Flask-Security Changelog

Here you can see the full list of changes between each Flask-Security release.

Version 5.4.3

Released March 23, 2024

Fixes

  • (#950) Regression - some templates no longer getting correct config (thanks pete7863).

  • (#954) CSRF not properly ignored for application forms using SECURITY_CSRF_PROTECT_MECHANISMS.

  • (#957) Improve jp translations (e-goto)

  • (#959) Regression - datetime_factory should still be an attribute (thanks TimotheeJeannin)

  • (#942) GENERIC_RESPONSES hide email validation/syntax errors.

Version 5.4.2

Released March 8, 2024

Fixes

  • (#946) OpenAPI spec missing.

  • (#945) Doc fixes (e-goto)

  • (#941) Update ES/IT translations (gissimo)

Version 5.4.0 & 5.4.1

Released February 26, 2024

Among other changes, this continues the process of dis-entangling Flask-Security from Flask-Login and may require some application changes due to backwards incompatible changes.

Features & Improvements

  • (#879) Work with Flask[async]. view decorators and signals support async handlers.

  • (#900) CI support for python 3.12

  • (#901) Work with py_webauthn 2.0 (and only 2.0+)

  • (#899) Improve (and simplify) Two-Factor setup. See below for backwards compatability issues and new functionality.

  • (#912) Improve oauth debugging support. Handle next propagation in a more general way.

  • (#877) Make AnonymousUser (Flask-Login) optional and deprecated.

  • (#906) Remove undocumented and untested looking in session for possible ‘next’ redirect location.

  • (#881) No longer rely on Flask-Login.unauthorized callback. See below for implications.

  • (#904) Changes to default unauthorized handler - remove use of referrer header (see below) and document precise behavior.

  • (#927) The authentication_token format has changed - adding per-token expiry time and future session ID. Old tokens are still accepted.

Docs and Chores

  • (#889) Improve method translations for unified signin and two factor. Remove support for Flask-Babelex.

  • (#911) Chore - stop setting all config as attributes. init_app(**kwargs) can only set forms, flags, and utility classes (see below for compatibility concerns).

  • (#873) Update Spanish and Italian translations. (gissimo)

  • (#855) Improve translations for two-factor method selection. (gissimo)

  • (#866) Improve German translations. (sr-verde)

  • (#911) Remove deprecation of AUTO_LOGIN_AFTER_CONFIRM - it has a reasonable use case.

  • (#931) Update message extraction - note that the CONFIRM_REGISTRATION message was changed to improve readability.

Fixes

  • (#845) us-signin magic link should use fs_uniquifier (not email).

  • (#893) Improve open-redirect vulnerability mitigation. (see below)

  • (#875) user_datastore.create_user has side effects on mutable inputs. (NoRePercussions)

  • (#878) The long deprecated _unauthorized_callback/handler has been removed.

  • (#884) Oauth re-used POST_LOGIN_VIEW which caused confusion. See below for the new configuration and implications.

  • (#908) Improve CSRF documentation and testing. Fix bug where a CSRF failure could return an HTML page even if the request was JSON.

  • (#925) Register with JSON and authentication token failed CSRF. (lilz-egoto)

  • (#870) Fix 2 issues with CSRF configuration.

  • (#914) It was possible that if SECURITY_EMAIL_VALIDATOR_ARGS were set that deliverability would be checked even for login.

Backwards Compatibility Concerns

  • Passing in an AnonymousUser class as part of Security initialization has been removed.

  • The never-public method _get_unauthorized_response has been removed.

  • Social-Oauth - a new configuration variable SECURITY_POST_OAUTH_LOGIN_VIEW was introduced and it replaces SECURITY_POST_LOGIN_VIEW in the oauthresponse logic when SECURITY_REDIRECT_BEHAVIOR == “spa”.

  • Two-Factor setup. Prior to this release when setting up “SMS” the /tf-setup endpoint could be POSTed to w/o a phone number, and then another POST could be made to set the phone number. This has always been confusing and added complexity to the code. Now, if “SMS” is selected, the phone number must be supplied (which has always been supported). Other changes:

    • The default two-factor-setup.html template now has a more generic “Enter code to complete setup” message.

    • Make sure the “disable” option first.

    • Adding any currently configured two-factor method on setup failure.

    • The two_factor_verify template won’t show the rescue form if it isn’t set.

    • A GET on /tf-validate now returns the two-factor-validate-form always - before if the client was validating a new method, it would return the two-factor-setup-form

    • After successfully disabling two-factor the client is redirected to SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR_POST_SETUP_VIEW rather than SECURITY_POST_LOGIN_VIEW.

  • Bring unauthenticated handling completely into Flask-Security:

    Prior to this release, Flask-Security’s Security.unauthn_handler() - called when a request wasn’t properly authenticated - handled JSON requests then delegated form responses to Flask-Login’s unauthenticated_callback. That logic has been moved into Flask-Security and Flask-Login is configured to call back into Flask-Security’s handler. While the logic is very similar the following differences might be observed:

    • Flask-Login’s FORCE_HOST_FOR_REDIRECTS configuration isn’t honored

    • Flask-Login’s USE_SESSION_FOR_NEXT configuration isn’t honored

    • The flashed message is SECURITY_MSG_UNAUTHENTICATED rather than SECURITY_MSG_LOGIN. Furthermore SECURITY_MSG_UNAUTHENTICATED was reworded to read better.

    • Flask-Login uses urlencode to encode the next query param - which quotes the ‘/’ character. Werkzeug (which Flask-Security uses to build the URL) uses quote which considers ‘/’ a safe character and isn’t encoded.

    • The signal sent on an unauthenticated request has changed to user_unauthenticated. Flask-Login used to send a user_unauthorized signal.

  • Flask-Security no longer configures anything related to Flask-Login’s fresh_login logic. This shouldn’t be used - instead use Flask-Security’s flask_security.auth_required() decorator.

  • Support for Flask-Babelex has been removed. Please convert to Flask-Babel.

  • JSON error response has changed due to issue with WTForms form-level errors. When WTForms introduced form-level errors they added it to the form.errors response using None as a key. When serializing it, it would turn into “null”. However, if there is more than one error the default settings for JSON serialization in Flask attempt to sort the keys - which fails with the None key. An issue has been filed with WTForms - and maybe it will be changed. Flask-Security now changes any None key to “”.

  • The default unauthorized handler behavior has changed slightly and is now documented. The default (SECURITY_UNAUTHORIZED_VIEW == None) has not changed (a default HTTP 403 response). The precise behavior when SECURITY_UNAUTHORIZED_VIEW was set was never documented. The important change is that Flask-Security no longer ever looks at the request.referrer header and will never redirect to it. If an application needs that, it can provide a callable that can return that or any other header.

  • Configuration variables (and other things) are no longer added as attributes on the Security instance. For example security.username_enable no longer exists - this could be an issue in code or templates. For templates, Flask places config in the Jinja context - so rather than using an attribute, use config[“SECURITY_USERNAME_ENABLE”] for the example above.

  • Open Redirect mitigation. Release 4.1.0 had a fix for #486 involving a potential open redirect. This was very low priority since the default configuration of Werkzeug (always convert the Location header to absolute URL) rendered the vulnerability un-exploitable. The solution at that time was to add an optional regex looking for these bizarre URLs that from a HTTP spec perspective are relative, but various browsers would interpret as absolute. In Werkzeug release 2.1 the default was changed so that the Location header was allowed to be a relative URL. This made the open redirect vulnerability much more likely to be exploitable. More recently, additional bizarre URLs were found, as documented in #893. More work was done and a patch release 5.3.3 was published. This fix utilized changing the Werkzeug default back to absolute and an updated regex. Comments and thoughts by @gmanfuncky proposed a much better solution and that is in 5.4. This implementation is independent of Werkzeug (and relative Location headers are again the default). The entire regex option has been removed. Instead, any user-supplied path used as a redirect is parsed and quoted.

Notes

  • Historically, the current_user proxy (managed by Flask-Login) always pointed to a user object. If the user wasn’t authenticated, it pointed to an AnonymousUser object. With this release, setting SECURITY_ANONYMOUS_USER_DISABLED to True will force current_user to be set to None if the requesting user isn’t authenticated. It should be noted that this is in support of a proposal by the Pallets team to remove AnonymousUser from Flask-Login - as well as deprecating the is_authenticated property. The default behavior (False) should be the same as prior releases. A new function _fs_is_user_authenticated is now part of the render_template context that templates can use instead of current_user.is_authenticated.

