I am implementing OIDC/OAuth authentication & authorization in a classic ASP.net MVC application using OWIN. For API calls that are not supported by Microsoft's OIDC middleware, it appears that I have some choices.
I can craft and make rest request directly to the IdP.
I can use classes contained within System.IdentityModel.
I can use classes contained within Microsoft.IdentityModel.
I can install and use IdentityModel built by Dominick Baier and Brock Allen
There may be other choices too. Among the above, it appears that IdentityModel by Dominick and Brock is the most mature, advanced and complete.
Given that I am using classic ASP.net MVC with OWIN, should I favor one method over the other or will I need to use a combination of the above? Where would I use one over the other? What would be some pros and cons?
I know there are some older posts comparing System.IdentityModel with Microsoft.IdentityModel, but I more interested in what's best in 2020. :-)
Mark
IDENTITY MODEL
For C# the IdentityModel HttpClient extension methods provide a nice facade over OAuth messages, as in this example class of mine.
SYSTEM.IDENTITYMODEL
This has some classes you can use in a Server Side web app, eg for claims / principals.
MICROSOFT.IDENTITYMODEL
This mostly contains old / redundant WS-Federation stuff and is best ignored.
OWIN
This does cookie handling for server side web apps in addition to handling OAuth / OIDC messages. IdentityModel is more token based than cookie based.
SINGLE PAGE APPS
My personal preference these days is to develop Single Page Apps. In this setup I would use IdentityModel libraries if building C# APIs.
SUMMARY
I would definitely use the IdentityModel Client library for the extra requests you refer to.I don't think it will do cookie issuing though, so maybe continue to use OWIN Openid Connect for that.
Related
I'm using identity server 4 as an authentication server, and have successfully demonstrated authenticating clients for access to my MVC web application and my Web API application, both running on IIS under .NET 4.7.
The problem I'm having is finding the correct approach for ensuring clients are only able to access the endpoints they should after the authentication process. EG, I have two clients, one with a write scope, and one without. How do I ensure the one without is only able to access endpoints that will read my data and not amend it?
The best method I've found so far is to use an authorization attribute like this:
https://github.com/IdentityModel/Thinktecture.IdentityModel/blob/master/source/WebApi/ScopeAuthorizeAttribute.cs
However, this is marked as obsolete and I'm unaware of the version based on OWIN middleware is mentions. Considering my MVC and Web Api applications are unable to be updated to .NET core applications, what would be the best approach?
Since the scope claims are available within the ASP.Net pipeline you can implement your own access control filter quite easily. It may be that that particular library is obsolete but the practice of enforcing scope in an MVC/WebAPI filter is certainly entirely valid.
I'm wondering if it is possible to use Thinktecture IdentityServer simply as an STS alongside an existing web app? That is, I want to use ASP.NET Identity for authentication in my web app because I want to use all of the built-in functionality like 2-factor, etc. However, I want to use IdentityServer as an STS to serve up tokens to access my web services (WCF and Web API).
I thought perhaps I need to authenticate normally through ASP.NET Identity, then again through IdentityServer to get the token. However, this seems heavy and wasteful.
Is there perhaps some way to authenticate against the IdentityServer directly from ASP.NET Identity? I saw the sample where we can integrate the two together (IdentityServer using ASP.NET Identity), but it seemed like I might lose the ability to use all of the built-in stuff like two-factor workflows.
I'm hoping I'm way off base here, and apologies if I have some fundamental misunderstandings about how IdentityServer works. Perhaps there is a way to get all of the added functionality that ASP.NET Identity provides from within IdentityServer?
Identity Server will handle all authentication, no need for double sign-ins if you are using it correctly.
You'll have to implement two factor authentication yourself though as it is not currently supported by Identity Server. However extending Identity Server's existing support for ASP.NET Identity to allow for two factor authentication is definately possible.
I think your first port of call should be to have a bit of a deep dive into the Identity Server documentation and the OpenID Connect protocol. After that check out UserService documentation and then derive from the existing ASP.NET Identity UserService to add support for two factor authentication.
Background:
I've implemented a Web-API (.NET), now I need to do the most important thing,
Secure it.
As I investigate this topic I understand that the common way is the Bearer Token.
Now we getting to my problem.
My Problem
On one side:
Every article I saw (that explains the concept and the way to implement it over .NET) starts from a project with a Web API template that holds MVC and Web API and in the authentication field choose one option from Individual / Organizational / Windows .
On the other side:
I don't need a MVC project, I need only Web API (without any GUI) that the reason I choose the empty project and check the Web API checkbox, in that way I cant choose an authentication type, I forced to start with no authentication.
Questions:
1.Do I bound to use MVC to get authentication ? if not how can I do it from pure Web API project ?
