Manual Authentication with Amazon Cognito

Question

I know of two ways to authenticate as a user and obtain the access token, one is through the Hosted UI and another with various provided SDKs.

What I'm looking for is an endpoint obtain the access token directly with user credentials.

POST https://that-special-endpoint.com/login
{
 username: "example@email.com",
 password: "Abc123456",
 ...client ID, etc.
}

I've searched for some time but could not find how to do this. Is this not possible due to some security concerns that I'm not aware of?

I did consider creating a Lambda API and make use of the Cognito SDK to cater for my use case but I'm not sure if it's advisable...

shoek · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-01T07:47:32.840

Similar question is answered here. You can access https://cognito-idp.[region].amazonaws.com/ to call InitiateAuth and RespondToAuthChallenge APIs.

InitiateAuth

Create a json file, aws-auth-data.json

{
    "AuthParameters": {
        "USERNAME": "your-email@example.com",
        "PASSWORD": "your-first-password",
        "SECRET_HASH": "......(required if the app client is configured with a client secret)"
    },
    "AuthFlow": "USER_PASSWORD_AUTH",
    "ClientId": "5m........................"
}

Send a request on https://cognito-idp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/ (if the user pool is on us-east-2 region) to call InitiateAuth API and initiate an authentication flow.

curl -X POST --data @aws-auth-data.json \
-H 'X-Amz-Target: AWSCognitoIdentityProviderService.InitiateAuth' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/x-amz-json-1.1' \
https://cognito-idp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/

Then you'll get the user's tokens.

{
    "AuthenticationResult": {
        "AccessToken": "eyJra........",
        "ExpiresIn": 3600,
        "IdToken": "eyJra........",
        "RefreshToken": "eyJjd........",
        "TokenType": "Bearer"
    },
    "ChallengeParameters": {}
}

RespondToAuthChallenge

You may get a challenge as InitiateAuth response. For example, you will be asked to change password when you make a first 'InitiateAuth' attempt:

{
    "ChallengeName": "NEW_PASSWORD_REQUIRED",
    "ChallengeParameters": {
        "USER_ID_FOR_SRP": "abababab-......",
        "requiredAttributes": "[]",
        "userAttributes": "{\"email_verified\":\"true\",\"email\":\"your-email@example.com\"}"
    },
    "Session": "DNdY......"
}

In this case, change the password with RespondToAuthChallenge and you will get tokens.

{
    "ChallengeName": "NEW_PASSWORD_REQUIRED",
    "ChallengeResponses": {
        "USERNAME": "your-email@example.com",
        "NEW_PASSWORD": "your-second-password"
    },
    "ClientId": "5m........................",
    "Session": "DNdYN...(what you got in the preceding response)"
}

curl -X POST --data @aws-change-password.json \
-H 'X-Amz-Target: AWSCognitoIdentityProviderService.RespondToAuthChallenge' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/x-amz-json-1.1' \
https://cognito-idp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/

Manual Authentication with Amazon Cognito

1 Answers1