Version 5.3.3

Released December 29, 2023

Fixes

  • (#893) Once again work on open-redirect vulnerability - this time due to newer Werkzeug. Addresses: CVE-2023-49438

Version 5.3.2

Released October 23, 2023

Fixes

  • (#859) Update Quickstart to show how to properly handle SQLAlchemy connections.

  • (#861) Auth Token not returned from /tf-validate. (thanks lilz-egoto)

  • (#864) Fix for latest email_validator deprecation - bump minimum to 2.0.0

  • (#865) Deprecate passing in the anonymous_user class (sent to Flask-Login).

Version 5.3.1

Released October 14, 2023

Please Note:

  • If your application uses webauthn you must use pydantic < 2.0 until the issue with user_handle is resolved.

Fixes

  • (#847) Compatability with Flask 3.0 (wangsha)

  • (#829) Revert change in 5.3.0 that added a Referrer-Policy header.

  • (#826) Fix error in quickstart (codycollier)

  • (#835) Update Armenian translations (amkrtchyan-tmp)

  • (#831) Update German translations. (sr-verde)

  • (#853) Fix ‘next’ propagation when passed as form.next (thanks cariaso)

Version 5.3.0

Released July 27, 2023

This is a minor version bump due to some small backwards incompatible changes to WebAuthn, recoverability (/reset), confirmation (/confirm) and the two factor validity feature.

Fixes

  • (#807) Webauthn Updates to handling of transport.

  • (#809) Fix MongoDB support by eliminating dependency on flask-mongoengine. Improve MongoDB quickstart.

  • (#801) Fix Quickstart for SQLAlchemy with scoped session.

  • (#806) Login no longer, by default, checks for email deliverability.

  • (#791) Token authentication is no longer accepted on endpoints which only allow ‘session’ as authentication-method. (N247S)

  • (#814) /reset and /confirm and GENERIC_RESPONSES and additional form args don’t mix.

  • (#281) Reset password can be exploited and other OWASP improvements.

  • (#817) Confirmation can be exploited and other OWASP improvements.

  • (#819) Convert to pyproject.toml, build, remove setup.py/.cfg.

  • (#823) the tf_validity feature now ONLY sets a cookie - and the token is no longer returned as part of a JSON response.

  • (#825) Fix login/unified signin templates to properly send CSRF token. Add more tests.

  • (#826) Improve Social Oauth example code.

Backwards Compatibility Concerns

  • To align with the W3C WebAuthn Level2 and 3 spec - transports are now part of the registration response. This has been changed BOTH in the server code (using webauthn data structures) as well as the sample javascript code. If an application has their own javascript front end code - it might need to be changed.

  • The tf_validity feature SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR_ALWAYS_VALIDATE used to set a cookie if the request was form based, and return the token as part of a JSON response. Now, this feature is ONLY cookie based and the token is no longer returned as part of any response.

  • Reset password was changed to adhere to OWASP recommendations and reduce possible exploitation:

    • A new email (with new token) is no longer sent upon expired token. Users must restart the reset password process.

    • The user is no longer automatically logged in upon successful password reset. For backwards compatibility SECURITY_AUTO_LOGIN_AFTER_RESET can be set to True. Note that this compatibility feature is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

    • Identity information (identity, email) is no longer sent as part of the URL redirect query params.

    • The SECURITY_MSG_PASSWORD_RESET_EXPIRED message no longer contains the user’s identity/email.

    • The default for SECURITY_RESET_PASSWORD_WITHIN has been changed from 5 days to 1 days.

    • The response to GET /reset/<token> sets the HTTP header Referrer-Policy to no-referrer as suggested by OWASP. PLEASE NOTE: this was backed out in 5.3.1

  • Confirm email was changed to adhere to OWASP recommendations and reduce possible exploitation:

    • A new email (with new token) is no longer sent upon expired token. Users must restart the confirmation process.

    • Identity information (identity, email) is no longer sent as part of the URL redirect query params.

    • The SECURITY_AUTO_LOGIN_AFTER_CONFIRM configuration variable now defaults to False - meaning after a successful email confirmation, the user must still sign in using the usual mechanisms. This is to align better with OWASP best practices. Setting it to True will restore prior behavior.

    • The SECURITY_MSG_CONFIRMATION_EXPIRED message no longer contains the user’s identity/email.

    • The response to GET /reset/<token> sets the HTTP header Referrer-Policy to no-referrer as suggested by OWASP. PLEASE NOTE: this was backed out in 5.3.1

Version 5.2.0

Released May 6, 2023

Note: Due to rapid deprecation and removal of APIs from the Pallets team, maintaining the testing of back versions of various packages is taking too much time and effort. In this release only current versions of the various dependent packages are being tested.

Fixes

  • (#764) Remove old Werkzeug compatibility check.

  • (#777) Compatibility with Quart.

  • (#780) Remove dependence on pkg_resources / setuptools (use importlib_resources package)

  • (#792) Fix tests to work with latest Werkzeug/Flask. Update requirements_low to match current releases.

  • (#792) Drop support for Python 3.7

Known Issues

  • Flask-mongoengine hasn’t released in a while and currently will not work with latest Flask and Flask-Security-Too (this is due to the JSONEncoder being deprecated and removed).

Backwards Compatibility Concerns

  • The removal of pkg_resources required changing the config variable SECURITY_I18N_DIRNAME. If your application modified or extended this configuration variable, a small change will be required.

Version 5.1.2

Released March 12, 2023

Fixes

  • (#771) Hungarian translations not working.

  • (#769) Fix documentation for send_mail. (gg)

  • (#768) Fix for latest mongoengine and mongomock.

  • (#766) Fix inappropriate use of &thinsp& in French translations. (maxdup)

  • (#773) Improve documentation around subclassing forms.

Version 5.1.1

Released March 1, 2023

Fixes

  • (#740) Fix 2 Flask apps in same thread with USERNAME_ENABLE set. There was a too aggressive config check.

  • (#739) Update Russian translations. (ademaro)

  • (#743) Run all templates through a linter. (ademaro)

  • (#757) Fix json/flask backwards compatibility hack.

  • (#759) Fix quickstarts - make sure they run using flask run

  • (#755) Fix unified signup when two-factor not enabled. (sebdroid)

  • (#763) Add dependency on setuptools (pkg_resources). (hroncok)

Version 5.1.0

Released January 23, 2023

Features

Fixes

  • (#678) Fixes for Flask-SQLAlchemy 3.0.0. (jrast)

  • (#680) Fixes for sqlalchemy 2.0.0 (jrast)

  • (#697) Webauthn and Unified signin features now properly take into account blueprint prefixes.

  • (#699) Properly propagate ?next=/xx - the verify, webauthn, and unified signin endpoints, that had multiple redirects, needed fixes.

  • (#696) Add Hungarian translations. (xQwexx)

  • (#701) Two factor redirects ignored url_prefix. Added a SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR_ERROR_VIEW configuration option.

  • (#704) Add configurations for static folder/URL and make sure templates reference blueprint relative static folder.

  • (#709) Make (some) templates look better by using single quotes instead of double quotes.

  • (#690) Send entire context to MailUtil::send_mail (patrickyan)

  • (#728) Support for Flask-Babel 3.0.0

  • (#692) Add configuration option SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR_POST_SETUP_VIEW which is redirected to upon successful change of a two factor method.

  • (#733) The ability to pass in a LoginManager instance which was deprecated in 5.0 has been removed.

  • (#732) If SECURITY_USERNAME_REQUIRED was True then users couldn’t login with just an email.

  • (#734) If SECURITY_USERNAME_ENABLE is set, bleach is a requirement.

  • (#736) The unauthz_handler now takes a function name, not the function!

Backwards Compatibility Concerns

  • Each form class used to be set as an attribute on the Security object. With the new form instantiation model, they no longer are.

  • After a successful update/change of a two-factor method, the user was redirected to SECURITY_POST_LOGIN_VIEW. Now it redirects to SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR_POST_SETUP_VIEW which defaults to “.two_factor_setup”.

  • The Security.unauthz_handler() now takes a function name - not the function - which never made sense.

Version 5.0.2

Released September 23, 2022

Fixes

  • (#673) Role permissions backwards compatibility bug. For SQL based datastores that use Flask-Security’s models.fsqla_vx - there should be NO issues. If you declare your own models - please see the 5.0.0 releases notes for required change.

Version 5.0.1

Released September 6, 2022

Fixes

  • (#662) Fix Change Password regression. (tysonholub)

Version 5.0.0

Released August 27, 2022

PLEASE READ CHANGE NOTES CAREFULLY - THERE ARE LIKELY REQUIRED CHANGES YOU WILL HAVE TO MAKE.

