For multiple applications, I want to build a centralized account solution. The core consists of some ASP.NET Core web applications. But I also want to include third-party applications like WordPress, GitLab, or a XAMPP/HipChat server. My goal: The user creates ONE account, which can be used in all of those applications. So an LDAP server seems the best way for this since many applications have support for this protocol. This also gives flexibility for other applications, which may be added later.
The problem here is, that the users should be able to authenticate using common social sites - Especially Facebook. It's state of the art and would increase the conversation rate, cause it's easier for the users.
Is it possible to integrate social login provider like Facebook to LDAP servers like ApacheDS?
As I see the topic, Facebook generates some kind of authentication token, which can be used from the application to verify the identity of the user. In my custom web apps, this is no problem. But for e.g. a XAMPP server, this seems not to work: LDAP requires username/password. But I don't have this, since there is only a Facebook token available. The LDAP server could store this in an attribute. However, this would require to check this token instead of a password on an LDAP bind.
On the other side, when I drop the LDAP server and use some framework like ASP.NET Core identity instead, it's not a big deal. The problem here: I'm not able to use this login for third-party applications. This would require the users to have an additional account for e.g. XAMPP, WordPress, and so on, which results in big chaos and is thereby not suitable for me.
By dropping social support, it works. This seems also not to be a good idea since those logins are state of the art and I'm targeting younger users, which expect an SSO solution with Facebook or similar providers.
Facebook (and other social login sites) use a protocol named OAuth to authenticate. Probably the easiest solution would be to implement an OAuth server yourself that uses your LDAP as backend and then add that beneath the Facebook login as the second way of login.
That will not add users logging in via Facebook to your LDAP but as you usually only get an OAuth token back for login (not necessarily a username) which needs to be verified against Facebook (or whoever provided that token) it doesn't work to use it as "password replacement".
Related
So.. I've read countless articles, but still can't wrap my mind on which to use; if a simple JSON Web Token is enough..
I have a Wordpress website and a mobile application of said website.
I can login in my website using email and password and I can also login on my mobile application using email and password.
The mobile application communicates with the website through the Wordpress REST API. It (the mobile app) sends the user email and password to the API, and the API returns a JWT if both are valid.
Then, I simply store the JWT in the user's device.
My main doubts are:
For a mobile app with not much sensitive user data, is that acceptable/safe enough?
For a mobile app with sensitive user data, is that acceptable/safe enough?
Or should I use OAuth2 in both cases (which is harder to implement and will take time, but it's safer (I think..))?
Thank you and apologies if duplicated.
This is more of a security compliance decision you might have to take.
As a first thing, you should think like a product owner or ask a product owner about which one to use by explaining to them, what are the advantages of OAuth 2.0 over simple JWT.
You might have to consider the following things,
what is the size of the userbase?
how sensitive is the data you are going to store?
What is the user experience you wanted to give to your users?
Also, JWT doesn't mean it is not safe enough.
One more extra thing you could do to make it more secure is adding a expiry time for your JWT with a refresh token mechanism that way even if JWT is exposed it ll be expired later sometime.
JWT is a secure solution and is often used for mobile applications.
If you choose OAuth, you have several options for authentication, because there are several grant types:
Authorization Code grant type, which is the most popular, the advantage of this is that it uses the WordPress login interface
User Credentials grant type, which has a direct trust relationship with the application, which provides the user credentials, this is often used with mobile applications
You have the option of JWT Access Tokens at the OAuth server, which provides even more security for you.
We have created an OAuth 2.0 plugin for WordPress: https://lana.codes/product/lana-passport/
You can try it with the demo, and there is also detailed documentation for it.
I personally use the OAuth plugin to be able to log in to my WordPress websites using the Single Sign On button, which uses my primary WordPress website for authentication. OAuth is more commonly used for Single Sign On solutions.
We are building several websites/products, if a user has an account on one site they will also be allowed access to all other sites.
Let's say we have the following setup:
Clients
site1.com
site2.com
Single Sign On Portal
sso.company.com
APIs
api1.company.com
api2.company.com
The Single Sign On Portal supports multiple OAuth providers, such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc and this is all working great built on top of the default ASP.NET Web Forms template in VS 2015 using OWIN and Idenity.
