RESTful authentication using ACS - asp.net-mvc

I have a web application written in ASP .NET MVC 3. I'm using ACS for authenticating my users and I defined Google, Windows Live, Yahoo! and Facebook as identity providers.
Now I want to expose a REST API for the application (I want to create an app for WP7). Some of the calls require that the user is authenticated so I thought I should pass a token in the authentication header of the request. What is the best approach to do this with ACS? Is the ACS able to provide me these kind of tokens or am I responsible for writing the code that generates these tokens?

Yes. ACS supports this scenario with "Simple Web Tokens" (SWT). See here, or any of the "released" documentation in ACS. ACS v2, currenlty in labs, has expanded support for WS-Fed, WS-trust, etc (this is what you are using today).
Here's a blog post I wrote with more information for the phone.

Related

Access Microsoft graph resources with an auth0 login

I'm having difficulties finding documentation for auth0 and microsoft graph integration. My end goal is to have a SPA that can login with a microsoft profile to auth0 (connected to azure ad). Then I want my app to get a token for microsoft graph and do some api calls.
As I've understood it so far, auth0 does not allow you to get the access token to different identity providers in a front end application, but rather that they should use a proxy to get this token. My flow therefore is:
I login with a SPA auth0 app (using a microsoft identity)
This is then used to authenticate to a backend server using a api registration in auth0
The backend has its seperate machine-to-machine app in auth0
Backend api uses this seperate app to get access token to auth0 management api
Current user is fetched (based on the logged in user from front end app login) from management api,
Here i find an access token under the azure identity (if I do the same in the front end, the access tokens are omitted)
Token does not work to call graph, I am unsure of where to send it next.
I am aware that the above is probably completely wrong, that's why I am here :)
My questions are:
1) Is it even possible to get an access token for microsoft graph starting from a login to auth0 in the way I want it to. If not, can it be done from a backend?
2) Does anyone have a link that discusses this, ideally with some code samples.
To answer your first question:
1) Is it even possible to get an access token for microsoft graph starting from a login to auth0 in the way I want it to. If not, can it be done from a backend?
I have had the chance to authenticate apps using the microsoft identity library called MSAl whose documentation is found here. It gives a pretty detailed way to authenticate directly from your SPA.
I have also used the microsoft javascript sdk as it comes inbuilt with token caching and refreshing so that I do not need to build that for myself.
In relation to this,
Does anyone have a link that discusses this, ideally with some code samples.
You can find the samples well described in the samples section of the SDK
I hope this helps.

(How) does one secure a Web API with OpenID Connect (or not?)

Is it recommended or good practice to protect a Web API directly with Open ID Connect or not?
The setup:
Mobile App
Authorization Server (ADFS 4.0)
Web API (ASP.NET Core)
Currently I do the normal OAuth2 "Authorization Code Flow", and then pass the access_code to my Web API in the HTTP Header as "Authorization: Bearer ".
In ASP.NET core I just do the usual
services.AddAuthentication(...).AddJwtBearer(...)
Works fine.
But everyone talks about OAuth2 beeing only "pseudo-authentication" with certain flaws. I want my Users to be a properly authenticated before using my Web API. So it seems like Open ID Connect should be the way to go, aka "real authentication".
But does it actually work to "consume" Open ID Connect authentication in an ASP.NET Core Web API? And if yes, how? And is it good practice? All samples seem to be about Web Sites, not Web APIs.
There is an extension method
services.AddAuthentication(...).AddOpenIdConnect()
But here Implement OpenID connect Authetication in asp.net WEB API they state that "this component is designed for user interactive clients".
What i also don't understand, what would I do with the "id_token" I get from Open ID connect.
Currently i just pass the "access_token" as Bearer.
How do i consume the id_token?
Some clarifications:
The API does not act on behalf of a user (access to company data).
The API already has access to the "data". It does not require any auth workflows for itself nor does it need to pass the users credentials along.
The API needs to know "WHO" the user is, and it has to be done in an modern and good way
That's why I was thinking of OICD with its "real auth" (VS Oauth2-only which is "pseudo").
I basically cannot wrap my head around how the stuff returned from OICD (id_token) will be passed to my Web API.
OIDC is an OAuth workflow. It merely extends OAuth; it is not a replacement for it. APIs are typically authorized either by token or client secret. The difference is simply whether it's acting on behalf of a specific user or not. For example, something like the Facebook API has both workflows for its API, you generally operate with Facebook's API as a client app using the app id and client secret for your app, or you can do user-specific things like create a post on the user's wall given an authorization token.
That authorization token almost invariably comes from an OAuth workflow. Given your stated setup, your mobile app would handle this to get an auth token for the user from your ADFS server. Your API, meanwhile, would actually probably do both. It would communicate both using an assigned client secret and a user auth token, if the mobile app provides it with one.