Features

  • (#475) Support for WebAuthn.

  • (#479) Support Two-factor recovery codes.

  • (#585) Provide option to prevent user enumeration (i.e. Generic Responses).

  • (#532) Support for Python 3.10.

  • (#657, #655) Support for Flask >= 2.2.

  • (#540) Improve Templates in support of JS required by WebAuthn.

  • (#608) Add Icelandic translations. (ofurkusi)

  • (#650) Update German translations. (sr-verde)

  • (#256) Add custom HTML attributes to improve user experience. This changed LoginForm quite a bit - please see backwards compatability concerns below. The default LoginForm and template should be the same as before.

  • (#638) The JSON errors response has been unified. Please see backwards compatibility concerns below.

  • Updated all-inclusive data models (fsqla_v3). Add fields necessary for the new WebAuthn and Two-Factor recovery codes features. Changed us_phone_number to be unique (but not required). Changed password to be nullable.

Deprecations

  • (#568) Deprecate the old passwordless feature in favor of Unified Signin.

  • (#568) Deprecate replacing login_manager so we can possibly vendor that in in the future.

  • (#654) The previously deprecated methods RoleMixin.add_permissions and RoleMixin.remove_permissions have been removed.

  • (#657) The ability to pass in a json_encoder_cls as part of initialization has been removed since Flask 2.2 has deprecated and replaced that functionality.

  • (#655) Flask has deprecated @before_first_request. This was used mostly in examples/quickstart. These have been changed to use app.app_context() prior to running the app. Flask-Security itself used it in 2 places - to populate _ in jinja globals if Babel wasn’t initialized and to perform various configuration sanity checks w.r.t. WTF CSRF. All Flask-Security templates have been converted to use _fsdomain rather than _ so Flask-Security no longer sets _ into jinja2 globals. The configuration checks have been moved to the end of Security::init_app() - so it is now imperative that FlaskWTF::CSRFProtect() be called PRIOR to initializing Flask-Security.

  • encrypt_password method has been removed. It has been deprecated since 2.0.2

  • get_token_status has been deprecated.

Fixes

  • (#591) Make the required zxcvbn complexity score configurable. (mephi42)

  • (#531) Get rid of Flask-Mail. Flask-Mailman is now the default preferred email package. Flask-Mail is still supported so there should be no backwards compatability issues.

  • (#597) A delete option has been added to us-setup (form and view).

  • (#625) Improve username support - the LoginForm now has a separate field for username if SECURITY_USERNAME_ENABLE is True, and properly displays input fields only if the associated field is an identity attribute (as specified by SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES).

  • (#627) Improve empty password handling. Prior, an unguessable password was set into the user record when a user registered without a password - now, the DB user model has been changed to allow nullable passwords. This provides a better user experience since Flask-Security now knows if a user has an empty password or not. Since registering without a password is not a mainstream feature, a new configuration variable SECURITY_PASSWORD_REQUIRED has been added (defaults to True).

  • (#479) A new configuration option SECURITY_TWO_FACTOR_RESCUE_EMAIL has been added that allows disabling that feature - defaults to backwards compatible True

  • (#658) us_phone_number needs to be validated to be unique.

Backward Compatibility Concerns

For unified signin:

  • The redirect after a successful us-setup used to redirect to SECURITY_US_POST_SETUP_VIEW or SECURITY_POST_LOGIN_VIEW (which would default to ‘/’). Now it just redirects to SECURITY_US_POST_SETUP_VIEW which defaults back to the /us-setup view.

  • The ability to authenticate using a one-time email link was automatically setup by the system for all users. “email” now behaves like the other unified sign in methods and must be explicitly set up - with the exception that if a user registers WITHOUT a password, the system will setup the one-time email link option - since otherwise the user would never be able to authenticate.

  • /us-signin/send-code didn’t used to check if the user account required confirmation it just sent a code and the /us-signin endpoint did the confirmation check. Now send-code does the confirmation check and won’t send a code unless the user is confirmed.

  • In us-verify the ‘code_methods’ item now lists just active/setup methods that generate a code not ALL possible methods that generate a code.

  • SECURITY_US_VERIFY_SEND_CODE_URL and SECURITY_US_SIGNIN_SEND_CODE_URL endpoints are now POST only.

  • Empty passwords were always permitted when SECURITY_UNIFIED_SIGNIN was enabled - now an additional configuration variable SECURITY_PASSWORD_REQUIRED must be set to False.

  • SECURITY_US_VERIFY_SEND_CODE_URL and SECURITY_US_SIGNIN_SEND_CODE_URL used to send code_sent to the template. Now they flash the SECURITY_MSG_CODE_HAS_BEEN_SENT message.

  • With the addition of being able to delete a previously setup up sign in method, the signal us_profile_changed arguments have changed. method is now methods and is a list, and a new argument delete is True if a sign in option was deleted.

Login:

  • Since the beginning of time, the flask-security login form has accepted any input in the ‘email’ field, and used that to check if it corresponds to any field in SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES. This has always been problematic and confusing - and with the addition of HTML attributes for various form fields - having a field with multiple possible inputs is no longer a viable user experience. This is no longer supported, and the LoginForm now declares the email field to be of type EmailField which requires a valid (after normalization) email address. The most common usage of this legacy feature was to allow an email or username - Flask-Security now has core support for a username option - see SECURITY_USERNAME_ENABLE. Please see Customizing the Login Form for an example of how to replicate the legacy behavior.

  • Some error messages have changed - USER_DOES_NOT_EXIST is now returned for any identity error including an empty value.

Other:

  • A very old piece of code in registrable, would immediately commit to the DB when a new user was created. It is now consistent with all other views, and has the caller responsible for committing the transaction - usually by setting up a flask after_this_request action. This could affect an application that captured the registration signal and stored the user object for later use - this user object would likely be invalid after the request is finished.

  • Some fields have custom HTML attributes attached to them (e.g. autocomplete, type, etc). These are stored as part of the form in the render_kw attribute. This could cause some confusion if an app had its own templates and set different attributes.

  • The keys for “/tf-rescue” select options have changed to be more ‘action’ oriented:

    • lost_device -> email

    • no_mail_access -> help

  • JSON error responses. THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE. In earlier releases, the JSON error response could have either a error key which was for rare cases where there was a single non-form related error, or an errors key which was a a dict as defined by WTForms. Now, the errors key will contain a list of (localized) messages - both non-form related as well as any form related. The key field_errors will contain the dict as specified by WTForms. Please note that starting with WTForms 3.0 form-level errors are supported and show up in the dict with the field name/key of “none”. There are no changes to non-error related JSON responses.

  • Permissions THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE. The Role Model now stores permissions as a list, and requires that the underlying DB ORM map that to a supported DB type. For SQLAlchemy, this is mapped to a comma separated string (as before). For SQLAlchemy DBs the underlying Column type (UnicodeText) didn’t change so no data migration should be required. However, the ORM Column type did change and requires the following change to your model:

    from flask_security import AsaList
from sqlalchemy.ext.mutable import MutableList
class Role(Base, RoleMixin):
    ...
    permissions = Column(MutableList.as_mutable(AsaList()), nullable=True)
    ...

    If your application makes use of Flask-Security’s models.fsqla_vX classes - no changes are required. For Mongo, a ListField can be directly used.

  • CSRF - As mentioned above, it is now required that FlaskWTF::CSRFProtect(), if used, must be called PRIOR to initializing Flask-Security.

  • json_encoder_cls - As mentioned above - Flask-Security initialization no longer accepts overriding the json_encoder class. If this is required, update to Flask >=2.2 and implement Flask’s JSONProvider interface.

For templates:

  • Pretty much every template was modified to replace <p> with <div class=xx> to make styling possible and to make more complex forms more readable.

  • Many forms had places where things weren’t properly localizable - that has (hopefully) been fixed.

  • The us_setup.html template was modified to add ability to delete an existing set up method.

DB Migration

To use the new WebAuthn feature a new table and two new columns in the User model are required. To ease updates - Flask-Security will automatically create a fs_webauthn_user_handle upon first use for existing users. If you are using Alembic the schema migration is easy:

op.add_column('user', sa.Column('fs_webauthn_user_handle', sa.String(length=64), nullable=True, unique=True))

If you want to allow for empty passwords as part of registration then set SECURITY_PASSWORD_REQUIRED to False. In addition you need to change your DB schema to allow the password field to be nullable.

Version 4.1.5

Released July 28, 2022

Fixes

  • (#644) Fix test and other failures with newer Flask-Login/Werkzeug versions.

