Express SSL authentication functionality missing?

Question

I am trying to use SSL authentication with Express as discussed in http://intown.biz/2016/11/22/node-client-auth/.

We are using TypeScript for our server code (in addition to client Angular code) for the strong typing benefit. We are using Express 4.14.1, @types/express": "^4.0.36"

The link above (as is the case with most server side NodeJS) is JavaScript not TypeScript. There is a chunk of code in the link that looks like the following:

app.use(function (req, res, next) {
   if (!req.client.authorized) {
       return res.status(401).send('User is not authorized');
   }
   #examine the cert itself, and even validate based on that!
   var cert = req.socket.getPeerCertificate();
   if (cert.subject) {
       console.log(cert.subject.CN);
   }
   next();
});

The application discussed in the link works (he has a link to download the project).

My problem: The latest types (4.0.36) don’t seem to have req.client or req.socket.getPeerCertificate(). They are not available in my TypeScript code (we do have Express imported/required). Also, I tried passing the TypeScript Request object into a plain JavaScript function and req.client and req.socket.getPeerCertificate() are still undefined. They just aren't there.

Note: We do have Passport initialized also. We are using that to authenticate our web application (client and internal REST API) but we have an external/separate REST API that we wish to secure with SSL certificates. I doubt that having Passport plugged in would cause the the req.client and req.socket.getPeerCertificate() features to disappear?

Can anyone tell me why I am not seeing req.client or req.socket.getPeerCertificate() in my Express code? Did they get replaced with something?

Any help/ acknowledgements with this would be appreciated.

Express SSL authentication functionality missing?

1 Answers