One question I’ve had recently about how the JWT middleware in asp.net core works is related to the Authority URL you can set if you want to verify tokens using an identity providers asymmetric keys (JWKS based presumably). All examples I’ve seen completely fail to explain what this authority URL should be. Some auth0 examples say it’s just your auth0 domain - but if that’s the case then how does the middleware locate the public key from this base URL? Every provider has a different convention for the endpoint where a JWKS can be found - so how does this work?
My requirement is that I need to use a home grown identity provider where the JWKS endpoint is totally different to auth0, okla, identity 4 or whatever other providers are using.
Is there some standard discovery mechanism that all these providers use that I’m not aware of? Do I need to have this same discovery mechanism in place I’m the in house identity web app for this middleware to work?
Thanks!
Generally, OpenID connects provider follows the standard and provides a discovery endpoint which includes all necessary endpoints and public key location information.
OpenID connect specification: https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-discovery-1_0.html
Auth0 exposes OIDC discovery documents (https://YOUR_DOMAIN/.well-known/openid-configuration). These can be used to automatically configure applications.
https://auth0.com/docs/protocols/oidc/openid-connect-discovery
IdentityServer 4 allows to include extra endpoint to the discovery document. http://docs.identityserver.io/en/latest/topics/discovery.html
Related
Migrating an SPA web app (Angular) and ASP Core Web API from Auth0 auth provider to Identity framework due to some requirements and limitations.
Until now everything was handled by auth0 and I didn't give it a much thought about the whole process of authentication. I would simply redirect users to auth0 hosted login page where it'd handle everything, callback with access token and I would use it for calls to API where API would just verify the JWT.
Now that I need to do this all manually, I am a bit confused. I want to have multiple authentication options: either Email/Password or OIDC auth providers like Google/Github.
I can get access token from these OIDC providers without much problem. But what do I do exactly with it, or to be more precise how do I configure Identity framework to handle the rest, without doing a lot of manual work? All users have quite a bit of additional data inside Identity framework user classes and I'm not fully sure how do i connect that to OIDC tokens.
Sorry for a bit abstract question, I think I'm missing some small detail, but at the moment I'm just really confused.
A lot of this is in place already, so to test the OIDC tokens, you just need them to be accepted by your consuming API.
To do so, you need to do some configuring, probably the same as you did for Auth0. Since the dependency here of the external providers, I'll post a link:
MSDN Google Auth
To accept them, you'll need the following steps:
register your API with the exteral provider
use the, provider dependent, instructions to set it up in your API.
The providers are additional to the one you have in placed and are referenced by Identity as ExternalProviders
In general, it's pretty easy. Possible some things are left out, since I don't know your exact use case.
So you are using an Identity Provider, previously Auth0, and now another (or custom) one.
Just for sanity a recap of your use case:
You trust the Identity Provider so every token signed by this provider is valid.
Your Identity Provider (and the external ones e.g; Facebook, Google etc) are responsible for their own user management.
Your own Identity Provider needs to handle specific authentication methods, tested against a corporate UserStore. These need to be managed, possibly with AD, Identity username/password or something similar.
Your Identity Provider provides authentication through JWTs
You also want to use external Identity Providers like Facebook etc.
So, as for the setup, you must do the following:
Implement (or reuse, or use ActiveDirectory or any other) user management tools, if you need to perform some management on them. This means password recovery and all that stuff, which is available in a lot of standard libraries (I think it comes out of the box in Identity)
Define clients, scopes and claims throughout your system(s). Possibly there is some effort to be made.
Make sure the JWT's are accepted as authentication throughout your system (this was already in place) and the proper claims are assigned when called for the correct client.
Register your API with the external providers
Setup your API to accept the external JWT tokens (needs some setup with secrets and API keys)
A lot of this is already in place in the Identity framework. There is an article about it here.