2.Maybe I will create an Authentication Server (that only generates tokens) from that Web API template (with the possibility of choosing authentication type) ? (and use the token on the real Web API)
3.There is any benefits of implement the Authentication Server on a different project and on different server ? (Kerberos style )
P.S I want to use an out of the box solution because the security aspect is the most important one (to my opinion) and should be flawless.
I wrote a blog on this topic called 'Securing and securely calling Web API and [Authorize]': http://blogs.msdn.com/b/martinkearn/archive/2015/03/25/securing-and-working-securely-with-web-api.aspx. I think if you read this, you'll have all your answers.
The Web API template does include MVC by default so that you get the automated docs feature (which is a great feature to have). However the authentication part is related to a core ASP.net feature, not specific to MVC or Web API. You'll need to enable one of the authentication options to secure your API using .net's built in security features.
If you do not want the MVC project that comes with Web API, just delete it after the project has been created. It is contained within the 'areas' folder. If you delete that folder, you'll be running on pure web api.
To answer your specific questions:
1) No you do not need an MVC project to secure an API project. You can use the [Authorize] attribute on your API controllers and actions.
2) an authentication server gets created by default with the web api template. You can access it and get tokens via http:///Token
3) No, you need to use the api itself to serve valid tokens for secured controller/action requests
Hope that helps. If not, then please be a bit more specific with your questions.
I have been implementing a skeleton Claims Based architecture for our services and websites. I'm using WIF, .NET 4.5, MVC / Web Api.
I have the STS (WS-Federation / WS-Trust) and several Relying Parties implemented, and all is working fine.
Now, I want to be able to authenticate in one Relying Party and use that same token (the bootstrap token, I assume) to make Ajax calls to another Relying Party. I can get the Bootstrap Token down in the HTML (is this even a good idea?), and add it to the Ajax call headers as some form of Authentication (Basic, etc).
What I don't know is how to intercept the request in the final Relying party, and "tell" WIF to use that bootstrap token and do it's magic with it (Load, Validate, Authenticate, Authorize, Create Principal, Create Session Token, Write it down in a cooke).
I guess I could do all this by hand using the available classes, but there must be a point where I can just hook up for this. Probably around the SAM / FAM modules, but I can't understand exactly how.
Any ideas?
Thanks
SAML is not a good fit for being consumed in html. The format is complex and relies too much on WS-Security for cryptography. I see more adoption these days of OAuth2 (It was OAuth-Wrap in the past), although is complex as well. If you want to explore that path, I recommend the ThinkTecture Identity Server as a quick solution.
http://weblogs.thinktecture.com/cweyer/2012/11/oauth2-in-thinktecture-identityserver-v2-implicit-grant-flow-with-javascript.html
Thanks
Pablo.
I am in the process of re-writing some very outdated .NET 2.0 SOAP web services for my company. So I am rewriting them using MVC3 RESTful. This method would simplify the usage of our services for our client base (over 500 clients using our current SOAP services) who are on multiple platforms and languages.
I am looking for a BETTER method of authorization for the RESTful services, than what the previous developer used for our .NET 2.0 SOAP web services (he basically just had the client pass in a GUID as a parameter and matched it in code behind).
I have looked into oAuth and I want to use it, HOWEVER, I have been told, from my superiors, that this method is TOO complicated for the "level" of clients that connect to our services and want me to find another simpler way for them to connect but still have authorization. Most of our clients have BASIC to no knowledge of programming (either we helped them get their connection setup OR they hired some kid to do it for them). This is another reason that the superiors want a different method, because we can't have all 500+ (plus 5-10 new clients a day) asking for help on how to implement oAuth.
So, is there another way to secure the MVC3 services other than passing a preset GUID?
I have looked into using Windows Authentication on the services site, but is this really logical for 500+ clients to use?
Is there an easy and secure method of authorizing multiple users on multiple platforms to use the MVC3 RESTful services that a end-client can implement very easily?
Thanks.
If you don't want anything too complicated, have a look at Basic HTTP Authentication. If you use it over SSL then it should be safe enough and also easy enough to implement for your clients. The Twitter API actually used this up until a few months ago when they switched to OAuth.
You want to distinguish between authentication and authorization. What you are looking for is authentication and indeed as Caps suggests, the easiest way may be to use HTTP BASIC authentication along with SSL to make the password is not compromised.
You could look into other means of authentication e.g. DIGEST or more advanced using ADFS or SAML (ADFS could be compelling since you're in .NET). Have a look at OpenID Connect too - it is strongly supported by Google and has great support.
Once you are done with that, you may want to consider authorization - if you need it that is - to control what a given client can do on a given resource / item / record. For that you can use claims-based authorization as provided in the .NET framework or if you need finer-grained authorization, look into XACML.
OAuth wouldn't really solve your issue since OAuth is about delegation of authorization i.e. I let Twitter write to my Facebook account on my behalf.
HTH