Version 4.1.4

Released April 19, 2022

Fixes

  • (#594) Fix test failures with newer Flask versions.

Version 4.1.3

Released March 2, 2022

Fixes

  • (#581) Fix bug when attempting to disable register_blueprint. (halali)

  • (#539) Fix example documentation re: generating localized messages. (kazuhei2)

  • (#546) Make roles joinedload compatible with SQLAlchemy 2.0. (keats)

  • (#586) Ship py.typed as part of package.

  • (#580) Improve documentation around use of bleach and include in common install extra.

Version 4.1.2

Released September 22, 2021

Fixes

  • (#526) default_reauthn_handler doesn’t honor SECURITY_URL_PREFIX

  • (#528) Improve German translations (sr-verde)

  • (#527) Fix two-factor sample code (djpnewton)

Version 4.1.1

Released September 10, 2021

Fixes

  • (#518) Fix corner case where Security object was being reused in tests.

  • (#512) If USERNAME_ENABLE is set, change LoginForm field from EmailField to StringField. Also - dynamically add fields to Login and Registration forms rather than always having them - this made the RegistrationForm much simpler.

  • (#516) Improved username feature handling solved issue of always requiring bleach.

  • (#513) Improve documentation of default username validation.

Version 4.1.0

Released July 23, 2021

Features

  • (#474) Add public API and CLI command to change a user’s password.

  • (#140) Add type hints. Please note that many of the packages that flask-security depends on aren’t typed yet - so there are likely errors in some of the types.

  • (#466) Add first-class support for using username for signing in.

Fixes

  • (#483) 4.0 doesn’t accept 3.4 authentication tokens. (kuba-lilz)

  • (#490) Flask-Mail sender name can be a tuple. (hrishikeshrt)

  • (#486) Possible open redirect vulnerability.

  • (#478) Improve/update German translation. (sr-verde)

  • (#488) Improve handling of Babel packages.

  • (#496) Documentation improvements, distribution extras, fix single message override.

  • (#497) Improve cookie handling and default samesite to Strict.

Backwards Compatibility Concerns

  • (#488) In 4.0.0, with the addition of Flask-Babel support, Flask-Security enforced that if it could import either Flask-Babel or Flask-BabelEx, that those modules had been initialized as proper Flask extensions. Prior to 4.0.0, just Flask-BabelEx was supported - and that didn’t require any explicit initialization. Flask-Babel DOES require explicit initialization. However for some applications that don’t completely control their environment (such as system pre-installed versions of python) this caused applications that didn’t even want translation services to fail on startup. With this release, Flask-Security still attempts to import one or the other package - however if those modules are NOT initialized, Flask-Security will simply ignore them and no translations will occur.

  • (#497) The CSRF_COOKIE and TWO_FACTOR_VALIDITY cookie had their defaults changed to set samesite=Strict. This follows the Flask-Security goal of making things more secure out-of-the-box.

  • (#140) Type hinting. For the most part this of course has no runtime effects. However, this required a fairly major overhaul of how Flask-Security is initialized in order to provide valid types for the many constructor attributes. There are no known compatability concerns - however initialization used to convert all arguments into kwargs then add those as attributes and merge with application constants. That no longer happens and it is possible that some corner cases don’t behave precisely as they did before.

Version 4.0.1

Released April 2, 2021

Features

Fixes

  • (#461) 4.0 doesn’t accept 3.4 authentication tokens. (kuba-lilz)

  • (#460) 2-fa error: Failed to send code - improved documentation and debuggability.

  • (#454) 2-fa error: TypeError - fixed documentation.

  • (#443) Calling create user without any arguments - fixed underlying cause of translating form errors in the CLI.

  • (#442) Email validation confusion - added documentation.

  • (#450) Add documentation on how to override specific error messages.

  • (#439) Don’t install global-scope tests. (mgorny)

  • (#470) Add note about updating DB using MySQL. (jugmac00)

  • (#468) Fix documentation - uia_phone_number should be uia_phone_mapper. (dvrg)

  • (#457) Improve chinese translations. (zxjlm)

  • (#453) Improve basque and spanish translations. (mmozos)

  • (#448) Add Afrikaans translations. (lonelyvikingmichael)

  • (#467) Add Blinker as explicit dependency, improve/fix celery usage docs, dont require pyqrcode unless authenticator configured, improve SMS configuration variables documentation.

Version 4.0.0

Released January 26, 2021

PLEASE READ CHANGE NOTES CAREFULLY - THERE ARE LIKELY REQUIRED CHANGES YOU WILL HAVE TO MAKE TO EVEN START YOUR APPLICATION WITH 4.0

Start Here

  • Your UserModel must contain fs_uniquifier

  • Either uninstall Flask-BabelEx (if you don’t need translations) or add either Flask-Babel (>=2.0) or Flask-BabelEx to your dependencies AND be sure to initialize it in your app.

  • Add Flask-Mail to your dependencies.

  • If you have unicode emails or passwords read change notes below.

Version 4.0.0rc2

Released January 18, 2021

Features & Cleanup

  • Removal of python 2.7 and <3.6 support

  • Removal of token caching feature (a relatively new feature that had some systemic issues)

  • (#328) Remove dependence on Flask-Mail and refactor.

  • (#335) Remove two-factor /tf-confirm endpoint and use generic freshness mechanism.

  • (#336) Remove SECURITY_BACKWARDS_COMPAT_AUTH_TOKEN_INVALID(ATE). In addition to not making sense - the documentation has never been correct.

  • (#339) Require fs_uniquifier in the UserModel and stop using/referencing the UserModel primary key.

  • (#349) Change SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES configuration variable semantics.

  • Remove (all?) requirements around having an ‘email’ column in the UserModel. API change - JSON SPA redirects used to always include a query param ‘email=xx’. While that is still sent (if and only if) the UserModel contains an ‘email’ columns, a new query param ‘identity’ is returned which returns the value of UserMixin.calc_username().

  • (#382) Improvements and documentation for two-factor authentication.

  • (#394) Add support for email validation and normalization (see MailUtil).

  • (#231) Normalize unicode passwords (see PasswordUtil).

  • (#391) Option to redirect to /confirm if user hits an endpoint that requires confirmation. New option SECURITY_REQUIRES_CONFIRMATION_ERROR_VIEW which if set and the user hits the /login, /reset, or /us-signin endpoint, and they require confirmation the response will be a redirect. (SnaKyEyeS)

  • (#366) Allow redirects on sub-domains. Please see SECURITY_REDIRECT_ALLOW_SUBDOMAINS. (willcroft)

  • (#376) Have POST redirects default to Flask’s APPLICATION_ROOT. Previously the default configuration was /. Now it first looks at Flask’s APPLICATION_ROOT configuration and uses that (which also by default is /. (tysonholub)

  • (#401) Add 2FA Validity Window so an application can configure how often the second factor has to be entered. (baurt)

  • (#403) Add HTML5 Email input types to email fields. This has some backwards compatibility concerns outlined below. (drola)

  • (#413) Add hy_AM translations. (rudolfamirjanyan)

  • (#410) Add Basque and fix Spanish translations. (mmozos)

  • (#408) Polish translations. (kamil559)

  • (#390) Update ru_RU translations. (TitaniumHocker)

Fixed

  • (#389) Fixes for translations. First - email subjects were never being translated. Second, converted all templates to use _fsdomain(xx) rather than _(xx) so that they get translated regardless of the app’s domain.

  • (#381) Support Flask-Babel 2.0 which has backported Domain support. Flask-Security now supports Flask-Babel (>=2.00), Flask-BabelEx, as well as no translation support. Please see backwards compatibility notes below.

  • (#352) Fix issue with adding/deleting permissions - all mutating methods must be at the datastore layer so that db.put() can be called. Added UserDatastore.add_permissions_to_role() and UserDatastore.remove_permissions_from_role(). The methods .RoleMixin.add_permissions and .RoleMixin.remove_permissions have been deprecated.

  • (#395) Provide ability to change table names for User and Role tables in the fsqla model.

  • (#338) All sessions are invalidated when a user changes or resets their password. This is accomplished by changing the user’s fs_uniquifier. The user is automatically re-logged in (and a new session created) after a successful change operation.

  • (#418) Two-factor (and to a lesser extent unified sign in) QRcode fetching wasn’t protected via CSRF. The fix makes things secure and simpler (always good); however read below for compatibility concerns. In addition, the elements that make up the QRcode (key, username, issuer) area also made available to the form and returned as part of the JSON return value - this allows for manual or other ways to initialize the authenticator app.

