Ruby Firebase ID Token verifier (pre-release)

A Ruby gem to verify the signature of Firebase ID Tokens. It uses Redis to store Google's x509 certificates and manage their expiration time, so you don't need to request Google's API in every execution and can access it as fast as reading from memory.

It also checks the JWT payload parameters as recommended here by Firebase official documentation.

Feel free to open any issue or to contact me directly.
Any contribution is welcome.

Docs

• http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/firebase_id_token

Requirements

• Redis

Installing

gem install firebase_id_token

or in your Gemfile

gem 'firebase_id_token', '~> 2.0.0'

then

bundle install

Configuration

It's needed to set up your Firebase Project ID.

If you are using Rails, this should probably go into config/initializers/firebase_id_token.rb.

FirebaseIdToken.configure do |config|
  config.project_ids = ['your-firebase-project-id']
end

project_ids must be a Array.

If you want to verify signatures from more than one Firebase project, just add more Project IDs to the list.

You can also pass a Redis instance to config if you are not using Redis defaults.
In this case, you must have the gem redis in your Gemfile.

FirebaseIdToken.configure do |config|
  config.project_ids = ['your-firebase-project-id']
  config.redis = Redis.new(host: '10.0.1.1', port: 6380, db: 15)
end

Otherwise, it will use just Redis.new as the instance.

Usage

You can get a glimpse of it by reading our RSpec output on your machine. It's really helpful. But here is a complete guide:

Downloading Certificates

Before verifying tokens, you need to download Google's x509 certificates.

To do it simply:

FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.request

It will download the certificates and save it in Redis, but only if Redis certificates database is empty. To force download and override Redis database, use:

FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.request!

Google give us information about the certificates expiration time, it's used to set a Redis TTL (Time-To-Live) when saving it. By doing so, the certificates will be automatically deleted after its expiration.

Certificates Info

Checks the presence of certificates in Redis database.

FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.present?
=> true

How many seconds until the certificate's expiration.

FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.ttl
=> 22352

Lists all certificates in a database.

FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.all
=> [{"ec8f292sd30224afac5c55540df66d1f999d" => <OpenSSL::X509::Certificate: [...]]

Finds the respective certificate of a given Key ID.

FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.find('ec8f292sd30224afac5c55540df66d1f999d')
=> <OpenSSL::X509::Certificate: subject=<OpenSSL::X509 [...]>

Downloading in Rails

If you are using Rails, it's clever to download certificates in a cron task, you can use whenever.

Example

Read whenever's guide on how to set it up.

Create your task in lib/tasks/firebase.rake:

namespace :firebase do
  namespace :certificates do
    desc "Request Google's x509 certificates when Redis is empty"
    task request: :environment do
      FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.request
    end

    desc "Request Google's x509 certificates and override Redis"
    task force_request: :environment do
      FirebaseIdToken::Certificates.request!
    end
  end
end

And in your config/schedule.rb you might have:

every 1.hour do
  rake 'firebase:certificates:force_request'
end

Then:

$ whenever --update-crontab

I recommend running it once every hour or every 30 minutes, it's up to you. Normally the certificates expiration time is around 4 to 6 hours, but it's good to perform it in a small fraction of this time.

When developing, you should just run the task:

$ rake firebase:certificates:request

And remember, you need the Redis server to be running.

Verifying Tokens

Pass the Firebase ID Token to FirebaseIdToken::Signature.verify and it will return the token payload if everything is ok:

FirebaseIdToken::Signature.verify(token)
=> {"iss"=>"https://securetoken.google.com/firebase-id-token", "name"=>"Bob Test", [...]}

When either the signature is false or the token is invalid, it will return nil:

FirebaseIdToken::Signature.verify(fake_token)
=> nil

FirebaseIdToken::Signature.verify('aaaaaa')
=> nil

WARNING: If you try to verify a signature without any certificates in Redis database it will raise a FirebaseIdToken::Exceptions::NoCertificatesError.

Payload Structure

In case you need, here's a example of the payload structure from a Google login in JSON.

{  
   "iss":"https://securetoken.google.com/firebase-id-token",
   "name":"Ugly Bob",
   "picture":"https://someurl.com/photo.jpg",
   "aud":"firebase-id-token",
   "auth_time":1492981192,
   "user_id":"theUserID",
   "sub":"theUserID",
   "iat":1492981200,
   "exp":33029000017,
   "email":"uglybob@emailurl.com",
   "email_verified":true,
   "firebase":{  
      "identities":{  
         "google.com":[  
            "1010101010101010101"
         ],
         "email":[  
            "uglybob@emailurl.com"
         ]
      },
      "sign_in_provider":"google.com"
   }
}

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.