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.
Related
I'm working on a service that provides smart (hopefully) integration of different services supporting OAuth 2.0. The focus of our tool is on team work flow improvement, so we're combining Slack, GitHub, Asana (issue tracker), Cezanne (hr tool), etc.
We have ui and backend that work with all those tools (user is authorised to all of them, so I have required access and refresh tokens). We need to be able to hide different parts of the ui depending on person's role in a specific tool. Let's take GitHub as an example. The user can be a repository owner, contributor, company owner (for business account), etc, so those user might need different ui based on their rights.
Originally I was hesitant implementing authorisation on my own (another custom authorisation system is the last thing this world needs), I wanted to take advantage of other services' authorisation mechanisms and just create a lightweight wrapper around them. It seemed like a reasonable idea at first, but I can't figure out how to implement it and Google doesn't give valuable advice which means: 99.99% I'm trying to do something stupid, 00.01% I'm trying to do something rare/innovative.
I hoped to take advantage of OAuth 2.0 but it doesn't seem to support what we need. The closest thing is scopes but it doesn't look very relevant to our scenario.
The only idea I have for now is to create our own authorisation system and integrate other services using kind of reverse engineering. So I would request user's GitHub account details using API and apply him roles in our system appropriately: Owner for repository A, contributor for repository B, owner of company C, etc. I will have to reverse-engineer the permission for each role (i. e. repository owner can not change company name). And we would have to keep user roles for each service: so instead of typical Admin/User/Manager/etc. we will get: OwnerOfGitHubRepository (for repositoryA), ManagerOfAsanaTeam (for team B), etc.
It would be awesome if OAuth 2.0 services had an endpoint that would return the permissions available for a current user.
I'm not a security engineer, so I might be missing something obvious. So wanted to ask you guys for advice before investing into the implementation mentioned above.
The word, "authorization", is used in two different contexts.
In one context, authorization means "who has what permissions". Solutions for this authorization is "identity management".
In the other context, authorization means "who grants what permissions to whom". Solutions for this authorization is "OAuth".
In some cases, you may have to handle these two authorizations simultaneously. See this question and this answer for details.
You tagged your question with identityserver4.
This Issue for identityserver3 from last year may interest you.
But I'm afraid most providers don't support this oauth2 profile (yet).
UMA seems to be an oauth2 way to enable fine grained authorization, but may not be the best solution.
This is not like other questions you might find similar. My issue is way bigger.
Scenario:
I have 3 websites. All of them have a common database for authentication and stuff.
Problem is that i will need to expand to 2 more sites, which means more maintenance in login screens and so on. So i will dedicate time to make a "central website" to manage users, access, etc.
Also, Need to implement OpenId for Microsoft Works accounts (ie, Azure tenants).
DDBB User Model: (Simplified)
All users are in the same central database. Which does not contains
anything non-user related.
User is personal on all applications.
Users can have different Roles
Each "User-Role" is mapped to an application, a server and a
database.
Problem:
Created a site in AspNet Core, without any authentication done so I can do it myself since I found that mapping Aspnet Identity tables was no-go because of incopatibilities and overriding is way to complicated, specially when dealing with Managers.
So, Tried and got working a simple Authentication page using HttpContext.Authentication.SignInAsync and CookieAuthentication. Which works well and there is no need to use any of the Identity's implementation (which is not compatible with my backend).
But then I added UseOpenIdConnectAuthentication to have the OpenId auth, but I have no idea how to use it since its suposed to work out of the box when using Identity and when checked documentation they use this code in an controller action: signInManager.ConfigureExternalAuthenticationProperties and I do not have any SignInManager since Im not using Aspnet Identity.
Questions:
Is coping the source of ConfigureExternalAuthenticationProperties to make it work in my site an aceptable solution?
Should I continue to override all SignInManager methods and also probably implement other classes to make Aspnet Identity work with my model?
Tried Mapping the properties to my columns just to test it out and it gave me non debuggable errors, which i dont like to even think about the problems this can give me in the future. For example one error was that it coudnt parse byte[] to string.
How can I implement Microsoft Work Accounts authentication and Database authentication in the same AspNet Site?
Bonus topic
Recently I feel like programming is becoming Configuring instead of coding. Is it just me? Are we now Professional Configurers?
Thanks
I'm working for a non-profit that is trying to create a collection of services that will allow them to do a few things:
Create/Manage Users
Create/Manger Competitions
Create/Manager Events(a Competition is made up of many Events)
Logistics
Etc.
