Replacing Google Sign-In for Websites with Cloud I

Question

There's an open feature request for Metabase to support IAP. I took a stab at it, and have a Clojure implementation of the steps detailed in Securing your app with signed headers (i.e. verify token header, verify token payload, retrieve user identity).

But this question isn't necessarily specific to Metabase. The general idea is to replace Google Sign-In and only use only IAP signed headers for authentication and user creation in an application on Google App Engine (specifically, GAE flex environment).

The "problem" is that the user identity information from the IAP token looks like: {"email":"[e-mail]","sub":"accounts.google.com:118133858486581853996"}. I also came across Using special URLs, but this returns something like: {"email":"accounts.google.com:USER_EMAIL","sub":"accounts.google.com:118133858486581853996"}.

With a Google Sign-In token, I can obtain values for given_name and family_name along with email, which means I can fetch-or-create a valid Metabase user. Is there a way to get the first and last name via the JWT sub, (i.e. accounts.google.com:118133858486581853996)?

Answer 1

Hm, if they have a public profile you can pass the number after "accounts.google.com:" to https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people/get . Unfortunately, you won't be able to authenticate to that API as the user, since IAP doesn't currently provide a way to call let users delegate access to call Google APIs. (You'll have to use a service account to call that API.)

The other solution would be, if IAP provided a way to a) specify additional scopes in its OAuth request to Google, and if it then b) passed additional claims from the OIDC token into the IAP JWT, you'd be able to configure IAP to request the "profile" scope. However, IAP currently only requests the "email" and "openid" scopes, and doesn't have a mechanism for specifying additional scopes.

-- Matthew, Google Cloud IAP engineering