The SSO site is logging the user in an using a cookie for authentication, which works fine while still on the SSO site. Now we need to return a token that the client site can use to know that the user is authenticated
Now the challange here is how do we exchange the cookie to a token that we can return to the client(s) to use in the Authorization header in request sent to our APIs?
Should we generate a token our selves or is there some built in functionality we can use for this purpose?
I've seen most people generate a token themselves and then multiple accounts can be linked to that same user in your account (i.e. a user could log into both FB and Google). Most of the SSO providers have a way to get an identity token or one time use code for your server to use and get user info like FacebookId. The key is ensuring that identity token came from FB and not a third party.
Auth0 is a pretty good service if you want a managed route. Even if you don't use them, they have a lot of good resources on oauth. (I have no affiliation with them other than that we used them before.) we also have a little more info on auth: https://www.moesif.com/blog/technical/restful-apis/Authorization-on-RESTful-APIs/
What is the best method of securing a REST Web API with the following requirements. The system has an Angular JS frontend with the REST APIs implemented in ASP.net.
There are two "roles" in the system, users will have one of the
roles. One role should allows access to some APIs (call it "VIEW"),
the other role allows access to other APIs
All users are in Active Directory, so if I have a username, I can check what role they are in- Some clients are on Windows boxes, the others are on Linux
I would like to persist the session so I don't have to look up AD for every API call
I would like single sign on. On the Windows machines, I don't require them to enter user and pass as I already can retrieve their username using Windows Authentication.
I believe that Oauth would be my best option.
There are two "roles" in the system, users will have one of the roles.
One role should allows access to some APIs (call it "VIEW"), the other
role allows access to other APIs
For role based authentication, you can use [Authorize("Role" = "Manager")]. The token will be provided by the identity server and will contain the claim as Role.
All users are in Active Directory, so if I have a username, I can
check what role they are in- Some clients are on Windows boxes, the
others are on Linux
If you have ADFS then you can have an Identity server that trusts the ADFS. The ADFS will provide a token which will have the claim for role and your Identity Server will do the claims transformation and will return the same Role claim back to angular app.
I would like to persist the session so I don't have to look up AD for
every API call
For this while requesting the token, you can ask for offline scope so the Identity server will provide the Refresh Token with Access Token so you don't need to ask for AD again and again.
I would like single sign on. On the Windows machines, I don't require
them to enter user and pass as I already can retrieve their username
using Windows Authentication.
For this one, you can have your Identity sever trust the WSFederation for windows Authentication.
So basically you need to setup Identity server that will provide you with the token and the REST API will use that token to verify claims to return the correct information back to the user.
I am not sure what you expect exactly. Anyway, first I'm gonna reformulate your question with requirements:
you accounts and role are in active directory
you want to manage roles based on an active directory group
you want anybody whatever the system (windows, linux, mac, mobile...) to connect on your application using the same authentication
you want to avoid your AD to be hit constantly (not at any call for example)
if the user is connected on an application that uses the authentication system, he doesn't have to do it so again on another application that uses the same authentication system
If these requirements are yours. I believe the only standard (and clean) solution is to use OAuth. I'm not gonna go in detailed description of OAuth, but this authentication protocol is the most standard one on the net (facebook, google, twitter...). Of course as you don't want to use facebook, google or twitter accounts in your business applications but your active directory accounts you'll have to install/setup/develop your OAuth identity provider using accounts of your active active directory server. Your choice will depend on how well you know ADFS protocol and its different flows (code, implicit, assersion) You have two solutions for it:
Use ADFS: install ADFS; it provides a OAuth portal that will work out of the box with asp.net mvc. This uses the code flow of OAuth that is the only OAuth flow supported by ADFS. For roles and its related AD groups, you'll have to map role claims with AD groups. (it's in the setup of adfs, you'll find many tutos on the net). You'll find lot of tutos as well about how to use ADFS with asp.net mvc/asp.net webapi. I mention .net here, but every technology has an implementation for OAuth authentication (nodeJs/express, php, java...).
Use thinktecture identity server (.net technology). This will provide all the foundation to implement a custom identity server with the least effort: http://www.thinktecture.com/identityserver / https://github.com/IdentityServer/IdentityServer3. It contains an addin to plug its accounts to active directory. With this, you can use implicit and assertion flows.
