I need a good advise and wanted to know whether a solution is feasible or not. Right now one of my customer has a common login application which is based on Forms authentication(ASP.NET) using membership provider. All internal users use their AD credentials to logon and external users use custom username and password. Both are wrapped via Forms authentication. Now the new proposal is to replace this Forms authentication with ADFS. I have gone through various articles over internet and not able to come to a conclusion. Let me list my findings so far with ADFS extension points.
1) It is possible to add a custom attribute to ADFS claims by the approach mentioned in https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/cloudpfe/2013/12/27/how-to-create-a-custom-attribute-store-for-active-directory-federation-services-3-0/.
2) It is possible to add a second level of authentication( or multifactor authentication) via the approach https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jenfieldmsft/2014/03/24/build-your-own-external-authentication-provider-for-ad-fs-in-windows-server-2012-r2-walk-through-part-1/. Here I understand that after first level authentication done by AD then only our external provider will come into picture.
So I have a general question that is it really possible to achieve what I am looking for with ADFS. Please let me know.
This is based on where the user accounts are stored. If both internal and external users are in AD, you can just redirect to ADFS.
If internal is in AD and external is in an untrusted or other LDAP source, using ADFS 2016 you can link to both these account stores and still offload authentication to ADFS.
If external is in SQL, you can either use a virtual directory in front to project it as an LDAP store (previous option) or use IdentityServer.
If externs is something else, you'd need IdentityServer.
Thanks //Sam (#MrADFS)
Yes - you can add a custom attribute store.
Yes - you can add a custom authenticator.
A better way might be to use thinktecture's IdentityServer 3.0 for the ASP.NET Identity part and then federate IdentityServer and ADFS.
Related
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.
We have a hosted .NET web application (Windows Server 2012 R2 environment) and we need to provide Single sign-on (SSO) to users from a corporate LAN environment. We have used ADFS to enable SSO and it is working as expected thus when a user hits our web application login page URL he is authenticated against ADFS and is automatically logged in to the application.
We have an additional requirement where we need to obtain a list of all users, their groups, email addresses some additional information periodically from their Active Directory so that this information can be bulk loaded into our web application however since ADFS is implemented we do not have direct access to the Active Directory.
Is it possible to connect to ADFS and obtain a list of all users, their email addresses etc. programmatically?
If the above is not possible then what is the recommended approach for this kind of a setup?
Thank you.
No, this is not possible. There is no such API because with SAML and WS-Federation, users can come from anywhere. This does not have to be AD, technically it's possible create a "Log in with Facebook" implementation.
What would you need the information for? The user's claims contain all information which you might need (user name, e-mail address, group memberships).
If you really need that information about all users in your application, perhaps ADFS is not the solution you are looking for.
As Alex mentioned above - the way it works, ADFS does not provide any way of importing data from the AD or other trust stores. It just gives you the information that are carried over with the token.
In case you need more information, you should extend the number of claims being issued by ADFS. You can then collect the information - when the user comes for the first time, use the data from the token and fill the profile. If it is returning user - update the information if necessary.
The other solution (but I wouldn't say it's recommended - rather a workaround) would be to implement custom solution for importing information from AD to your application. I'd say it's fair as long as you use your local AD for reading this data. In the moment you decide to extend the access to third party (e.g. partner company), which might be using different identity provider, which doesn't have to be backed by Active Directory any more - you find yourself in tough spot.
I have a .NET Web API with a bunch of end points/methods that an Angular App calls. I want to now implement the login system against our active directory, and wondering what my options are.
Back in the days, it was simple: windows or forms authentication, and then just some simple configuration in the web.config, and may be a custom provider. But now it seems like there are a lot more options with OWIN, OAuth, token based authentication, etc.
Where do I start? I have a form with username, password, and a login button on the Angular app, and I have the active directory in the backend. What should happen after the user hits the login button? Any direction would help.
Thanks.
Well, it depends on what you actually need.
If you want to authenticate only AD users then you can try authenticate in AD on their behalf and in case of success you return either token or authentication cookie.
But I don't think it is a good idea to make users use their domain password unless you have two factor authentication.
It's better to extend AD schema with additional data for authentication through your service or even to have standalone auth server with associated domain user info. Look how it is done in SQL server (but in reverse direction): you need to define internal user corresponding to domain login. This approach allows you to have users that do not belong to AD, sometimes this can be important for outsourcing some tasks.
Look at IdentityServer
I am relatively new to uisng ADFS (in ASP.NET) which is what my company wants to use and just have a few basic questions about that:
Am I correct there is no explicit "Authorize" call you can do like with ASP.NET Membership Providers? Unless you on a domain it presents you with a login screen and once you enter credentials it does validation and returns back a token with claims information.
Can you configure some forms to allow anonymous access like you can do with Forms Authentication?
Thanks.
Yes, you can setup pages in your app that don't require authentication. It works exactly like you'd do with Forms Auth.
On #1: in a claims based model, your app relies on an external system to authenticate users and receives evidence that the user is valid in the form of a token. You can completely automate this (using WIF and config files), or you can explicitly trigger the authentication process. In any case, your app won't be responsible for validating legitimate users anymore. It is a responsibility that it delegates to the STS (e.g. ADFS). That's why apps are called "relying parties".
I'd suggest you read the first couple chapters of the A Guide to Claims based Identity for a better understanding of the underlying principles.
I have an existing production application that uses vanilla ASP.Net Membership for authentication.
However, I'd like to provide other means of authentication as well as the current ASP.net membership system, such as Facebook.
The Windows Azure Access Control Service makes this extremely easy and straight forward. Provided, that is, you're starting a new web application from scratch.
So, in this case, how do I
Integrate the Access Control Service authentication into my app without affecting the current login system and its users?
Migrate users over or Link logins? ( not sure if this is even possible)
Thanks all
Roberto
You need to create a custom identity provider based on your membership database. See this article on custom WS-Federation Identity Providers that can be integrated to access control: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg185933.aspx
Also see this article on one that was written on top of the membership database: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/archive/2009/04/23/enhance-your-asp-net-membership-based-website-by-adding-identity-provider-capabilities.aspx
Approach of creating an identity provider (IP) based on your ASP.NET membership database which Paul Tyng suggested is valid.
However, it means that if you just create an IP you'll allow log in to all people who are authorised with other IPs (e.g. Google or Facebook). I'm guessing it's not what you want - you'd still want people to first register (either plainly with username-password or with their external identity). If that's the case then your task is the following:
Add a data store for users' external identities which is related to your existing Users table.
Modify the ACS login handling within your application to check that the identity returned from ACS actually exists in your members database.
Perform member log in (instead of federated log in) if you found the returned identity in your db.
Add external identity tie in during the registration process so your Identities table can be actually populated.
(optional) Re-use the bulk of the #4 mechanism to provide an ability to attach external identity to existing user accounts (i.e. I already have a normal membership with you and now want to add an ability to log in with Google as well, for example).
There is no one single tutorial/walk-through to achieve this (or I have not found one) so I had to pull bits from a variety of sources to make it work. Please let me know in the comment if I understood your requirement correctly and I'll add a guide on how to set this up. Cheers!
Might be a bit late, but check out the following blog posts by fellow Windows Azure MVP - Dominik Bayer:
Mixing Forms and Token Authentication in a single ASP.NET Application
Mixing Forms and Token Authentication in a single ASP.NET Application (the Details)
Replacing ASP.NET Forms Authentication with WIF Session Authentication (for the better)
Invaluable readings which will help you in any way!