Like SO, I am gonna depend on many Open ID providers to provide user authentication and I will use my own authorization methods. but I'm still in development phase, and don't want to work with real OpenID providers currently, what approach can I use to test my users and their activities in the website (w/o TDD), to emulate real users but not really use Open ID providers.
No need to make auto-transfer of users into real OpenID servers (when moving to production mode) since the current users are just for testing purposes and Unit-test code.
I guess, I need a User Service layer which provides a higly abstracted way to deal with users, so that the move to the real Open ID providers can be smooth in the future and doesn't affect the logic of my already written code.
Using C#.Net 4, ASP.Net MVC 3, Ninject
DotNetOpenAuth provides both server and client portions of OpenID and can be used to run your own OpenID provider for local testing.
Give your site members their own OpenIDs with the provider support included in this library.
Sample relying party and provider web sites show you just how to do it.
I simply register my test id as user with various organisations. I don't see anything wrong with that. I get to see the various responses and their differences.
I found it terribly easy to code for openid consumer. Just need to understand the sequence of responses. Draw the UML sequence diagram to aid your understanding before you start coding. No need to fake openId. Otherwise, whip up an openid server yourself.
Your services shouldn't depend on OpenID. Just have OpenID plug into an authentication module to provide a local user principal. In development, you can have the auth module return a fake user principal with the permissions you desire.
In a beta environment you could turn on OpenID and use test accounts from any OpenID provider. Having to log in during the development phase will just slow down all the developers. Any authentication bug or internet outage will kill everyone's productivity.
Related
I am exploring the possibility of using OAuth 2.0 in future projects.
What I see is that OAuth is built on the concept of [Resource Owner]+[Web Site Client]+[Authorization Server]+[Resource Server]. A lot of the articles and tutorials in the internet talks about using Facebook, Twitter, etc. as the Authorization/Resource Server, which is all cool and good.
What I am struggling to mentally picture is if I am the one who is going to create my own Auth/Resource servers, why will I choose to go this way? What are the scenarios that otherwise may not be ordinarily be achieved through ASP.NET MVCs form based authentication and the [Authorization] attribute model?
Take a look at the RFC 6749 - it talks about usecases. Its good comprehensible RFC.
Usecase verbatim from RFC:
o Third-party applications are required to store the resource
owner's credentials for future use, typically a password in
clear-text.
o Servers are required to support password authentication, despite
the security weaknesses inherent in passwords.
o Third-party applications gain overly broad access to the resource
owner's protected resources, leaving resource owners without any
ability to restrict duration or access to a limited subset of
resources.
o Resource owners cannot revoke access to an individual third party
without revoking access to all third parties, and must do so by
changing the third party's password.
o Compromise of any third-party application results in compromise of
the end-user's password and all of the data protected by that
password.
Read Aaron's article - OAuth2-Simplified
Recently I learnt OAuth with help of Apigee,you can use anything like google API.
Here is my github project oauth20_apigee if it helps checkout.
It depends on what your short and long term goals are going to be. In my opinion, the short and dirty points are:
OAuth 2.0 is typically used to grant an application access to specific resources on behalf of the user which is a great mechanism for allowing 3rd party applications extend your product. So if you're building an API, then this would be great for you.
Likewise, it is beneficial in that it not only enables someone else to extend your product, but you can also extend theirs. For instance, you could create a trusted application for another product, they could link their customer directly to your module (for lack of a better term) without requiring a separate login, provided you support their token format (typically through the use of a federated identity provider)
If you build your application to support 3rd party OAuth authentication, you can improve the user's experience for registering with your site. By allowing them to use their choice of authentication (e.g. google, facebook, twitter, etc), they won't have to enter in a lot of personal information for umpteen millionth time. You just need to take their authentication and collect any additional information you need. Then create an internal account for them and associate their provider with their account
You can emulate single sign on through the use of a federated IDP, again, enhancing the user experience. For instance, if the user is already logged into google, your product can accept the token and simply request additional scope be added to the token without the user having to sign in again.
Implementing your own OAuth provider is a different beast and I'm not sure there's a ton of benefit to it unless you're planning on being the next Facebook or something.
I think there is a lot to gain from using OAuth. I believe that enabling these credentials in your web sites provides a significant advantage because millions of users already have accounts with these external providers. These users may be more inclined to sign up for your site if they do not have to create and remember a new set of credentials. Also, after a user has logged in through one of these providers, you can incorporate social operations from the provider.
However there is always the devils advocate and this article explains why OAuth could be a possible sercurity hole in an application if not implemented correctly:
http://www.thread-safe.com/2012/01/problem-with-oauth-for-authentication.html
I'm going to be undertaking a large project for a client of mine. I need to write an IDP (identity provider) that will handle single-sign-on to multiple apps by a number of different authentication methods (such as SAML, OAuth, Form-based auth, HTTP Basic auth). I'd also need the ability to add in additional types of authentication as the app grows.
The basic idea would be that we'd have three different components to the app. One would be the IDP. Another would be a data-store that contains user accounts, the apps they want to use, etc. The third would be a GUI front-end that allows users to sign into apps.
It seems that there are some existing gems that handle authentication, like https://github.com/onelogin/ruby-saml and https://github.com/intridea/omniauth. My question is, am I overcomplicating this project -- would I just be able to use existing gems like these to act as the IDP, or is this a project where I'd need to read specs and implement them myself in Ruby?