  • (#421) GET on /login and /change could return the callers authentication_token. This is a security concern since GETs don’t have CSRF protection. This bug was introduced in 3.3.0.

Backwards Compatibility Concerns

  • (#328) Remove dependence on Flask-Mail and refactor. The send_mail_task and send_mail methods as part of Flask-Security initialization have been removed and replaced with a new MailUtil class. The utility method send_mail() can still be used. If your application didn’t use either of the deprecated methods, then the only change required is to add Flask-Mail to your package requirements (since Flask-Security no longer lists it). Please see the Emails for updated examples.

  • (#335) Convert two-factor setup flow to use the freshness feature rather than its own verify password endpoint. This COMPLETELY removes the /tf-confirm endpoint and associated form: two_factor_verify_password_form. Now, when /tf-setup is invoked, the flask_security.check_and_update_authn_fresh() is invoked, and if the current session isn’t ‘fresh’ the caller will be redirected to a verify endpoint (either SECURITY_VERIFY_URL or SECURITY_US_VERIFY_URL). The simplest change would be to call /verify everywhere the application used to call /tf-confirm.

  • (#339) Require fs_uniquifier. In 3.3 the fs_uniquifier was added in the UserModel to fix the slow authentication token issue. In 3.4 the fs_uniquifier was used to implement Flask-Login’s Alternative Token feature - thus decoupling the primary key (id) from any security context. All along, there have been a few issues with applications not wanting to use the name ‘id’ in their model, or wanting a different type for their primary key. With this change, Flask-Security no longer interprets or uses the UserModel primary key - just the fs_uniquifier field. See the changes section for 3.3 for information on how to do the schema and data upgrades required to add this field. There is also an API change - the JSON response (via UserModel.get_security_payload()) returned the user.id field. With this change the default is an empty directory - override UserMixin.get_security_payload() to return any portion of the UserModel you need.

  • (#349) SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES has changed syntax and semantics. It now contains the combined information from the old SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES and the newly introduced in 3.4 SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_MAPPINGS. This enabled changing the underlying way we validate credentials in the login form and unified sign in form. In prior releases we simply tried to look up the form value as the PK of the UserModel - this often failed and then looped through the other SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES. This had a history of issues, including many applications not wanting to have a standard PK for the user model. Now, using the mapping configuration, the UserModel attribute/column the input corresponds to is determined, then the UserModel is queried specifically for that attribute:value pair. If you application didn’t change the variable, no modifications are required.

  • (#354) The flask_security.PhoneUtil is now initialized as part of Flask-Security initialization rather than @app.before_first_request (since that broke the CLI). Since it isn’t called in an application context, the app being initialized is passed as an argument to __init__.

  • (#381) When using Flask-Babel (>= 2.0) it is required that the application initialize Flask-Babel (e.g. Babel(app)). Flask-BabelEx would self-initialize so it didn’t matter. Flask-Security will throw a run time error upon first request if Flask-Babel OR FLask-BabelEx is installed, but not initialized. Also, Flask-Security no longer has a dependency on either Flask-Babel or Flask-BabelEx - if neither are installed, it falls back to a dummy translation. If your application expects translation services, it must specify the appropriate dependency AND initialize it.

  • (#394) Email input is now normalized prior to being stored in the DB. Previously, it was validated, but the raw input was stored. Normalization and validation rely on the email_validator package. The MailUtil class provides the interface for normalization and validation - allowing all this to be customized. If you have unicode local or domain parts - existing users may have difficulties logging in. Administratively you need to read each user record, normalize the email (see MailUtil), and write it back.

  • (#381) Passwords are now, by default, normalized using Python’s unicodedata.normalize() method. The SECURITY_PASSWORD_NORMALIZE_FORM defaults to “NKFD”. This brings Flask-Security in line with the NIST recommendations outlined in Memorized Secret Verifiers If your users have unicode passwords they may have difficulty authenticating. You can turn off this normalization or have your users reset their passwords. Password normalization and validation has been encapsulated in a new PasswordUtil class. This replaces the method password_validator introduced in 3.4.0.

  • (#403) By default all forms that have an email as input now use the wtforms html5 EmailField. For most applications this will make the user experience slightly nicer - especially for mobile devices. Some applications use the email form field for other identity attributes (such as username). If your application does this you will probably need to subclass LoginForm and change the email type back to StringField.

  • (#338) By default, both passwords and authentication tokens use the same attribute fs_uniquifier to uniquely identify the user. This means that if the user changes or resets their password, all authentication tokens also become invalid. This could be viewed as a feature or a bug. If this behavior isn’t desired, add another uniquifier: fs_token_uniquifier to your UserModel and that will be used to generate authentication tokens.

  • (#418) Fix CSRF vulnerability w.r.t. getting QRcodes. Both two-factor and unified-signup had a separate GET endpoint to fetch the QRcode when setting up an authenticator app. GETS don’t have any CSRF protection. Both of those endpoints have been completely removed, and the QRcode is embedded in a successful POST of the setup form. The changes to the templates are minimal and of course if you didn’t override the template - there is no compatibility concern.

  • (#421) Fix CSRF vulnerability on /login and /change that could return the callers authentication token. Now, callers can only get the authentication token on successful POST calls.

Version 3.4.5

Released January 8, 2021

Security Vulnerability Fix.

Two CSRF vulnerabilities were reported: qrcode and login. This release fixes the more severe of the 2 - the /login vulnerability. The QRcode issue has a much smaller risk profile since a) it is only for two-factor authentication using an authenticator app b) the qrcode is only available during the time the user is first setting up their authentication app. The QRcode issue has been fixed in 4.0.

Fixed

  • (#421) GET on /login and /change could return the callers authentication_token. This is a security concern since GETs don’t have CSRF protection. This bug was introduced in 3.3.0.

Backwards Compatibility Concerns

  • (#421) Fix CSRF vulnerability on /login and /change that could return the callers authentication token. Now, callers can only get the authentication token on successful POST calls.

Version 3.4.4

Released July 27, 2020

Bug/regression fixes.

Fixed

  • (#359) Basic Auth broken. When the unauthenticated handler was changed to provide a more uniform/consistent response - it broke using Basic Auth from a browser, since it always redirected rather than returning 401. Now, if the response headers contain WWW-Authenticate (which is set if basic @auth_required method is used), a 401 is returned. See below for backwards compatibility concerns.

  • (#362) As part of figuring out issue 359 - a redirect loop was found. In release 3.3.0 code was put in to redirect to SECURITY_POST_LOGIN_VIEW when GET or POST was called and the caller was already authenticated. The method used would honor the request next query parameter. This could cause redirect loops. The pre-3.3.0 behavior of redirecting to SECURITY_POST_LOGIN_VIEW and ignoring the next parameter has been restored.

  • (#347) Fix peewee. Turns out - due to lack of unit tests - peewee hasn’t worked since ‘permissions’ were added in 3.3. Furthermore, changes in 3.4 around get_id and alternative tokens also didn’t work since peewee defines its own get_id method.

Compatibility Concerns

In 3.3.0, flask_security.auth_required() was changed to add a default argument if none was given. The default include all current methods - session, token, and basic. However basic really isn’t like the others and requires that we send back a WWW-Authenticate header if authentication fails (and return a 401 and not redirect). basic has been removed from the default set and must once again be explicitly requested.

Version 3.4.3

Released June 12, 2020

Minor fixes for a regression and a couple other minor changes

Fixed

  • (#340) Fix regression where tf_phone_number was required, even if SMS wasn’t configured.

  • (#342) Pick up some small documentation fixes from 4.0.0.

Version 3.4.2

Released May 2, 2020

Only change is to move repo to the Flask-Middleware github organization.

Version 3.4.1

Released April 22, 2020

Fix a bunch of bugs in new unified sign in along with a couple other major issues.

Fixed

Version 3.4.0

Released March 31, 2020

Features

  • (#257) Support a unified sign in feature. Please see Unified Sign In.

  • (#265) Add phone number validation class. This is used in both unified sign in as well as two-factor when using sms.

  • (#274) Add support for ‘freshness’ of caller’s authentication. This permits endpoints to be additionally protected by ensuring a recent authentication.

  • (#99, #195) Support pluggable password validators. Provide a default validator that offers complexity and breached support.

  • (#266) Provide interface to two-factor send_token so that applications can provide error mitigation. Defaults to returning errors if can’t send the verification code.

  • (#247) Updated all-inclusive data models (fsqlaV2). Add fields necessary for the new unified sign in feature and changed ‘username’ to be unique (but not required).

