i'm trying to goto the following url :-
http://user1:pass1#localhost:1234/api/users?format=xml
nothing to complex. Notice how i've got the username/password in the url? this, i believe, is for basic authentication.
When I do that, the Request Headers are MISSING the 'Authorize' header. Er... that's not right :(
I have anonymous authentication only setup on the site. I don't want to have anon off and basic turned on .. because not all of the site requires basic.. only a few action methods.
So .. why is this not working? Is this something to do with the fact my code is not sending a 401 challenge or some crap?
For What It's Worth, my site is ASP.NET MVC1 running on IIS7 (and the same thing happens when i run it on cassini).
Update:
If this is an illegal way of calling a resource using basic auth (ala security flaw) .. then is this possible to do, for an ASP.NET MVC website .. per action method (and not the entire site, per say)?
If you want to use basic authentication, the first request to the resource needs to return a HTTP 401 error code, and set a WWW-Authenticate header. This will instruct the browser to actually send those credentials.
You mentioned you're using ASP.NET MVC. You might be able to do this via the web.config, but I'm not sure on the exact mechanics.
My company makes a product called the Neokernel Web Server (http://www.neokernel.com), it is an ASP.NET web server with support for basic authentication among other features.
You specify protected resources in an apache-style config file so you could put your "protected" actions in a folder requiring authentication and put everything else in the root / unprotected. Look at the "http.authentication" file installed in the Neokernel root directory for an example, or at the authentication samples in the demos.zip file.
Related
In the old form authentication, you could secure an entire directory with a web.config setting. I can't seem to figure out how to do this with the new OWIN authentication. It looks like it only works via attributes on controllers. I must be missing something. There must be a way to secure images, html, script etc...
Katana doesn't provide any authorization middleware, only authentication middleware, so it'd be up to you to implement your path based authorization and return 401 if you didn't like the user.
One way you could do this is to use app.Map("/yourfolder", ctx=>{
// do your authorization check in here
});
I have to implement a web site (MVC4/Single Page Application + knockout + Web.API) and I've been reading tons of articles and forums but I still can't figure out about some points in security/authentication and the way to go forward when securing the login page and the Web.API.
The site will run totally under SSL. Once the user logs on the first time, he/she will get an email with a link to confirm the register process. Password and a “salt” value will be stored encrypted in database, with no possibility to get password decrypted back. The API will be used just for this application.
I have some questions that I need to answer before to go any further:
Which method will be the best for my application in terms of security: Basic/ SimpleMembership? Any other possibilities?
The object Principal/IPrincipal is to be used just with Basic Authentication?
As far as I know, if I use SimpleMembership, because of the use of cookies, is this not breaking the RESTful paradigm? So if I build a REST Web.API, shouldn't I avoid to use SimpleMembership?
I was checking ThinkTecture.IdentityModel, with tokens. Is this a type of authentication like Basic, or Forms, or Auth, or it's something that can be added to the other authentication types?
Thank you.
Most likely this question will be closed as too localized. Even then, I will put in a few pointers. This is not an answer, but the comments section would be too small for this.
What method and how you authenticate is totally up to your subsystem. There is no one way that will work the best for everyone. A SPA is no different that any other application. You still will be giving access to certain resources based on authentication. That could be APIs, with a custom Authorization attribute, could be a header value, token based, who knows! Whatever you think is best.
I suggest you read more on this to understand how this works.
Use of cookies in no way states that it breaks REST. You will find ton of articles on this specific item itself. Cookies will be passed with your request, just the way you pass any specific information that the server needs in order for it to give you data. If sending cookies breaks REST, then sending parameters to your API should break REST too!
Now, a very common approach (and by no means the ONE AND ALL approach), is the use of a token based system for SPA. The reason though many, the easiest to explain would be that, your services (Web API or whatever) could be hosted separately and your client is working as CORS client. In which case, you authenticate in whatever form you choose, create a secure token and send it back to the client and every resource that needs an authenticated user, is checked against the token. The token will be sent as part of your header with every request. No token would result in a simple 401 (Unauthorized) or a invalid token could result in a 403 (Forbidden).
No one says an SPA needs to be all static HTML, with data binding, it could as well be your MVC site returning partials being loaded (something I have done in the past). As far as working with just HTML and JS (Durandal specifically), there are ways to secure even the client app. Ultimately, lock down the data from the server and route the client to the login screen the moment you receive a 401/403.
If your concern is more in the terms of XSS or request forging, there are ways to prevent that even with just HTML and JS (though not as easy as dropping anti-forgery token with MVC).
My two cents.
If you do "direct" authentication - meaning you can validate the passwords directly - you can use Basic Authentication.