Using something like SAML toolkit for Ruby on Rails adapted to work with ADFS server, you can integrate with ADFS. Now you can leverage ADFS features:
Interface with Facebook etc. via Azure ACS
Interface with Azure Active Directory and hence SSO to SaaS applications
Azure Active Directory Multi Factor Authentication
BYOD via the Web Applications Proxy
OAuth on ADFS 3.0
and so on. The list is expanding all the time.
Once you hook into these standards. you just inherit all the new features as they are released.
UPDATE: I failed to mention earlier that we want solution that will be flexible with authenticating users from within our databases or by asking other servers to tell us if the user is authenticated. It is also worth mentioning that these other servers are not under our control so we can't enforce a specific user model.
I had a long and hard read on OAuth and OpenID but they are both not a suitable solution for our situation and will make the process harder to the user. This is something that has been solved a thousand times, yet I cannot find the solution.
What we are looking for is a framework that can be used in a REST services server to authenticate users (no third-party clients involved) with their username and password.
The solution must not pass the username and password except the first time on login and use tokens for further authentication. Even though OAuth does use tokens, it is designed to allow third-party clients access to the service-providers resources. That is not the case here, the services are for our own application only, the only thing needed is user authentication.
What do you guys think is the most appropriate solution?
Configuration:
-Spring server that provides RESTful services with our thinking going towards using Spring Security with some user management and token management framework.
-iOS Device that will be making HTTPS calls to the server.
What we ultimately want is to have the device send a login request and receive a token if the login was successful, later on make requests using that token. Just like Facebook, excluding third-party involvement.
Is there something that is ready to be configured in our server? Or should we consider building our own token management, comparison and generation software?
Is using Spring-Security with an iOS application without involving storing cookies or redirecting to pages possible?
OpenStack offers as part of it's many projects related to open source cloud... the project Keystone. Which does this pretty much exactly what you want.
You might want to check it out here:
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/keystone/
We've got an MVC website that is going to use DotNetOpenAuth for signing in users via OpenID and I've found this really helpful template and other more simple examples that will help me get started on that end. However, what I don't have fully figured out is how to provide my users with a way to create an account with us if they don't want to use OpenID.
I can see two options here, write some custom code that allows OpenID to piggy back on the standard membership provider. Or, have the end site only use OpenID via DotNetOpenAuth and build an Identity Provider for my users to sign up on. That way the site would only see OpenID users and wouldn't know a difference.
Are these my only options? I haven't been able to find anything on standing up my own Identity Provider, just the relying party templates. I think I can get by with just putting OpenID on top of the default membership provider, but that feels like I'm doing it wrong, since I should be able to just stand up an identity provider.
So, in my situation, what would be the best way to support membership via local account creation and OpenID via DotNetOpenAuth?
Setting up your own identity provider so that your site only speaks OAuth is certainly an option, but a non-trivial one. I wouldn't recommend setting up an identity provider unless you intend your customers to use it for logging into other sites.
Also keep in mind that most web sites don't use OAuth to authenticate (since it's not an authentication protocol anyway). OpenID is more popular.
The project template you linked to in your question demonstrates allowing users to log in via several OpenID Providers and includes support for linking user accounts.
As for supporting local user accounts as well, I suggest you take a look at the source code behind nerddinner.com. I would advise against using the ASP.NET Membership provider for the OpenID/OAuth accounts as the interface doesn't fit very well, but folks have made it work so you can too if you want.
I've been research WIF a lot recently and am still quite a bit confused about some of the specifics. I understand that if you're using ADFS that it's great, but that is not my scenario. Within my organization there are at least 3 main security systems. I have tried to get the company to use AD for all internal uses, but it's just not going to happen. In order to create a unified programming model, I've contemplated building add'l STS's for authenticating/authorizing.
Is this really wise? Most of the stuff I've read says just use ADFS. If not, then don't bother. Is it worth using WIF for the unified claims model when the process of creating custom STS's can be difficult?
What do you do in a case where not every user has an AD login to map to. For example, we have many seasonal employees that never actually log in to a machine with a personal account. The machine is logged in in the morning by a supervisor and the employee scans his/her badge and the employee id is used.
We are creating a new application whose code base will be accessed by at least three different sets of users. One group is internal (using AD) the other two would probably use asp.net default membership (okay, so two different sets of user stores). I'd love to be able to use WIF to unify authorization/auth, but with WIF it seems to want to go in the opposite direction. It de-emphasizes authentication and just kind of assumes it's all good when in many case that is the main concern. How could I leverage WIF in this scenario, if at all?
I've tried reading this article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff359105.aspx
and I read up on StarterSTS which I still need to read up on a bit more. I've also watched the videos by the author of StarterSTS. I'm failing to really put everything together. It feels like WIF won't be useful for me, but I feel like it should since all I'm really after is a unified model of authentication and authorization. Thanks
What you want is similar to the Federated Identity model. You can build a Federated STS (like StarterSTS) that would normalize your claims for your application. You can then use something like ACS / AD FS V2 to federate these Identity Providers. Reading the Claims Based Identity Guide is a good start as well. When you Claims enable your application you can add more and more Identity Providers and use the Federation Provider to control the claims and set rules.
We just released a new version of the guide on CodePlex (the docs and code) while it goes through the production process.