Publ 0.5.8, Authl 0.3.1, and IndieAuth security

So, both Publ and Authl had a pretty naïve issue with the identity verification step of the IndieAuth flow; it simply accepted whatever the authorization endpoint said the user’s identity was. This made it very simple to spoof one’s identity and log in as anyone on any Publ or Authl site.

Authl 0.3.1 fixes the problem with the IndieAuth login flow, and Publ 0.5.8 fixes the problem with the Bearer token flow.

Publ v0.5.7, now with theoretical AutoAuth support!

There is only one feature for this new release of Publ, but it’s a big one – there is (theoretical) support for AutoAuth! That’s right, deploy this version and people should be able to magically log on to your website using unattended IndieAuth providers.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any tools that I know of which actually support this mode of operation; all testing has been manual and In Theory.

Fortunately, if someone does want to test AutoAuth (or IndieAuth Bearer authentication in general), you can test it out on this site! You can use this entry as an individual entry, and this category or this feed to see how well it works with the “partial public” path.

Also, this page will tell you all sorts of useful information about the current user (if any).

And I’d might as well use this opportunity to show off the admin dashboard – just sign in as the user test:admin to see how it looks.

EDIT: It looks like there’s a problem with third-party auth due to the way that Heroku works. I should have anticipated this. Third-party auth is temporarily disabled for now. (But this doesn’t affect AutoAuth at least!)

Publ v0.5.6 released

Oops, I’d been sitting on a bunch of bugfixes for a month, which I didn’t notice until I put in another bugfix tonight.

Changes since v0.5.5:

• Fix title sanitization
• Handle category.name with the same formatting options as entry.title
• Replace hand-rolled atomic file operations with atomicwrites
• Add link_class to image renditions
• Fix automatic alt generation for external images
• Simplify the way entry URLs are canonicized
• Fix some bitrot in older tests