PCDE Module 15 Course Content

Introduction

In this module, you will be working on two new projects that you will be able to add to your portfolio. The projects are divided into three components. Project 15.1 will use JSON web server authentication and authorization that allows you to control who can use the application and what they are allowed to do once inside the application. Project 2 is divided into two parts: in Project 2 Part 1, you will work with a database using lists, functions, and dictionaries to compute student grades. Essentially employing Python Collections when dealing with relational databases. In Project 2 Part 2, you will compute student grades using redundant dictionaries and improve the functions in your database.

This module includes two main projects, divided into three different project submissions:

The first project is Project 15.1: Project 1: Creating a Books Web Application.

In Project 15.1, you will expand on the concepts you learned in Module 11 to create a website that shows a collection of books. First, you will learn how to add images to your website. Next, you will practice adding more users along with their respective usernames and passwords. You will also learn how to allow users with different roles, such as admin or reader, to perform different actions on the website.

The anticipated time to complete this project is approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes.

The second project is divided into two submissions:

The first submission for the second project is Project 15.2: Project 2 Part 1: Creating a Student Grades Database.

In Project 15.2, you will work in Codio to practice using Python lists, functions, and dictionaries to create a database that contains student names, information about problem sets that were given to them, and their grades for each problem. First, you will work with a simplified version of the database that is constructed using lists. Next, you will create a more advanced, faster, and more efficient version of the database that uses dictionaries to store its entries. Finally, you will be asked to define some advanced Python functions that compute the weighted average for each student in the database.

The anticipated time to complete this project is approximately four hours.

The second submission for the second project is Project 15.3: Project 2 Part 2: Redundant Dictionaries in Python.

In Project 15.3, you will work in Codio to build on your Project 15.2 submission using Python lists, functions, and redundant dictionaries to enhance your student grades database. The goal of this project is for you to improve the functions to create the database by using redundant dictionaries to define a database that contains the weighted average for each student in the database.

The anticipated time to complete this project is approximately 2 hours.

Although the time to complete each project component may vary, be sure to set aside enough time to complete each portion of the project for submission.

To review the project details, please see the full descriptions of each project at the links below:

Learning Outcomes

  1. Define a web token architecture.
  2. Create an application using web tokens.
  3. Describe applications of authorization servers.
  4. Identify key components of relations databases in Python.
  5. Create a relational database using Python.
  6. Identify key components of relational databases in Python.
  7. Implement redundant dictionaries in Python.

Activities

Key Activities

Self-Study Activities

Knowledge Check 15.1: Authorization Servers

Discussion 15.1: Applications of Authorization Servers

Discussion Prompt

As you continue to learn how to develop web applications using Python programming fundamentals, it is important to understand how authorization servers work.

Authentication and authorization are essential to application development. Authentication is the process of verifying who a user is, and authorization is the process of verifying what specific applications, files, and data a user has access to. The authorization server is the application for issuing the OAuth client tokens that allow access to the data on the resource server on behalf of the resource owner.

For example, OpenID Connect is used to authenticate users with a web application. The application uses the ID token that is returned from the authorization server to know whether a user is authenticated and to obtain profile information about the user, such as their username or location. On the other hand, OAuth 2.0 is used to authorize user access to an API. In this case, an access token is used by the resource server to validate a user's level of authorization/access.

Your response for this discussion will include two components:

First, research a real-world application that works based on OpenID Connect.

Next, research a real-world application that works based on OAuth 2.0.

Read the statements posted by your peers. Engage with them by responding with thoughtful comments and questions to deepen the discussion.

Suggested Time: 60 minutes

Suggested Length: 300 words

This is a required activity and will count toward course completion.

My Response

OpenID Connect

OpenID Connect is a protocol that allows web developers to setup their own applications that require authentication without worrying about (not as much anyways) about implementing the best security practices for authenticating their users. Different providers like Google, Facebook, GitHub, etc. will provide identity services where your users can log in to your application via their existing accounts on those providers or thru a newly created one there.

Why should we trust these providers? Well for starters, they are massive companies who stake their reputation and a lot of investment into the security of their services. Secondly, they have the resources to ensure their OpenID services are as secure as possible and that the account creation and login services are as secure as possible. While as data and web engineers we do learn the basics of security, it's no match for the skills and resources of these companies. These providers also have the resources to implement more secure identity services based on features like multi-factor authentication which makes it much harder to exploit the security of their services to hijack the accounts of their users.

A real world example of an application that uses OpenID Connect is GitHub. By logging into GitHub with your GitHub account, I get access to a lot of other services tailored towards developers. For example, I use netlify to build and host my static websites. By identifying with GitHub, they can develop a ton of features that are tailored towards using GitHub. Not only as an identity provider, but also as a source of application data. For example, I can allow netlify to view some repositories holding my static websites' code. And because they not only identify me through GitHub but also have access to some of my repository data, they can automatically setup build and deployment pipelines for my websites. All I need to provide is the name of the repository and the branch I want to deploy.

Security wise, because I secure GitHub with multi-factor authentication, and because GitHub has an enormous stake in their users' security, I can be reasonably assured that my account is secure. And that is not necessarily tied to the security of netlify's services. At least not the authentication part.

OAuth 2.0

OAuth 2.0 is a protocol that allows web developers to setup their own applications that require authorization with less concern for setting up ad-hoc authorization services that need security experts to maintain. This often goes hand in hand with authentication. After authenticating a user, you can use OAuth 2.0 to authorize them to access some of your application's data.

Going back to the netlify example, After I am authenticated with GitHub, OAuth 2.0 allows me to authorize netlify to access some of my GitHub data. Which as described before, comes with some serious benefits in terms of convenience and security. That authorization process that GitHub provides means that again, I can authorize them to view some of my repositories' data. Which then gets used to much easier setup build and deployment pipelines for my websites.

From a security perspective, here I am trusting GitHub with my account's authorization, but because OAuth2.0 also allows me to specify exactly what netlify can access, I can be assured that even if netlify's security practices are not as good as GitHub's, they will not be able to access any data that I do not explicitly authorize them to.

Conclusion

Tying it all together. With the examples shown, OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 are both protocols that allows developers to offload some of the security concerns of their applications when it comes to authentication and authorization. Instead of worrying about implementing the best security practices for authenticating and authorizing their users, you can instead offload some of that responsibility to a third party. And with that extra time saved, you can use some of the features of the protocol to make your application more secure, but also more convenient for your users by allowing them to share some information about the accounts that share the same identity.

Knowledge Check 15.2: Relational Databases in Python

Knowledge Check 15.3: Redundant Dictionaries in Python

def empty():
    return {"column1": [], "column2": []}
db = empty()

References

Web Links

Note Links