Access control & data security

Authentication and authorization mechanisms in your chat app let you decide who can access what resources based on identity and permissions.

Additonal security measures let you send and receive messages and files through your chat app, preventing unauthorized users from accessing that data.

User authentication

In your chat app, you need to have a process of verifying the identity of all users, ensuring that they are who they claim to be.

Chat SDK doesn't provide a built-in authentication mechanism, and you'll need to implement user verification in your app on your own. Typically, this could involve a login system where users provide their credentials (username and password), token-based authentication, Single Sign-On (SSO), two-factor authentication (2FA), or external authentication services like OAuth.

User authorization

A chat app will require an authorization mechanism granting or denying access to specific PubNub resources or functionalities based on the authenticated user's permissions and privileges.

This way, you don't let your chat users delete or modify each other's metadata, publish messages on private channels, or remove messages that other chat members wrote.

Chat SDK provides authorization in your chat app through Access Manager - a secure, token-based permission administrator that lets you regulate clients' access to such PubNub resources as channels and users. By making a single call to Access Manager API, you can define multiple user permissions saying who can do what with your client or server app data.

Depending on whether you create a client or server app, there are three possible actors involved in the authorization cycle: PubNub (server), your own server, and a client device. For more details, read the authorization workflow.

Enable Access Manager

Access Manager is not enabled by default. To use it in your app, you must allow it on your app's keyset in the Admin Portal and then initialize the Chat SDK with secretKey.