If you are willing to do a good exercise (and a lot of work), you could also try to implement things fully customized with IdentityServer4
I have a uwp application and an ASP Core server application. I want to perform Get and Post requests to the ASP server and I want to perform authorization on the server side.
According to the team, they don't want you to use Basic authentication nor seems there be a way to perform digest Authentication. I don't want my client app to show the user any ui: it should be able to perform a secure request by itself.
So: what is the most easy and secure protocol to use to perform api requests from UWP to an ASP Core server?
what is the most easy and secure protocol to use to perform api requests from UWP to an ASP Core server?
I'd like to say this is a open question and I will give some suggestions and hope it can help you. Basic authentication and digest authentication you mentioned are defined in rfc2617. Since you don't want to use them, besides HTTP Basic/Digest you may have other choices like OAuth, HMAC and Azure API Management.
Since you don't want the user to input username and password, to request an access token for authentication may meet your requirements. So I recommend you to use OAuth authentication which is popular. More details about OAuth2.0 please reference this. But it requires OAuth server, it may not be a easiest way.
Another way you can apply HMAC authentication to secure Web Api. HMAC authentication uses a secret key for each consumer. For more details about HMAC authentication please reference this thread. For more details about HMAC in uwp please reference MACs, hashes, and signatures.
You can also use third party tools from Azure. Azure API management can help secure and optimize your APIs. Details please reference the Publishing and securing access to REST APIs in uwp.
Reading this question, #Pinpoint's answer and the further discussion on comments, I'm well aware that natively we can't add an identity provider to our apps developed with ASP.NET 5. One possible replacement for the legacy OAuthAuthorizationServerMiddleware is then provided by the AspNet.Security.OpenIdConnect.Server as I've found in many places.
Now, there is one point that I'm still unsure about all this because I'm really not an expert in security, so my knowledge about OAuth is not very deep. My doubt is the following: is it possible to use an external identity provider when using OAuth to protect one RESTful API?
Notice that I'm not talking about adding social login to one website, I'm talking about using one external identity provider in one RESTful API.
My point is, this makes me a little confused yet, because I always thought this should be a concern of my app.
So my question here is: when using OAuth and ASP.NET 5, is it possible to use an external identity provider, other than implementing one? If it is possible, how this works in short? I mean, my app still needs to be able to manage the identities of users, in the sense that it needs to manage claims and so on.
In that case, if it is really possible, how the flow would be? The external identity provider should issue the tokens? But how my app would be able to verify those tokens and manage users identities?
EDIT: One of the reasons I feel unsure about that is that when we use the UseOAuthAuthentication extension method, we set up one callback path which is described as
The request path within the application's base path where the user-agent will be returned. The middleware will process this request when it arrives.
Now, if we are developing a site, then this really does make sense. The person goes there, click a button to login with a provider like Facebook. The user is redirected to Facebook's page and then after he logs in, he is redirected to some page of the site.
On the other hand, with a RESTful API this is meaningless. There is no notion of being redirected.
This makes it seems that the usage of external providers is only for sites and not for RESTful API's. This is the main point of my question.
My doubt is the following: is it possible to use an external identity provider when using OAuth to protect one RESTful API?
Yes, it's definitely possible. This is exactly what you do when you use Azure Active Directory to protect your API endpoints:
app.UseOAuthBearerAuthentication(options => {
options.AutomaticAuthenticate = true;
options.Authority = "https://login.windows.net/tushartest.onmicrosoft.com";
options.Audience = "https://TusharTest.onmicrosoft.com/TodoListService-ManualJwt";
});
The next legitimate question is: if you can use the tokens issued by AAD to protect your API, why couldn't you do the same thing with Facebook or Google tokens?
Unlike Facebook or Google, AAD issues completely standardized tokens named JWT tokens that the OAuth2 bearer middleware can "read" and "verify" to determine whether the token is still valid and was really issued for your API (i.e if the audience attached with the token corresponds to your API. You can control this value using the resource parameter when making your authorization request).
