README.md

Budget application

This is the final project in the training program Web Security Academy. It represents a real-life use case of personal money tracker. There are five main feature modules: Auth, Dashboard, Expenses, Settings and Admin with many security measures implemented described below. The project implements role-based access control (RBAC), giving different users different permissions. This is the frontend part to the accompanying backend api in Node.js with TypeScript. A deployed version (with mocked in-memory API) is available under https://budget.dev-academy.com.

Installation

npm install
ng serve

Running

There are two ways you can run the Angular part:

1. As a standalone Angular application with ng serve
2. From node project with ng build --watch
   • Angular distribution will be avaiable in dist/
   • Angular and Node application must reside in the some folder
   • Angular application must reside in angular filder
   • Node application will look for Angular build in /angular/dist/ thanks to app.use(express.static('../angular/dist/'));

Main modules

Auth	Dashboard	Expenses	Settings	Admin
Login, signup and recover password	Read budgets and account summary	List and manage the expenses belonging to the account	Manage account users and expense categories for account	Manage active sessions of logged users

Roles in the system

Role	Permission
Reader	Read expenses and categories for the account.
Owner	Create, read, update and delete expenses, categories. Create and delete account's users.
Admin	Read and delete active users' sessions.

Domain model

• Each user belongs to one account.
• Each account may have multiple users.
• Each expense belongs to one account.
• Each account may have multiple expenses.

Authentication mechanisms

There are two authentication mechanism implemented in both Angular and Node.js parts:

• Session cookies
• JWT Tokens

In Angular part you can select one mechanism with config setting in src/app/core/config.ts as presented below. Remember that both Angular and Node.js selections must match!

interface Config {
  [key: string]: string;
  auth: 'session' | 'token';
}

export const config: Config = {
  auth: 'token' // type-safe
};

Mocked API

You can run the Angular application with completly mocked backend API. To do this you need to import and initalize HttpClientInMemoryWebApiModule in CoreModule as in the code snippet below. Make sure it is imported after HttpClientModule.

Once initalized, all the HTTP request will return mocked data thanks to mock.api.ts and src/app/mocks/*. The application deployed to budget.angular-academy.com is using that mocked data. Note, that not all of the data associations are reflected with mocks (as with the real backend API), but most of the features are available.

import { HTTP_INTERCEPTORS, HttpClientModule, HttpClientXsrfModule } from '@angular/common/http';
import { HttpClientInMemoryWebApiModule } from 'angular-in-memory-web-api';
import { MockApi } from './../mocks/mock.api'; // mocks are defined here 😎

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    HttpClientModule,
    HttpClientInMemoryWebApiModule.forRoot(MockApi, { passThruUnknownUrl: true, delay: 1000 }),
  ],
  declarations: [...],
  providers: [...],
  exports: [...]
})
export class CoreModule { }

Mock users

You can find mock users in in-memory-user.repository.ts in the backend API for this application.

Implemented security measures

NOTE: The security measures on the frontend part are not enought to protect the user. Make sure to check the description of security measures in the backend application in Node repository.

Content Security Policy

In index.html there are CSP directives defined to prevent unintended code from execution (Cross-site scripting). Unfortunatelly Angular injects inline styles in the build and 'unsafe-inline' is a must for style-src. Note, that CSP reporting is not possible to be setup with meta tags.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="
    default-src 'self';
    connect-src 'self';
    font-src data:;
    style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'">

XSRF prevention

Built-in mechanism of Angular's '@angular/common/http' library is used to receive and send anti-xsrf tokens. This requires proper handling on the backend part.

import { HTTP_INTERCEPTORS, HttpClientModule, HttpClientXsrfModule } from '@angular/common/http';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    HttpClientModule,
    HttpClientXsrfModule.withOptions({
      cookieName: 'XSRF-Token',
      headerName: 'XSRF-Token',
    }),
  ],
  declarations: [...],
  providers: [..],
  exports: [..]
})
export class CoreModule { }

Conditional components visibility

Particular components are visible to the users with specified roles. For example a reader doesn't see a button to create a new expense. It's possible thanks to custom structural directive forRoles (only owner sees the button).

<button mat-fab color="primary" (click)="openExpenseDialog()" *forRoles="['owner']">+</button>

Directive implementation:

import { Directive, Input, ViewContainerRef, TemplateRef } from '@angular/core';
import { AuthService } from '../services/auth.service';

@Directive({
  selector: '[forRoles]'
})
export class ForRolesDirective {

  roles: string[];

  @Input()
  set forRoles(roles: string[]|string) {
    if (roles != null) {
      this.roles = Array.isArray(roles) ? roles : [roles];
      this.roles = this.roles.map(r => r.toUpperCase());
    } else {
      this.roles = [];
    }

    this.authService.getUserRole$().subscribe(
      role => {
        if (role && !this.roles.includes(role.toUpperCase())) {
          this.viewContainer.clear();
        } else {
          this.viewContainer.createEmbeddedView(this.templateRef);
        }
      }
    );
  }

  constructor(
    private viewContainer: ViewContainerRef,
    private templateRef: TemplateRef<any>,
    private authService: AuthService) { }

}

License

GPL-3.0