Authenticate a web application user on Azure Active Directory using OAuth

Context
I'm building a web application deployed to Azure Webapps where users need to sign in. To accomplish this, I'm leveraging Azure AD with OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Grant. Since I'm using Nancy (with the ASP.NET host) instead of MVC, I can't follow the official Azure AD MVC examples where all the OAuth handling seems to happen magically in the background.
Redirecting to the OAuth endpoint is straight-forward, and the user is also correctly redirected back to my application with an authorization code.
Problem
Now I need retrieve the user ID in order to match it to the user database in my application. I'm using ADAL for this, because this is basically step D & E of the authorization code grant flow, from what I understand.
Now what puzzles me is that this use case is not supported by Azure AD, stating that
The client '[ClientId]' and resource '[ResouceId]' identify the same application.
Also, as indicated by this answer, "ADAL is not meant to achieve web sign-on in a web application."
I've been able to work around this problem by creating two applications in Azure AD, as suggested by this blog, but it feels like I misunderstood something. This could very well be the case, as I am new to OAuth and Azure AD.
So my question is, what is the correct way to authenticate a user from a non-MVC web application using Azure AD?
the OWIN middleware should work with non-ASP.NET as well. See for example http://unlustrously55.rssing.com/browser.php?indx=24287735&item=13 - in your case you will have to use the OpenId Connect one or the ww-federation one.
Is this purely for users inside your organisation/tenant? It sounds like it.
Why don't you use an App Registration in Azure AD and grant it permissions to access the users profile? You should then be able to retrieve a user's UPN from the token. Please see here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/scenario-secure-app-authentication-app-service

Implementing a login system for web apps and web API with DotNetOpenAuth

I'm looking for some guidance on what people think are the best set of technologies to use. We are looking to create a web portal to allow customers to register/login with standard credentials or their social accounts (Google, Twitter etc).
Once they are registered and logged in to the portal they can access our different web apps which will know who they are and what permissions they have based on a token. We will also need to secure a set of web APIs using some sort of OAuth mechanism, so the user would possibly create an account on the web app and then create an application which would give them the keys they need to access the API from their own app.
We have a basic portal app using MVC 4 and DotNetOpenAuth which allows a user to create an account and login with either a username and password or their Google, Facebook account etc.
The APIs would be MVC 4 Web APIs
Ideally the whole set up needs to be as simple as possible, I've briefly looked into using Windows Azure Access Control (ACS) as a way to cut out some of the heavy lifting but its hard to tell where exactly it all fits together.
Currently we run an ADFS 2.0 server and WIF to allow web login to our apps but it doesn't seem like it would be an ideal choice when integrating the social login and for securing the web APIs
I guess it could be two quite seperate parts, once they are logged into the portal, how would we go about providing some sort of claims token to the other apps they then access to understand who the user is and what they are allowed to do. And maybe the web API authentication/authorisation is its own entity?
Thanks for your time
We ended up using the built in MVC 4 login system and also added JWT token support, when a user is logged in a JWT token containing their claims is stored as a cookie. This is then automatically passed around our sites on the same domain by the browser, when the web API is called from javascript it checks for the token in the headers sent by the browser and either validates it and returns the correct data or returns an unauthorised response.
It doesn't cover all the bases, we can't give trusted third parties access to our web services yet

How to reconcile Salesforce SSO using WS-Federation and REST API using OAuth 2.0?

I am developing web application which consists of a Silverlight application and a REST API. An optional use case is that the customer may also want to integrate with Salesforce. By "integrate" I mean utilize SSO with Salesforce when logging into my application as well as access data via Salesforce's REST API. The current hurdle I can't seem to get over is that SSO uses WS-Federation while Salesforce's REST API uses OAuth 2.0. What is the best way to being these two authentication mechanisms together?
My knee-jerk reaction was for my Federation Provider STS to acquire an OAuth access token from Salesforce and add it as a claim to the security token received from Salesforce's Identity Provider STS, but I think this might require me to write a custom STS. I'd rather not do that. Is there a better way?
This question is old but comes up often, so ...
There is now information on how to do this here
Configuring-SSO-to-SharePoint
This approach uses WS-Fed.

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