You can't do something similar with FB or Google tokens, since they are totally opaque. Actually, it's not really surprising since these tokens have only one objective: allowing you to query FB or Google APIs, not your own ones (these social providers don't allow to set the audience of the access token).
Since you can't read the token yourself, the only option is to ask FB or Google whether it is still valid to make sure your API doesn't accept invalid tokens. That's something you can (easily) do with Facebook as they offer a "token inspection endpoint" you can query for that: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/manually-build-a-login-flow (see the Inspecting access tokens chapter). This way, you can ensure the token is not expired and determine the user corresponding to the token.
Sadly, this approach has two downsides:
You have to make an extra HTTP call to the Facebook endpoint to validate the access token, which implies caching received tokens to avoid flooding Facebook with too many requests.
As the access token is not issued for your own API, you MUST absolutely ensure that the access token was issued to a client application you fully trust, or it will allow any third party developer to use his own FB/Google tokens with your API without having to request user's consent. This is - obviously - a major security concern.
You can find more information in the last part of this SO answer (it's for Katana and about Dropbox, but you should get the idea): OWIN/OAuth2 3rd party login: Authentication from Client App, Authorization from Web API
So my question here is: when using OAuth and ASP.NET 5, is it possible to use an external identity provider, other than implementing one? If it is possible, how this works in short? I mean, my app still needs to be able to manage the identities of users, in the sense that it needs to manage claims and so on.
In that case, if it is really possible, how the flow would be? The external identity provider should issue the tokens? But how my app would be able to verify those tokens and manage users identities?
To work around the limitations mentioned in the previous part, the best option is - as you've already figured out - to create your own authorization/authentication server. This way, your API doesn't (directly) accept FB or Google tokens but the tokens issued by your own server, that can possibly redirect your users to FB or Google for authentication.
This is exactly what this sample does: https://github.com/aspnet-contrib/AspNet.Security.OpenIdConnect.Server/tree/vNext/samples/Mvc
The user is invited by the client application (Mvc.Client) to authenticate with your authorization server (Mvc.Server) so he can get an access token to later query the API (also in Mvc.Server). For that, the user is redirected to your authorization server, which itself offers you to authenticate with Google or Twitter.
When this external authentication step is done, the user is redirected back to your authorization server (Mvc.Server), where he's asked to give his consent for the client app (Mvc.Client) to access his personal data.
When the consent is given, the user is redirected back to the client application with the access token you can use to query the API endpoint.
I have REST web services exposed by APIs controllers in my ASP.NET Application. These services are useful for me to synchronize my business layer with my view layer.
Now I want to make them more secure, because I feel like all my data is exposed and that anyone can have access to them, if only he types the http url of the web service. Is there any username/password security mecanism for my web services? Or is this done via a certain configuration to IIS?
If you would like to create your own security mechanism then it would not be to hard to authenticate using tokens in the http header. For example, you could use a public/private key scheme and hash a few items that change frequently such as DateTime and input parameters and the resource url itself.
.Net provides ways to place your security checks prior to reaching your service methods so you don't even have to check the token in the http header in each of your methods. They will only be invoked if the request is authenticated.
I am going to be using Web API for an upcoming project and was asked to integrate an existing STS provider into the equation as my authentication mechanism. Therefore my Web API would be the RP (relying party). I don't need any support to provide the actual token (like creation of STS Provider), just need to incorporate claims based authentication to the configured STS provider and use it in my Web API REST based service.
Does anyone know if this is possible, and some examples on how to implement this? I see full examples with creating a STS provider, but like I said it already exists. I just need to trust it and use for authentication purposes.
Depends which protocols your existing STS supports. You need to find that out.
Basically you need to do this:
request a token from your STS (from within your client app)
send the token to the Web API
validate the token inside Web API
The thing you need to find out is if 1. works with your custom STS - then we can talk about 2 and 3 ;)