email]);
    }
}

Point the framework at it and the middleware does the rest:

$app = new App(__DIR__ . '/../.env', [
    IdentityProviderInterface::class => Users::class,
]);

Reading who it was

use Quillstack\Auth\Middleware\AuthenticationMiddleware;

public function handle(ServerRequestInterface $request): OrdersResponse
{
    $identity = AuthenticationMiddleware::identityOf($request);

    $identity?->id;
    $identity?->hasRole('admin');
    $identity?->attribute('email');
}

It is worked out for every request, guarded or not — so an open route can still know who is reading it.

What is refused, and how

Answer	Means
401 NotAuthenticatedException	nobody was recognised: no credentials, or credentials standing for nobody
403 NotAuthorisedException	somebody was recognised, and may not do this

They are different on purpose: 401 says try again with credentials, 403 says do not bother. No token and a token nobody knows are the same answer, because saying which of the two it was tells whoever is guessing that they are close.

A request which matched no route is not turned into a refusal — a 404 becoming a 401 would say the page exists.

Passwords

use Quillstack\Auth\Password;

$user->password = Password::hash($given);

if (Password::verify($given, $user->password)) {
    // …
}

The algorithm is whatever PHP currently considers best, and it changes when PHP does. The same password hashed twice gives two different hashes, because each carries its own salt — two identical rows in a table would say two people chose the same password.

Somebody signing in is the one moment their password is known, so it is the only moment an old hash can be brought up to date:

if (Password::verify($given, $user->password) && Password::needsRehash($user->password)) {
    $user->password = Password::hash($given);
}

Tokens

use Quillstack\Auth\Token;

$token = Token::create();          // hand this to the client, once
$stored = Token::hash($token);     // keep this

Token::verify($token, $stored);

Two things go wrong with tokens written by hand: they are made from something guessable, and they are compared with ===, which stops at the first byte that differs and so says how much of a guess was right. Token::create() takes its randomness from the operating system, and everything here compares with hash_equals().

A token is a password somebody else chose, so what is stored is a hash of it: a database somebody reads then holds nothing they can sign in with.

Technical documentation

Class	What it is
Identity	who a request is from: an id, roles, and whatever else the application carries
IdentityProviderInterface	findByToken(string $token): ?Identity — the one thing the application writes
Middleware\AuthenticationMiddleware	works out who, and enforces what the route asked for
Credentials	reads the Authorization: Bearer … header, without regard to the scheme's case
Password	hash(), verify(), needsRehash()
Token	create(), hash(), verify(), equals()
Exceptions\AuthException	what everything here extends; carries the status it means

The identity travels on the request under AuthenticationMiddleware::IDENTITY, prefixed because route parameters become attributes too.

What this is not

There are no sessions, no cookies and no login form: this is for APIs, where the client holds a token. There is no permission language either — a role is a string, and anything finer is a question for the application, which knows what it is about.

Unit tests

composer test
composer test:coverage
composer stan

License

MIT. See LICENSE.