I have a single page app that uses a standard Controller (not ApiController) for retrieving all HTML views, which is done via ajax. However, WebApi is utilized using breezejs for the client to talk to the backend database. I am implementing ASP.NET identity security - should I use MVC cookie authentication or bearer token? I need the solution to illustrate a separate login page, and need a clean server side redirect.
Disclaimer
This is a relatively trivial question because it is very specific and by understanding the difference in authentication between Web API and MVC Controllers this should be fairly straight forward.
Assumptions
Your Web API Project has it's own authentication and does not talk to the MVC project to get a session user or anything
Your ASP.NET MVC Controllers are in a project using forms authentication and storing the user in a session cookie.
When I reference MVC below you undertand these are referencing ASP.NET MVC
Recommendation
What I would do is have your MVC project use OAuth for authentication and store the user in a cookie in the session that you can set and get. Then your controller actions that serve views can be decorated with the Authorize attribute. This will redirect users to the login page when they try to access a view they are not allowed to (as long as that is set up in your web.config
For the Web API Project you can't rely on Session because it sounds like you are decoupling the two projects. This is my recommendation -
When your user is successfully authenticated in your MVC Project make a request to the Web API to an open log in method. This would do some logical test and then either store the user in the DB with a session token of some sort or automatically write the user to the DB.
Now your user that is stored in session in your MVC project you can pass that down to the client and append it to the Breeze calls to your Web API and use that for authentication. You will need to explicitly set up how long that token is for and such but it is pretty easy to append this to the Breeze.js call like such -
var query = breeze.EntityQuery.from('myService').withParameters({'tokenId': thisTokenId});
Now your queries will hit the API with a tokenId parameter that it can use for authentication.
Edit
If you want to set up your ASP.NET MVC Project to use OAuth you can following along with this link -
http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/security/using-oauth-providers-with-mvc
Remember that forms based authentication just means (in a nutshell) that you will provide the user some way of logging in with a form of some sort.
Related
On IIS I have a login website which is used to get credentials from user and authenticate him. Authentication is done through:
FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie
Login application is written in asp.net webapplication.
Now there is another .NET CORE mvc web application which will sit as a child web application to this login website and needs to authenticate through login application.
By default child web application does not comes under login page.
How I can put this web application to use login from parent website?
HttpContext.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated in mvc core child application returns false and can't read logged in user.
You cannot. Traditional web-based auth and specifically FormsAuth utilizes cookies to persist the login state. Cookies are domain-bound, and auth cookies are also encrypted. You can only access the cookie in the first place if both apps are on the same domain, and even then, one can only read it if they can both encrypt and decrypt in the same way. The method of encryption has changed between ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core, so that's out of the window off the bat. ASP.NET used machine keys whereas ASP.NET Core utilizes the Data Protection API.
There's one minor exception, in an ASP.NET MVC 5 site, you can utilize the Data Protection API, through its support of OWIN. The two apps, then, can be made to encrypt/decrypt in the same way. However, by the very fact that you're using FormsAuth means that you cannot achieve this. FormsAuth can only use machine keys, so you'd have to migrate the legacy app to using ASP.NET Identity at the very least, first.
I have ASP.NET MVC and Angular2 application and I'm using Identity Server 3. Typical workflow for user is to log on MVC application which stores obtained token in a cookie.
After successful login, user can use angular2 application for specific operations and it resides on subdomain. Angular application "talks" to web api.
Is it possible to share access token stored in a cookie between mvc and angular (javascript) client. Currently, I'm extracting access token and store it in local storage for using in ng2. It is working, but in my opinion this is not elegant solution
You can implement Direct Authentication in Angular and use SSO.
User will be logged in to ASP.NET MVC, the Angular will hit the identityserver and will returns the token.
You can use the OIDC.JS library to implement implicit flow in Angular.
I'm implement aspnet identity with my MVC5 project. I have configured my project to use cookie authentication, form authentication and external authentication (facebook and google). Everything work fine.
Now i have a requirement to log whenever user log in system and i need to do some further logic. For the form authentication and external authentication i have a controller action that i can add my logic. However for the case user just come back system via cookie, how do i handle it?
I'm sure there's a better way to handle this, but a basic method would be to track all activity by the user, and then use timestamps to determine when a user was last active on your site.
Discussed here: Track user activity/actions for an asp.net mvc website?
OnExecuting filters here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg416513%28VS.98%29.aspx
I am building an AngularJS MVC application, I need some guidance in terms of authentication. I am thinking of building the Authentication using the MVC authentication pipeline. AngularJS code will reside in the MVC application and the root SPA view would be a Razor cshtml. Here is my scenario -
Login page will call a Authenticate API that would return a token
AngularJS has the logic to get the bearer and pass to each of the API requests
There will be multiple ASP.NET WebAPI projects that will be hosted as subdomains.
I also need to call complex dynamic razor templates, this would need the authentication for the MVC controller that will return the razor views. Since MVC follows cookie based authentication, the token gives a 401 status code. How would this work wherein the authentication is shared between MVC and WEB API apps.
I think you would need to get your token from the API project, not the MVC in order to be able to securely call the API.
If you want to share identities across both the API and MVC projects, have them use the same database.
When getting the token from the API, you can get the identity details of the current user from your MVC application. At least, that is how I have done it in the past.
I blogged something along these lines here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/martinkearn/archive/2015/03/25/securing-and-working-securely-with-web-api.aspx however this does not cover the step of using the creds from your MVC login and passing that to the API to get the token.
Hope that helps.
How can I provide authentication / authorization for an asp.net mvc 4 web application that is built on Hot Towel template. All the views are considered as html pages. In this case how can I redirect my user to login view when s/he requests a view that needs specific credentials?
In a project of mine I used CodeFirst Membership Provider along with AccountController from the BreezeJS sample project. As for redirecting, try building a global library that checks if a user is logged in on every module activate call, and if the authentication fails, redirect them to login page.
You can do that in your viewmodel js files and adding attributes to web api controllers. In the viewmodel's activate function when you go to the webserver to pull data, you can secure your API call by adding attributes which will ensure that the API call is executed only when the user is authenticated. In case the user is not authenticated you can return appropriate Response message or 401 or 403 message type. ViewModel can interpret this response type and redirect the user to login view.
Take a look at the ASP.NET SPA template, which uses the standard MVC authentication.
You can take the authentication code from there and put it into the Hot towel project.