Here are some of the requirements:
Host on Azure
Accounts are created using the user's own email address (can be any domain)
Each service must be independent of each other
System should be accessible from anywhere(browser, mobile app, etc.)
Once a user logs in, access to other systems should be available(if needed or depending on permissions)
-services can talk to each other(we've successfully done a POC on this using Azure Active Directory)
I've spent some time researching the possible ways to tackle this, including looking at articles like this:
http://bitoftech.net/2014/10/27/json-web-token-asp-net-web-api-2-jwt-owin-authorization-server/
It sounds like JWT is the way to go, but I want to make sure that this architecture approach lends itself to flexibility down the road. I'm willing to learn/user any technology as long as it plays along .Net, Web Api, and MVC.
My initial idea was to set each "system" as a Web API, which is pretty straightforward. My concern is authentication/authorization. The million dollar question then becomes:
How can I authenticate a user on a browser/mobile/desktop app and then make use of the other services(APIs), where each service can verify if the user is authenticated independent of other services.
For example, lets say I am using the web app(browser) and register as a user(using User service) in order to register for a competition(Competition service). what kind of technologies/architecture would need to be used for both services to use the same authentication mechanism?
I am not new to MVC or Web API but I am to a scenario like this, so all help or advice is greatly appreciate it. For any that are interested, this is the non-profit: http://worldjumprope.org/
They are doing some cool stuff in terms of outreach and spreading the love for jump rope. Their goal is to be able to help people all around the world and provide a way to for them to come together and compete. They've been doing it for years, growing each year, all for free and out of pure passion for the sport. Help me help them!
Azure Active Directory can help you with your need.
About the security/Auth mechanism, simply put, it is like you get a token from Azure Active Directory to be able to use it to do authentication for a certain Audiences/Tenants.
And in your architecture, when you acquire a Token, you can specify if you are going to use it against a certain audience or it will work for a list of audiences or all audiences in a specific tenant or in a multi tenant scenario.
Here is a link to a video about AAD Single Sign on:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/videos/overview-of-single-sign-on/
You can download the AAD Solutions arcutecture from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45909
Also maybe worth looking at Identity Server - https://github.com/IdentityServer/IdentityServer3.
Same concept as Azure AD in terms of tokens, but perhaps with greater options for what you choose as a data store for your user information.
There are lots of demos and source code on the site, particularly around the different types of authentication flow \ service to service authentication
I feel a bit overwhelmed right now with how to approach building an SSO solution for a project I'm taking on. I understand that I need a centralized login site, but, I'd like input on what framework I should be using to achieve this. I've been reading a bit about Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), but, the lack of documentation and code samples is quite disappointing. DotNotOpenAuth sounds like it has much more usage by the community than WIF, but, I'm not sure if that's the right framework for me to use given that I am not going to be letting third-party accounts be used for logging in.
There are multiple user data stores to take into account as well; active directory and a SQL Server database.
I really don't care what framework I use so long as it's simple and intuitive; I don't want an overly complex solution. Documentation and samples are also a plus! I already have experience with creating custom role providers and membership providers; those were a breeze and easy to do.
Here is a very quick visual of the structure I'm dealing with:
Refer: Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide and Identity Developer Training Kit. There's WIF samples there.
In terms of what you want to achieve, ADFS v2.0 will get you most of the way but it can only authenticate against AD. For SQL server, use IdentityServer and then federate ADFS and IdentityServer.
Have a look at SAML. It is designed to address SSO. You may also want to look into OpenID.
There are enterprise products out there, such as CA Site Minder or IBM Tivoli for this kind if thing. They are not cheap because building a custom solution for this will be quite a feat.
If you are .NET based - then .NET 4.5 (which includes WIF) is the way to go.
But the framework will be you simplest problem. Building that kind of security infrastructure is hard. Have a look at both the book and idenitity server from nzpcmad's answer as a starting point.
As far as cross-platform goes, SAML tends to lead the pack. There are many implementations (java, php, perl). As Dominick (#leastprivilege) mentioned, if every application is .Net based, WS-Fed via WIF is the way to go. (btw, Dominick is the man when it comes to WIF - definitely hit his blog and forums up if you plan on exploring that route)
OpenId and OAuth are alternatives that you will hear about. They are somewhat less secure (the trust is in the user, rather than the infrastructure) and you will find that you will have to build a provider in order to support sign-in using your own user store.
Regardless of the route you choose, be prepared to do a lot of reading and learning. Check out the wikipedia articles above for a nice overview of how these technologies work, and don't be afraid to ask questions..
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.