  • (#245) Use fs_uniquifier as the default Flask-Login ‘alternative token’. Basically this means that changing the fs_uniquifier will cause outstanding auth tokens, session and remember me cookies to be invalidated. So if an account gets compromised, an admin can easily stop access. Prior to this cookies were storing the ‘id’ which is the user’s primary key - difficult to change! (kishi85)

Fixed

  • (#273) Don’t allow reset password for accounts that are disabled.

  • (#282) Add configuration that disallows GET for logout. Allowing GET can cause some denial of service issues. The default still allows GET for backwards compatibility. (kantorii)

  • (#258) Reset password wasn’t integrated into the two-factor feature and therefore two-factor auth could be bypassed.

  • (#254) Allow lists and sets as underlying permissions. (pffs)

  • (#251) Allow a registration form to have additional fields that aren’t part of the user model that are just passed to the user_registered.send signal, where the application can perform arbitrary additional actions required during registration. (kuba-lilz)

  • (#249) Add configuration to disable the ‘role-joining’ optimization for SQLAlchemy. (pffs)

  • (#238) Fix more issues with atomically setting the new TOTP secret when setting up two-factor. (kishi85)

  • (#240) Fix Quart Compatibility. (ristellise)

  • (#232) CSRF Cookie not being set when using ‘Remember Me’ cookie to re-sign in. (kishi85)

  • (#229) Two-factor enabled accounts didn’t work with the Remember Me feature. (kishi85)

As part of adding unified sign in, there were many similarities with two-factor. Some refactoring was done to unify naming, configuration variables etc. It should all be backwards compatible.

  • In TWO_FACTOR_ENABLED_METHODS “mail” was changed to “email”. “mail” will still be honored if already stored in DB. Also “google_authenticator” is now just “authenticator”.

  • TWO_FACTOR_SECRET, TWO_FACTOR_URI_SERVICE_NAME, TWO_FACTOR_SMS_SERVICE, and TWO_FACTOR_SMS_SERVICE_CONFIG have all been deprecated in favor of names that are the same for two-factor and unified sign in.

Other changes with possible backwards compatibility issues:

  • /tf-setup never did any phone number validation. Now it does.

  • two_factor_setup.html template - the chosen_method check was changed to email. If you have your own custom template - be sure make that change.

Version 3.3.3

Released February 11, 2020

Minor changes required to work with latest released Werkzeug and Flask-Login.

Version 3.3.2

Released December 7, 2019

  • (#215) Fixed 2FA totp secret regeneration bug (kishi85)

  • (#172) Fixed ‘next’ redirect error in login view

  • (#221) Fixed regressions in login view when already authenticated user again does a GET or POST.

  • (#219) Added example code for unit testing FS protected routes.

  • (#223) Integrated two-factor auth into registration and confirmation.

Thanks to kuba-lilz and kishi85 for finding and providing detailed issue reports.

In Flask-Security 3.3.0 the login view was changed to allow already authenticated users to access the view. Prior to 3.3.0, the login view was protected with @anonymous_user_required - so any access (via GET or POST) would simply redirect the user to the POST_LOGIN_VIEW. With the 3.3.0 changes, both GET and POST behaved oddly. GET simply returned the login template, and POST attempted to log out the current user, and log in the new user. This was problematic since this couldn’t possibly work with CSRF. The old behavior has been restored, with the subtle change that older Flask-Security releases did not look at “next” in the form or request for the redirect, and now, all redirects from the login view will honor “next”.

Version 3.3.1

Released November 16, 2019

  • (#197) Add Quart compatibility (Ristellise)

  • (#194) Add Python 3.8 support into CI (jdevera)

  • (#196) Improve docs around Single Page Applications and React (acidjunk)

  • (#201) fsqla model was added to __init__.py making Sqlalchemy a required package. That is wrong and has been removed. Applications must now explicitly import from flask_security.models

  • (#204) Fix/improve examples and quickstart to show one MUST call hash_password() when creating users programmatically. Also show real SECRET_KEYs and PASSWORD_SALTs and how to generate them.

  • (#209) Add argon2 as an allowable password hash.

  • (#210) Improve integration with Flask-Admin. Actually - this PR improves localization support by adding a method _fsdomain to jinja2’s global environment. Added documentation around localization.

Version 3.3.0

Released September 26, 2019

There are several default behavior changes that might break existing applications. Most have configuration variables that restore prior behavior.

If you use Authentication Tokens (rather than session cookies) you MUST make a (small) change. Please see below for details.

  • (#120) Native support for Permissions as part of Roles. Endpoints can be protected via permissions that are evaluated based on role(s) that the user has.

  • (#126, #93, #96) Revamp entire CSRF handling. This adds support for Single Page Applications and having CSRF protection for browser(session) authentication but ignored for token based authentication. Add extensive documentation about all the options.

  • (#156) Token authentication is slow. Please see below for details on how to enable a new, fast implementation.

  • (#130) Enable applications to provide their own render_json() method so that they can create unified API responses.

  • (#121) Unauthorized callback not quite right. Split into 2 different callbacks - one for unauthorized and one for unauthenticated. Made default unauthenticated handler use Flask-Login’s unauthenticated method to make everything uniform. Extensive documentation added. .Security.unauthorized_callback has been deprecated.

  • (#120) Add complete User and Role model mixins that support all features. Modify tests and Quickstart documentation to show how to use these. Please see Responses for details.

  • Improve documentation for UserDatastore.create_user() to make clear that hashed password should be passed in.

  • Improve documentation for UserDatastore and verify_and_update_password() to make clear that caller must commit changes to DB if using a session based datastore.

  • (#122) Clarify when to use confirm_register_form rather than register_form.

  • Fix bug in 2FA that didn’t commit DB after using verify_and_update_password.

  • Fix bug(s) in UserDatastore where changes to user active flag weren’t being added to DB.

  • (#127) JSON response was failing due to LazyStrings in error response.

  • (#117) Making a user inactive should stop all access immediately.

  • (#134) Confirmation token can no longer be reused. Added SECURITY_AUTO_LOGIN_AFTER_CONFIRM option for applications that don’t want the user to be automatically logged in after confirmation (defaults to True - existing behavior).

  • (#159) The /register endpoint returned the Authentication Token even though confirmation was required. This was a huge security hole - it has been fixed.

  • (#160) The 2FA totp_secret would be regenerated upon submission, making QRCode not work. (malware-watch)

  • (#166) default_render_json uses flask.make_response and forces the Content-Type to JSON for generating the response (koekie)

  • (#166) SECURITY_MSG_UNAUTHENTICATED added to the configuration.

  • (#168) When using the @auth_required or @auth_token_required decorators, the token would be verified twice, and the DB would be queried twice for the user. Given how slow token verification is - this was a significant issue. That has been fixed.

  • (#84) The anonymous_user_required() was not JSON friendly - always performing a redirect. Now, if the request ‘wants’ a JSON response - it will receive a 400 with an error message defined by SECURITY_MSG_ANONYMOUS_USER_REQUIRED.

  • (#145) Improve 2FA templates to that they can be localized. (taavie)

  • (#173) SECURITY_UNAUTHORIZED_VIEW didn’t accept a url (just an endpoint). All other view configurations did. That has been fixed.

Possible compatibility issues

  • (#164) In prior releases, the Authentication Token was returned as part of the JSON response to each successful call to /login, /change, or /reset/{token} API call. This is not a great idea since for browser-based UIs that used JSON request/response, and used session based authentication - they would be sent this token - even though it was likely ignored. Since these tokens by default have no expiration time this exposed a needless security hole. The new default behavior is to ONLY return the Authentication Token from those APIs if the query param include_auth_token is added to the request. Prior behavior can be restored by setting the SECURITY_BACKWARDS_COMPAT_AUTH_TOKEN configuration variable.

  • (#120) RoleMixin now has a method get_permissions() which is called as part each request to add Permissions to the authenticated user. It checks if the RoleModel has a property permissions and assumes it is a comma separated string of permissions. If your model already has such a property this will likely fail. You need to override get_permissions() and simply return an emtpy set.

  • (#121) Changes the default (failure) behavior for views protected with @auth_required, @token_auth_required, or @http_auth_required. Before, a 401 was returned with some stock html. Now, Flask-Login.unauthorized() is called (the same as @login_required does) - which by default redirects to a login page/view. If you had provided your own .Security.unauthorized_callback there are no changes - that will still be called first. The old default behavior can be restored by setting SECURITY_BACKWARDS_COMPAT_UNAUTHN to True. Please see Responses for details.

