Day Implementing JWT Authentication in NestJS with Passport (Part 1)

First steps

nest g resource auth

This will further ask you for a selection
❯ REST API
GraphQL (code first)
GraphQL (schema first)
Microservice (non-HTTP)
WebSockets

select REST API and this will generate the whole module for you with the dtos services controller and module

Register User

since we are implementing email/password-based authentication as the first step we will register the user.

1. Validate first to make sure the data is legitimate and add password strength validation to mitigate brute force attacks.
2. Sanitize afterward to ensure the data is safe to use.
3. Check that the user record already exists in the database if exists it means the user already has an account so send a response that's this email already registered.
4. if the above checks failed it means we need to register a user take the user password and hash it with a good hashing library like bcrypt or argon2
5. after hashing insert user record in DB.
6. send an email to the user to verify is email legitimate.
7. add rate-limiting to route to avoid DDoS attacks

1 Validate incoming data

Since nest js has strong integration with recommended validation packages like class validator but from my previous experience I use zod for validation lot in react js front ends and so I found an awesome
solution for nest js ecosystem called nests zod so I'll prefer to go with this one for now. To get started first install the library
npm i nestjs-zod

import { createZodDto } from 'nestjs-zod';
import { z } from 'zod';
const passwordStrengthRegex =
  /^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d)(?=.*[@$!%*?&])[A-Za-z\d@$!%*?&]{8,}$/;
const registerUserSchema = z
  .object({
    email: z.string().email(),
    password: z
      .string()
      .min(8)
      .regex(
        passwordStrengthRegex,
        'Password must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and one special character',
      ),
    confirmPassword: z.string().min(8),
  })
  .refine((data) => data.password === data.confirmPassword, {
    message: 'Passwords do not match',
  });

export class RegisterUserDto extends createZodDto(registerUserSchema) {}

and then apply validation pipe on the route

import { Controller, Post, Body, Version, UsePipes } from '@nestjs/common';
import { AuthService } from './auth.service';
import { RegisterUserDto } from './dto/register.dto';
import { ZodValidationPipe } from 'nestjs-zod';

@Controller('auth')
export class AuthController {
  constructor(private readonly authService: AuthService) {}

  @Version('1')
  @Post()
  @UsePipes(ZodValidationPipe)
  async registerUser(@Body() registerUserDto: RegisterUserDto) {
    return await this.authService.registerUser(registerUserDto);
  }
}

if we provide all inputs correct

so we are done with the first step

Let's Sanitize Data

we have three inputs

• password: typically passwords should not be Sanitize because they are never gonna sent and displayed to frontend even if someone sends a malicious script to the password eventually it'll be hashed do not need
• confirmPassword: same story as above one
• email: yes emails are sent and rendered to clients so the email field must be Sanitize to mitigate injections and scripting attacks

but we explicitly added email: z.string().email() which is enough for this use case

but to add an extra lyre of security we can add a sanitization layer

import { createZodDto } from 'nestjs-zod';
import { z } from 'zod';
import * as xss from 'xss'; 

const passwordStrengthRegex =
  /^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d)(?=.*[@$!%*?&])[A-Za-z\d@$!%*?&]{8,}$/;

const registerUserSchema = z
  .object({
    email: z.string().transform((input) => xss.filterXSS(input)), // Sanitizing input using xss
    password: z
      .string()
      .min(8)
      .regex(
        passwordStrengthRegex,
        'Password must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and one special character',
      ),
    confirmPassword: z.string().min(8),
  })
  .refine((data) => data.password === data.confirmPassword, {
    message: 'Passwords do not match',
  });

export class RegisterUserDto extends createZodDto(registerUserSchema) {}

This was a test we also added again back

email: z
.string()
.email()

Step3,4,5

import { createZodDto } from 'nestjs-zod';
import { z } from 'zod';
const passwordStrengthRegex =
  /^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d)(?=.*[@$!%*?&])[A-Za-z\d@$!%*?&]{8,}$/;
const registerUserSchema = z
  .object({
    email: z.string().email(),
    password: z
      .string()
      .min(8)
      .regex(
        passwordStrengthRegex,
        'Password must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and one special character',
      ),
    confirmPassword: z.string().min(8),
  })
  .refine((data) => data.password === data.confirmPassword, {
    message: 'Passwords do not match',
  });

export class RegisterUserDto extends createZodDto(registerUserSchema) {}

The main point to notice I just returned a success message with no data related
to the user like ID or email because it does not need to send back data to the user in this step. after registration user will be redirected to the login page to fill in details so avoiding sending unnecessary data is a good security practice

Rate limiting

implementing rate limiting in nestjs is very easy just install nestjs/throttler configure it globally and you're done .
to install package run npm i --save @nestjs/throttler

import { Controller, Post, Body, Version, UsePipes } from '@nestjs/common';
import { AuthService } from './auth.service';
import { RegisterUserDto } from './dto/register.dto';
import { ZodValidationPipe } from 'nestjs-zod';

@Controller('auth')
export class AuthController {
  constructor(private readonly authService: AuthService) {}

  @Version('1')
  @Post()
  @UsePipes(ZodValidationPipe)
  async registerUser(@Body() registerUserDto: RegisterUserDto) {
    return await this.authService.registerUser(registerUserDto);
  }
}

then add nestjs throttle guard as global guard

import { createZodDto } from 'nestjs-zod';
import { z } from 'zod';
import * as xss from 'xss'; 

const passwordStrengthRegex =
  /^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d)(?=.*[@$!%*?&])[A-Za-z\d@$!%*?&]{8,}$/;

const registerUserSchema = z
  .object({
    email: z.string().transform((input) => xss.filterXSS(input)), // Sanitizing input using xss
    password: z
      .string()
      .min(8)
      .regex(
        passwordStrengthRegex,
        'Password must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and one special character',
      ),
    confirmPassword: z.string().min(8),
  })
  .refine((data) => data.password === data.confirmPassword, {
    message: 'Passwords do not match',
  });

export class RegisterUserDto extends createZodDto(registerUserSchema) {}

and here it is

import {
  BadRequestException,
  Injectable,
  InternalServerErrorException,
} from '@nestjs/common';
import { RegisterUserDto } from './dto/register.dto';
import { PrismaService } from 'src/prismaModule/prisma.service';
import * as argon2 from 'argon2';

@Injectable()
export class AuthService {
  constructor(private readonly prismaService: PrismaService) {}
  async registerUser(registerUserDto: RegisterUserDto) {
    // data is validate and sanitized by the registerUserDto
    const { email, password } = registerUserDto;

    try {
      // check if user already exists
      const user = await this.prismaService.user.findFirst({
        where: {
          email,
        },
      });

      if (user) {
        throw new BadRequestException('user already eists ');
      }
      //if use not exists lets hash user password
      const hashedPassword = await argon2.hash(registerUserDto.password);

      // time to create user
      const userData = await this.prismaService.user.create({
        data: {
          email,
          password: hashedPassword,
        },
      });

      if (!userData) {
        throw new InternalServerErrorException(
          'some thing went wrong while registring user',
        );
      }

      // if user is created successfully then  send email to user for email varification
      return {
        success: true,
        message: 'user created successfully',
      };
    } catch (error) {
      throw error;
    }
  }
}

since registering the user endpoint is a sensitive endpoint brute-force
or dictionary attack can happen we kept the rate limit strict

Send Verification Email

for sending a verification email to a user's use Resend is an awesome easy-to-use service. but I decided to create a separate episode for the whole notification service so that understanding it becomes easier for everyone

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