I wrote about it here:
http://leastprivilege.com/2013/04/22/web-api-security-basic-authentication-with-thinktecture-identitymodel-authenticationhandler/
In addition you can consider using session tokens to get rid of the password on the client:
http://leastprivilege.com/2012/06/19/session-token-support-for-asp-net-web-api/
I currently have an intranet site that is accessed by external customers. I therefore set this up using Forms Authentication. However the powers that be (my bosses) want all our domain users to not have to enter their username and password to access the site.
I've done a bit or reading and everything seems to point to setting up a WinLogin.aspx page that you alter to use WindowAuthenthication and then redirect from there.
I have a problem with this as I don't like the idea of putting an aspx form in my mvc application.
Can anyone tell me how to achieve mixed authentication using a strictly MVC Controller/Action setup without a second application?
NOTES: running MVC 3 on an IIS 7 box.
Forms Authentication is not related to the URL or physical structure of your files. What matters is that a URL should ultimately map to a physical (or virtual) resource on the server, and be processed, and be returned back to the user.
Thus, somewhere in between for each incoming call (each HTTP request, even those for CSS and JavaScript files), you have to see if the current user has enough permission to access it or not. If no, then you might redirect him to the login page.
If you want, you can have a URL like /user/windowslogin where user is the name of the controller, and windowslogin is the name of your action method. Then you can create a custom authentication attribute (something like [WindowsAuthentication]) on your windowslogin action, and in that attribute (which is an MVC filter in essence), you can see if the current request comes from within your domain, and if so, talk to Active Directory for authentication or stuff like that, and on case of successful authentication, create an authentication cookie using FormsAuthentication class, and the rest of the story.
However, I don't think this would be an easy task. Others might introduce better solutions.
How does the new routing service deal with security? According to http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/applisec/archive/2011/12/12/wcf-routing-and-message-security.aspx, it might be difficult when default windows security is not chosen (typically a simple username/password scenario).
Can wcf routing actually support a scenario where the router receives a WS-Security secured message over HTTP and forwards it to another server over HTTP, without unwrapping the security token?
My scenario is as follows:
A server (relying party), a custom STS with username/password authentication and a client. We use ws2007FederationHttpBinding and message security.
Now we setup wcf routing, it works with basicHttp or wsHttp.
Then we using WIF, we can instanciate proxies, the STS generates claims, but it fails at the first service call. It seems the router is waiting for the certificate definition (included, otherwise we get an error), then seems to require Cardspace UI (while in fact we're using username/password).
If so, would you have an example ?
Thanks.
Good question, i couldn't find anything about this on google yet beside this question also being unanswered on msdn. I don't think this is added out of the box as normally u would need to use delegatation (ActAs) whenever u want to route the request to another service.
The only solution i can think of is creating a message inspector and use that one in your WCF Routing Service. And ofcourse u'll need to use "SupportInteractive = false"
I did found something that might be the answer, see the following post (ignore silverlight lol) http://zamd.net/2011/02/08/silverlight-claim-based-security/
Zamd says:
For the 2nd part I have implemented a message inspector along with an extension method which makes it super easy to attach the SAML with outgoing messages.
So far, my https deployments have commonly involved a naive lockdown of the entire site with https and provide an http-to-https redirect on the web server.
I now plan to have a single ASP.NET MVC site (on the cloud) that will contain both http and https pages. So, the site will have 2 conceptual (not physical) zones providing for both secure and non-secure requests.
Configuration-wise, I have set up input ports for both 80 and 443 and the site accepts both requests.
Is there any way I can flip protocol to https for any call that goes to an action that belongs in the secure zone? For instance, the kind of things that action filters can do.
Thanks much.
edit: Please note that the whole idea of this is to avoid using absolute urls on the form action attribute because of portability issues and because the user will not see the https:// assurance visual cues on the browser.
P
You might want to take a look at the MVC futures assembly from Microsoft available for download here.
This has a FilterAttribute, RequireSslFilterAttribute that allows you to easily tag Action methods in your controller that require SSL - e.g.
[RequireSsl(Redirect=true)]
public ActionResult LogOn()
{
return View();
}
The optional redirect parameter will cause the request to be redirected to the same URL but via https instead of http if required.
WARNING: As Daniel points out though, by the time you hit this Action it may already be too late if data was posted to a non secure version of the page - it is already potentially compromised, so you still need to exercise care when using this and make sure all sensitive data is sent via https. (I just noticed your comment to Daniel, you obviously understand this, I'll leave the warning here for anyone else who stumbles upon this though!)
EDIT: As Luke points out, in MVC2 this attribute is now part of the core framework and is renamed to [RequireHttps]
Is there any way I can flip protocol to https for any call that goes to an action that belongs in the secure zone?
The short answer is no, once the request has come via http, it has already been potentially compromised. You can require that certain calls come via the HTTPS (not sure how to do that as I have not done ASP.Net for awhile) and send an error if they do not. The key is to decide when you want the application to make the jump, ie during login and choose the HTTPS as the action for those forms. Is that what you meant by 'action filters'?