  • (#127) Fix for LazyStrings in json error response. The fix for this has Flask-Security registering its own JsonEncoder on its blueprint. If you registered your own JsonEncoder for your app - it will no longer be called when serializing responses to Flask-Security endpoints. You can register your JsonEncoder on Flask-Security’s blueprint by sending it as json_encoder_cls as part of initialization. Be aware that your JsonEncoder needs to handle LazyStrings (see speaklater).

  • (#84) Prior to this fix - anytime the decorator anonymous_user_required() failed, it caused a redirect to the post_login_view. Now, if the caller wanted a JSON response, it will return a 400.

  • (#156) Faster Authentication Token introduced the following non-backwards compatible behavior change:

    • Since the old Authentication Token algorithm used the (hashed) user’s password, those tokens would be invalidated whenever the user changed their password. This is not likely to be what most users expect. Since the new Authentication Token algorithm doesn’t refer to the user’s password, changing the user’s password won’t invalidate outstanding Authentication Tokens. The method UserDatastore.set_uniquifier() can be used by an administrator to change a user’s fs_uniquifier - but nothing the user themselves can do to invalidate their Authentication Tokens. Setting the SECURITY_BACKWARDS_COMPAT_AUTH_TOKEN_INVALIDATE configuration variable will cause the user’s fs_uniquifier to be changed when they change their password, thus restoring prior behavior.

New fast authentication token implementation

Current auth tokens are slow because they use the user’s password (hashed) as a uniquifier (the user id isn’t really enough since it might be reused). This requires checking the (hashed) password against what is in the token on EVERY request - however hashing is (on purpose) slow. So this can add almost a whole second to every request.

To solve this, a new attribute in the User model was added - fs_uniquifier. If this is present in your User model, then it will be used instead of the password for ensuring the token corresponds to the correct user. This is very fast. If that attribute is NOT present - then the behavior falls back to the existing (slow) method.

DB Migration

To use the new UserModel mixins or to add the column user.fs_uniquifier to speed up token authentication, a schema AND data migration needs to happen. If you are using Alembic the schema migration is easy - but you need to add fs_uniquifier values to all your existing data. You can add code like this to your migrations::update method:

# be sure to MODIFY this line to make nullable=True:
op.add_column('user', sa.Column('fs_uniquifier', sa.String(length=64), nullable=True))

# update existing rows with unique fs_uniquifier
import uuid
user_table = sa.Table('user', sa.MetaData(), sa.Column('id', sa.Integer, primary_key=True),
                      sa.Column('fs_uniquifier', sa.String))
conn = op.get_bind()
for row in conn.execute(sa.select([user_table.c.id])):
    conn.execute(user_table.update().values(fs_uniquifier=uuid.uuid4().hex).where(user_table.c.id == row['id']))

# finally - set nullable to false
op.alter_column('user', 'fs_uniquifier', nullable=False)

# for MySQL the previous line has to be replaced with...
# op.alter_column('user', 'fs_uniquifier', existing_type=sa.String(length=64), nullable=False)

Version 3.2.0

Released June 26th 2019

  • (#80) Support caching of authentication token (eregnier opr #839). This adds a new configuration variable SECURITY_USE_VERIFY_PASSWORD_CACHE which enables a cache (with configurable TTL) for authentication tokens. This is a big performance boost for those accessing Flask-Security via token as opposed to session.

  • (#81) Support for JSON/Single-Page-Application. This completes support for non-form based access to Flask-Security. See PR for details. (jwag956)

  • (#79 Add POST logout to enhance JSON usage (jwag956).

  • (#73) Fix get_user for various DBs (jwag956). This is a more complete fix than in opr #633.

  • (#78, #103) Add formal openapi API spec (jwag956).

  • (#86, #94, #98, #101, #104) Add Two-factor authentication (opr #842) (baurt, jwag956).

  • (#108) Fix form field label translations (jwag956)

  • (#115) Fix form error message translations (upstream #801) (jwag956)

  • (#87) Convert entire repo to Black (baurt)

Version 3.1.0

Released never

  • (#53) Use Security.render_template in mails too (noirbizarre opr #487)

  • (#56) Optimize DB accesses by using an SQL JOIN when retrieving a user. (nfvs opr #679)

  • (#57) Add base template to security templates (grihabor opr #697)

  • (#73) datastore: get user by numeric identity attribute (jirikuncar opr #633)

  • (#58) bugfix: support application factory pattern (briancappello opr #703)

  • (#60) Make SECURITY_PASSWORD_SINGLE_HASH a list of scheme ignoring double hash (noirbizarre opr #714)

  • (#61) Allow custom login_manager to be passed in to Flask-Security (jaza opr #717)

  • (#62) Docs for OAauth2-based custom login manager (jaza opr #727)

  • (#63) core: make the User model check the password (mklassen opr #779)

  • (#64) Customizable send_mail (abulte opr #730)

  • (#68) core: fix default for UNAUTHORIZED_VIEW (jirijunkar opr #726)

These should all be backwards compatible.

Possible compatibility issues:

  • #487 - prior to this, render_template() was overridable for views, but not emails. If anyone actually relied on this behavior, this has changed.

  • #703 - get factory pattern working again. There was a very complex dance between Security() instantiation and init_app regarding kwargs. This has been rationalized (hopefully).

  • #679 - SqlAlchemy SQL improvement. It is possible you will get the following error:

    Got exception during processing: <class 'sqlalchemy.exc.InvalidRequestError'> -
'User.roles' does not support object population - eager loading cannot be applied.

    This is likely solvable by removing lazy='dynamic' from your Role definition.

Performance improvements:

  • #679 - for sqlalchemy, for each request, there would be 2 DB accesses - now there is one.

Testing: For datastores operations, Sqlalchemy, peewee, pony were all tested against sqlite, postgres, and mysql real databases.

Version 3.0.2

Released April 30th 2019

  • (opr #439) HTTP Auth respects SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES (pnpnpn)

  • (opr #660) csrf_enabled` deprecation fix (abulte)

  • (opr #671) Fix referrer loop in _get_unauthorized_view(). (nfvs)

  • (opr #675) Fix AttributeError in _request_loader (sbagan)

  • (opr #676) Fix timing attack on login form (cript0nauta)

  • (opr #683) Close db connection after running tests (reambus)

  • (opr #691) docs: add password salt to SQLAlchemy app example (KshitijKarthick)

  • (opr #692) utils: fix incorrect email sender type (switowski)

  • (opr #696) Fixed broken Click link (williamhatcher)

  • (opr #722) Fix password recovery confirmation on deleted user (kesara)

  • (opr #747) Update login_user.html (rickwest)

  • (opr #748) i18n: configurable the dirname domain (escudero)

  • (opr #835) adds relevant user to reset password form for validation purposes (fuhrysteve)

These are bug fixes and a couple very small additions. No change in behavior and no new functionality. ‘opr#’ is the original pull request from https://github.com/mattupstate/flask-security

Version 3.0.1

Released April 28th 2019

  • Support 3.7 as part of CI

  • Rebrand to this forked repo

  • (#15) Build docs and translations as part of CI

  • (#17) Move to msgcheck from pytest-translations

  • (opr #669) Fix for Read the Docs (jirikuncar)

  • (opr #710) Spanish translation (maukoquiroga)

  • (opr #712) i18n: improvements of German translations (eseifert)

  • (opr #713) i18n: add Portuguese (Brazilian) translation (dinorox)

  • (opr #719) docs: fix anchor links and typos (kesara)

  • (opr #751) i18n: fix missing space (abulte)

  • (opr #762) docs: fixed proxy import (lsmith)

  • (opr #767) Update customizing.rst (allanice001)

  • (opr #776) i18n: add Portuguese (Portugal) translation (micael-grilo)

  • (opr #791) Fix documentation for mattupstate#781 (fmerges)

  • (opr #796) Chinese translations (Steinkuo)

  • (opr #808) Clarify that a commit is needed after login_user (christophertull)

  • (opr #823) Add Turkish translation (Admicos)

  • (opr #831) Catalan translation (miceno)

These are all documentation and i18n changes - NO code changes. All except the last 3 were accepted and reviewed by the original Flask-Security team. Thanks as always to all the contributors.

Version 3.0.0

Released May 29th 2017

  • Fixed a bug when user clicking confirmation link after confirmation and expiration causes confirmation email to resend. (see #556)

  • Added support for I18N.

  • Added options SECURITY_EMAIL_PLAINTEXT and SECURITY_EMAIL_HTML for sending respectively plaintext and HTML version of email.

  • Fixed validation when missing login information.

  • Fixed condition for token extraction from JSON body.

