I have an app that uses my own membership system. It uses ASP.NET MVC 3 which I'm updating to ASP.NET MVC 5. It's not possible to change the membership to use a new one like ASP.NET Identity. But, for the authentication side, do you think it is a good idea to replace my auth-ticket system with OWIN.Security? Are there any traps that I should know about?
The Katana security middleware is independent from ASP.NET Identity. You can use them both or just one.
There are some cases where it makes very good sense to use just the Owin/Katana middleware, but not involve aspnet identity.
I just rolled up a prototype webforms application using OpenID Connect against an Azure Domain. My domain is Federated with an on-prem ADFS. By the time I got OpenID Connect and the GraphAPI working, I realized that I didn't really need much from aspnet identity.
I use the GraphAPI to grab extra info about the user and their group memberships, and I am adding that info as claims on the user principal... my site's code can operate against just the information in the claims.
Of course, if you want to do any custom profile or role stuff in your application, it probably makes sense to link it to aspnet identity too.. create an aspnet identity user when a new user authenticates, map that user's AD groups to roles, etc. Then you can manage application specific data for the user directly in the application via aspnet identity, while relying on Azure AD for the core authentication, basic profile, and group/role assignments.
Related
im developing a .net core mvc application with authentication against azure active Directory. My Problem is, that i have two different azure avtice directories which are undepentandend to eachother. Based on the user Input (mail or employenumber) i will decide which active Directory should used.
Any idea or reference?
Thank You!
You're describing a multi-tenant application where the AAD common endpoint is used as the entry point to the application rather than a specific AAD login page. You can configure your application to trust more than one AAD instance. It's rather involved, but MS had good documentation on how to adopt a single tenant app to multi-tenant. I'd also highly recommend Vittirio's blog as a place to learn about AAD auth, and while you're at it, his book titled 'Modern Authentication with Azure Active Directory for Web Applications'
Once you've turned on multitenancy for your application, you'll want to handle AAD validation yourself by checking the tenant id in the incoming SSO request. You do this by overriding SecurityTokenValidated in UseOpenIdConnectAuthentication. You can refer to this example where the code validates against a database.
There are other considerations such as admin consent where an AAD admin has to grant access to restricted permissions to your application. Good explaination here.
There is a very good reliable open-source project for that (Identity Server)
https://github.com/IdentityServer/IdentityServer4
And also you can check that (openiddict)
https://github.com/openiddict/openiddict-core
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.
I'm working on an MVC4 site using SimpleMembership to handle user accounts and role based authentication. We have another site and we'd like to implement a single sign on system allowing users from the existing site to log in to the one I am building. What would be the best way to achieve this and hopefully leverage to the existing roles based authorization I'm using on the MVC4 site. Is it possible to have multiple membership providers (i.e. use the built in one and if the user is not found, attempt to authenticate via a custom provider that I'll write (once I work out how!). Or would it be better to abandon the built in membership/roles and roll my own?
I also thought of letting WebSecurity check the local database and if the user is not found, query the 2nd database and if the users credentials are valid, create a local account for them. One issue with this approach is if a user called Fred registers on the MVC site, and then a user from the other site called Fred logs in, we couldn't create them a local account with the same username. We could prefix/suffix the username with some text to indicate that they are from the other site but then we lose the single sign on feature.
We will also want to integrate AD authentication for staff in the future.
So essentially I'm looking for the best way to authenticate users from multiple databases and keep using roles based authentication?
I've also done a little digging was wondering if ADFS might be useful for this.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!
I recommend the use of an Identity server to handle all your login request and switching to a claim based authentication instead of a role based authentication if you can.
I personally went with Thinktecture IdentityServer
pluralsight.com have a good course on it.
Thinktecture IdentityServer is build on top of simple Membership and it supports multiple protocol such as
WS-Federation
WS-Trust
OpenID Connect
OAuth2
ADFS Integration
Simple HTTP
I recommend checking it
Good Luck
I'm new to the ASP.NET world. Since I want to use the ORM it seems I would want an Entity to represent the User or Member or whatever, not some data tucked away by the forms authentication api. In fact I don't see how I can live without one.
How do people deal with this? Roll your own authentication? Or is there a best practice for incorporating forms authentication with the Entity Framework?
In short, since I need a User and Role Entity for queries anyway, should I skip the forms auth or find a way to use it?
Thanks
EF and Forms Auth are really two different areas. You can use Forms Auth without ASP.NET Membership very easily and roll your own provider with very little effort.
This tutorial will show you how:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172766(VS.80).aspx
With ASP.NET MVC you should really use standard Auth since you can manage access to controllers using attributes for Roles very easily.
FormsAuthentication on its own does not care about the identity store and can validate only credentials stored in the web.config <credentials> section, through the Authenticate method. Standard implementations of the login page use the static Membership class to manage the identities and credentials in the MembershipProvider specified in the config file (usually SqlProfileProvider).
However, you don't have to use the membership provider functionality of ASP.NET to maintain your identities and you can still use FormsAuthentication just fine. The forms authentication control flow shows that forms authentication deals primarily with creating and maintaining the auth ticket for the user in a cookie. It does not deal with the user identity or profile itself, as it does not care about those.
Thus, you can safely use EF to maintain your user profiles, including credentials and do authentication of the provided credentials in your login page, while still using FormsAuthnetication.
If I have an ASP.Net MVC applicaiton where users can only access via an NTLM authenticate account, do I need to use ASP.Net Membership services and issue cookies?
Or do I have completely the wrong end of this particular stick?
You never have to use the asp.net membership provider, it is just an option. If all you need to do is authenticating the user, NTML works just fine by itself. If you need to use the user's identity for further authorization or personalization on the site you need to use some sort of user management, but it doesn't have to be the membership provider, you can write your own or your own.
I doesn't make any difference whether you are using mvc or web-forms.