[firebase_auth] Multi tenancy ( Identity Platform compatibility )

[darioielardi]

Identity Platform, which relies on Firebase Authentication SDKs for most of the operations ( from my understanding FBA is becoming an abstraction over Identity Platform ), provides multi tenancy support, essentially splitting users by tenantId, which must be provided at login time.
Is there any work in progress or ETA on this feature compatibility for the Flutter plugin?

Thank you for your time.

[ddomingues]

Hi guys!

Any news about it? 🙏

[cacianokroth]

Hi guys!

Any news about it? 🙏

Please! 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

[ddomingues]

@darioielardi FYI and anyone interested.

I discovered a workaround solution to make it work 😬

I move the authentication (login + password) to backend using custom token and return this token to my mobile apps using it as custom token authentication. After that, using the last version of the firebase_auth I can authenticate multi-tenancy on my mobile apps 🎉

[darioielardi]

@ddomingues thanks for letting us know!
May I ask you how are you handling credentials verification server side? I thought about the same solution, using the client REST APIs for that, but AFAIK there's a severe rate limit for those calls from the same IP.

[ddomingues]

@daikini of course.

We use cloud functions in nodeJS.

My authentication flow now has 2 steps, unfortunatelly:

1. Try to authenticate the user using the auth().signInWithEmailAndPassword(email, password) using the correct tenant
2. Generate a custom token with the user found: auth().createCustomToken(user.id)

If it works successfully I return this token as result of the request and authenticate the user with the custom token using the firebase_auth : firebaseAuth.signInWithCustomToken(token: token)

I don't think it a great solution, but until the implementation at firebase_auth to be delivered, it works 🤷‍♂

[darioielardi]

@ddomingues thank you very much for the explanation, I'm wondering if the rate limit applies for sign in operations.

[2ZeroSix]

link
ios: firebase/firebase-ios-sdk#5747
android: firebase/firebase-android-sdk#1616

[2ZeroSix]

@daikini of course.

We use cloud functions in nodeJS.

My authentication flow now has 2 steps, unfortunatelly:

1. Try to authenticate the user using the `auth().signInWithEmailAndPassword(email, password)` using the correct tenant

2. Generate a custom token with the user found: `auth().createCustomToken(user.id)`

If it works successfully I return this token as result of the request and authenticate the user with the custom token using the firebase_auth : firebaseAuth.signInWithCustomToken(token: token)

I don't think it a great solution, but until the implementation at firebase_auth to be delivered, it works 🤷‍♂

Unfortunately, this workaround is not complete, you will lose almost all the metadata, and the token won't contain tenantId. Therefore, if you use TenantAwareAuth in your backend, it will reject these tokens.

[ajbarry]

@2ZeroSix ... as you noted the API support is already there. Can you think of or point us to a reasonable work-around for flutter-web? This is a very important security consideration for us as we definitely want the tenantId on the user to secure our firebase/storage rules.

[2ZeroSix]

@ajbarry you can try to emulate TenatAwareAuth behavior using claims and custom tokens.

In this case if you want to let user use same credentials (email/phone/third party) for different accounts in your system (one per tenant):
You won’t be able to access almost all the user metadata and methods provided by the firebase_auth, so you’ll be forced to wrap anything you need in your own backend or cloud functions.

Else you don’t need tenants and can just use claims for restriction policies

[bencalnan]

Hi is there any update on this? Would be fantastic to be able to run a setTenant method like one can in other firebase language libraries without using the cloud function method described above?

[ConProgramming]

Yep, same question here. Any updates on this?

[tc]

Looks like android has it supported now https://firebase.google.com/support/release-notes/android#auth_v19-4-0
Will flutter be updated to support multi tenancy login?