Use oauth2orize (for nodeJs): https://www.npmjs.com/package/oauth2orize. This will permit you to make the same than thinktecture identity server but in nodeJs. Apparently you'll have to make all the wirering with ad manually. With this, you can use implicit flows (not sure about assertion flows).
At application side, most of frameworks can authenticate easily using OAuth with a lot of existing frameworks. For example, even if you make a single page application, you can use adal.js or oidc.js for angular if you use angular. As I mentioned above, all this is taken in charge by asp.net mvc/webapi out of the box but I know it's the case for other server technologies. If you have more questions, don't hesitate as I'm not sure of what you expect exactly.
First off--thanks for having a look.
MY QUESTION
In a .NET web app, is using Windows Authentication for a extra-net on a WAN consisting of various users, companies, user-agents, etc a bad idea?
BACKGROUND
I am lead dev on a fast track (very fast) web application for an extra-net that will allow the client's vendors, suppliers, partners, etc to log on and push and pull certain assets such as image files, videos, flash files, etc.
PLATFORM/TECHNOLOGY
Asp.Net 4.0, C#, MVC3
PROBLEM (Maybe)
The client's IT department has requested that the app use Windows Authentication to authenticate users. One of the reasons for this (they say) is that the assets that will be pushed/pulled by users reside on a third-party server (Signiant) which already uses credentials form their active directory to authenticate users.
MY VIEW
Windows Authentication is going to cause a bunch of headaches. Viewed as a stack, this app will sit on top of the third-party server. So if we use Forms authentication, we can just populate a data table with windows credentials for each user and pass those to Signiant's servers with our requests (you have to do this anyway). If possible, we can even make an LDAP call for the creds on the fly and then pass those to Signiant's servers.
It just seems to me that simple functionality such as "lost password" would be come extremely difficult if we are doing the Windows Auth thing. But, full disclosure, I have never built an Asp.Net app using Windows Authentication so what do I know??
Thanks!
Matt
UPDATE 8/12/11
I still don't have an answer as to whether you should do this, but the client is adamant that it must be this way. The app is supposed to be turned over in a month so I will come back and let any followers of this topic know my findings.
ASP.NET has built in support for doing AD Authentication using Forms Authentication, including password recovery.
See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff650308.aspx
I'd like to use OpenID to authenticate users on my webapp -- similar to how StackExchange does it. I'd also like to enable users of my website to use my Desktop and Mobile Apps using the same account. I've read this requires OAuth (OpenID is purely website only).
What I don't know is
Is this the correct approach?
What would the workflow for this be?
What data do I need in my database per user/OpenID? Do I store an "account" and then when they've authenticated with OpenID, I allow them to generate an OAuth Token for the mobile app?
In an ideal world, I would be able to have buttons similar to those on https://stackoverflow.com/users/login for both my WebApp and also in my Desktop and Mobile Apps which would simply allow users to login with their google or facebook account, is that possible? Simplicity for users is paramount, because my userbase will not take well anything remotely complex.
Can I use something like DotNetOpenAuth to provide all of this functionality?
Would a better solution be to break this up and allow users to authenticate to my site with OpenID and then I provide my own OAuth scheme for my desktop and mobile clients?
Probably the simplest mechanism is to embed a web view, and simply watch for navigation to a specific callback page and grab the authentication data that way. You should still be able to use OpenID for this.
What you should be looking into is Windows Identity Framework (WIF), it will work similarly for Web or Desktop applications using Claims-Based Identity. You would store an authorization token for each user (along with any other information you need) and you would get it in the Authorization Header of an authenticated HTTP Request. oAuth is the protocol for passing authorization requests and responses. WIF is a .NET toolkit to simplify this interaction.
For more info, check out the WIF home page and the following blog (not mine):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/aa570351
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/
This is the workflow that I came up with, and so far I think its working well.
The user is required to authenticate to the website via third party OpenID/Facebook/etc (mobile friendly website is available). Then, in their "profile" they can generate an API "key" which they can copy/paste into their client software. It isn't 100% transparent to the user, but its pretty good.