  • Better support for universal bdist wheel.

  • Added port of CLI using Click configurable using options SECURITY_CLI_USERS_NAME and SECURITY_CLI_ROLES_NAME.

  • Added new configuration option SECURITY_DATETIME_FACTORY which can be used to force default timezone for newly created datetimes. (see mattupstate/flask-security#466)

  • Better IP tracking if using Flask 0.12.

  • Renamed deprecated Flask-WFT base form class.

  • Added tests for custom forms configured using app config.

  • Added validation and tests for next argument in logout endpoint. (see #499)

  • Bumped minimal required versions of several packages.

  • Extended test matric on Travis CI for minimal and released package versions.

  • Added of .editorconfig and forced tests for code style.

  • Fixed a security bug when validating a confirmation token, also checks if the email that the token was created with matches the user’s current email.

  • Replaced token loader with request loader.

  • Changed trackable behavior of login_user when IP can not be detected from a request from ‘untrackable’ to None value.

  • Use ProxyFix instead of inspecting X-Forwarded-For header.

  • Fix identical problem with app as with datastore.

  • Removed always-failing assertion.

  • Fixed failure of init_app to set self.datastore.

  • Changed to new style flask imports.

  • Added proper error code when returning JSON response.

  • Changed obsolete Required validator from WTForms to DataRequired. Bumped Flask-WTF to 0.13.

  • Fixed missing SECURITY_SUBDOMAIN in config docs.

  • Added cascade delete in PeeweeDatastore.

  • Added notes to docs about SECURITY_USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES.

  • Inspect value of SECURITY_UNAUTHORIZED_VIEW.

  • Send password reset instructions if an attempt has expired.

  • Added “Forgot password?” link to LoginForm description.

  • Upgraded passlib, and removed bcrypt version restriction.

  • Removed a duplicate line (‘retype_password’: ‘Retype Password’) in forms.py.

  • Various documentation improvement.

Version 1.7.5

Released December 2nd 2015

  • Added SECURITY_TOKEN_MAX_AGE configuration setting

  • Fixed calls to SQLAlchemyUserDatastore.get_user(None) (this now returns False instead of raising a TypeError

  • Fixed URL generation adding extra slashes in some cases (see GitHub #343)

  • Fixed handling of trackable IP addresses when the X-Forwarded-For header contains multiple values

  • Include WWW-Authenticate headers in @auth_required authentication checks

  • Fixed error when check_token function is used with a json list

  • Added support for custom AnonymousUser classes

  • Restricted forgot_password endpoint to anonymous users

  • Allowed unauthorized callback to be overridden

  • Fixed issue where passwords cannot be reset if currently set to None

  • Ensured that password reset tokens are invalidated after use

  • Updated is_authenticated and is_active functions to support Flask-Login changes

  • Various documentation improvements

Version 1.7.4

Released October 13th 2014

  • Fixed a bug related to changing existing passwords from plaintext to hashed

  • Fixed a bug in form validation that did not enforce case insensitivity

  • Fixed a bug with validating redirects

Version 1.7.3

Released June 10th 2014

  • Fixed a bug where redirection to SECURITY_POST_LOGIN_VIEW was not respected

  • Fixed string encoding in various places to be friendly to unicode

  • Now using werkzeug.security.safe_str_cmp to check tokens

  • Removed user information from JSON output on /reset responses

  • Added Python 3.4 support

Version 1.7.2

Released May 6th 2014

  • Updated IP tracking to check for X-Forwarded-For header

  • Fixed a bug regarding the re-hashing of passwords with a new algorithm

  • Fixed a bug regarding the password_changed signal.

Version 1.7.1

Released January 14th 2014

  • Fixed a bug where passwords would fail to verify when specifying a password hash algorithm

Version 1.7.0

Released January 10th 2014

  • Python 3.3 support!

  • Dependency updates

  • Fixed a bug when SECURITY_LOGIN_WITHOUT_CONFIRMATION = True did not allow users to log in

  • Added SECURITY_SEND_PASSWORD_RESET_NOTICE_EMAIL configuration option to optionally send password reset notice emails

  • Add documentation for @security.send_mail_task

  • Move to request.get_json as request.json is now deprecated in Flask

  • Fixed a bug when using AJAX to change a user’s password

  • Added documentation for select functions in the flask_security.utils module

  • Fixed a bug in flask_security.forms.NextFormMixin

  • Added CHANGE_PASSWORD_TEMPLATE configuration option to optionally specify a different change password template

  • Added the ability to specify addtional fields on the user model to be used for identifying the user via the USER_IDENTITY_ATTRIBUTES configuration option

  • An error is now shown if a user tries to change their password and the password is the same as before. The message can be customed with the SECURITY_MSG_PASSWORD_IS_SAME configuration option

  • Fixed a bug in MongoEngineUserDatastore where user model would not be updated when using the add_role_to_user method

  • Added SECURITY_SEND_PASSWORD_CHANGE_EMAIL configuration option to optionally disable password change email from being sent

  • Fixed a bug in the find_or_create_role method of the PeeWee datastore

  • Removed pypy tests

  • Fixed some tests

  • Include CHANGES and LICENSE in MANIFEST.in

  • A bit of documentation cleanup

  • A bit of code cleanup including removal of unnecessary utcnow call and simplification of get_max_age method

Version 1.6.9

Released August 20th 2013

  • Fix bug in SQLAlchemy datastore’s get_user function

  • Fix bug in PeeWee datastore’s remove_role_from_user function

  • Fixed import error caused by new Flask-WTF release

Version 1.6.8

Released August 1st 2013

  • Fixed bug with case sensitivity of email address during login

  • Code cleanup regarding token_callback

  • Ignore validation errors in find_user function for MongoEngineUserDatastore

Version 1.6.7

Released July 11th 2013

  • Made password length form error message configurable

  • Fixed email confirmation bug that prevented logged in users from confirming their email

Version 1.6.6

Released June 28th 2013

  • Fixed dependency versions

Version 1.6.5

Released June 20th 2013

  • Fixed bug in flask.ext.security.confirmable.generate_confirmation_link

Version 1.6.4

Released June 18th 2013

  • Added SECURITY_DEFAULT_REMEMBER_ME configuration value to unify behavior between endpoints

  • Fixed Flask-Login dependency problem

  • Added optional next parameter to registration endpoint, similar to that of login

Version 1.6.3

Released May 8th 2013

  • Fixed bug in regards to imports with latest version of MongoEngine

Version 1.6.2

Released April 4th 2013

  • Fixed bug with http basic auth

Version 1.6.1

Released April 3rd 2013

  • Fixed bug with signals

Version 1.6.0

Released March 13th 2013

  • Added Flask-Pewee support

  • Password hashing is now more flexible and can be changed to a different type at will

  • Flask-Login messages are configurable

  • AJAX requests must now send a CSRF token for security reasons

  • Form messages are now configurable

  • Forms can now be extended with more fields

  • Added change password endpoint

  • Added the user to the request context when successfully authenticated via http basic and token auth

  • The Flask-Security blueprint subdomain is now configurable

  • Redirects to other domains are now not allowed during requests that may redirect

  • Template paths can be configured

  • The welcome/register email can now optionally be sent to the user

  • Passwords can now contain non-latin characters

  • Fixed a bug when confirming an account but the account has been deleted

Version 1.5.4

Released January 6th 2013

  • Fix bug in forms with csrf_enabled parameter not accounting attempts to login using JSON data

Version 1.5.3

Released December 23rd 2012

  • Change dependency requirement

Version 1.5.2

Released December 11th 2012

  • Fix a small bug in flask_security.utils.login_user method

Version 1.5.1

Released November 26th 2012

  • Fixed bug with next form variable

  • Added better documentation regarding Flask-Mail configuration

  • Added ability to configure email subjects

Version 1.5.0

Released October 11th 2012

  • Major release. Upgrading from previous versions will require a bit of work to accommodate API changes. See documentation for a list of new features and for help on how to upgrade.

Version 1.2.3

Released June 12th 2012

  • Fixed a bug in the RoleMixin eq/ne functions

Version 1.2.2

Released April 27th 2012

  • Fixed bug where roles_required and roles_accepted did not pass the next argument to the login view

Version 1.2.1

Released March 28th 2012

  • Added optional user model mixin parameter for datastores

  • Added CreateRoleCommand to available Flask-Script commands

Version 1.2.0

Released March 12th 2012

  • Added configuration option SECURITY_FLASH_MESSAGES which can be set to a boolean value to specify if Flask-Security should flash messages or not.

Version 1.1.0

Initial release