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.
Related
What is the best/proper technique to share login between two sites.
I have website A, and some websites B. Both types belong to the same company, but B is running on the customer premises. What I would like, is that users login in B, and when redirected to A for some reason, they don't need to login again, and they can work with their account in A.
Of course, the company will make logins for each 'B' user. The problem is that the user could initiate the login in A or B.
Would OAuth do? Or OpenID would be more suitable?
Another option is pass a GUID token in the GET string, with a sort time to live and only valid for the IP address of the requester, but it is not sure the user would access the web sites through the same gateway.
Thanks
OAuth is exactly what you need. OpenID offers discovery which is only useful when the user gets to choose who to authenticate with (not your use case). Also, OpenID is much more complicated and is a dying protocol.
In your scenario, Server A is the OAuth server (or authorization server in OAuth 2.0) and Server B is the client. There are many ways to implement this, but I would suggest you start by looking (and trying) how Facebook OAuth 2.0 implementation works. It will give you a good idea of what is involved and some of their extension (e.g. display) which make it more user-friendly.
You are talking about single sign-on. Does the company who owns Website A provide remote sign-on in their api?
You need to make sure that the log-on information is encrypted when it is passed to website A. The last single sign-on I built required me to pass the user's AD name encrytped via RSA and hashed with MD5. The third party had a database of the user's AD name and their password to the third party site. When the user clicked a link, their encrypted information was sent to the log-on api of the third party and the third party redirected them to the welcome page with the log on process complete.
If you are building a single sign-on API yourself, as in you have control over website A, OAuth is a respectable choice. It is fairly easy to impliment.
I want to create a new .NET application with implemented Individual User Accounts.
Actually, there is no more possible to create it with users stored in local DB so Active Directory is necessary.
I created AD on Azure but have no clue how to fill this form.
I have a problem with all three inputs.
I have 3 question:
How to fill this form?
Is there any reason why I should implement Authentication by myself.
Is there other solution to get authentication out of the box? (like template with already implemented authentication)
To answer your first question, filling out the form, you will need to get these details from the Azure AD you setup. The Domain Name is the domain you created in Azure Ad. The Application ID is the guid you got when you registered your application in your Azure AD. The last field, Sign-up or sign-in policy, is the Azure AD policy you want to use to manage people signing up for your service as well as signing into your service.
The problem is, setting up your Azure AD is only one step out of many. What you should be learning how to do is setting up Single Sign On (SSO) using Azure AD. For that, I suggest looking at Authentication Scenarios for Azure AD, What is application access and single sign-on with Azure Active Directory? and Azure Active Directory B2C: Built-in policies. These series of articles should put you on the right path to get started with using Azure AD.
Your second question can be subjective, so I'll simply point things you will need to concern yourself with if you try to implement your own authentication. The biggest problem with doing it your self is making sure you have addressed the necessary security concerns. You will need to have your passwords stored securely which means salting and hashing them (I suggest Googling if you aren't aware of those term). You will also need to handle scenarios like password reset, forgetting user name and/or handling inactive or disabled user accounts. Many organizations and developers like using third party providers for SSO so they don't have to deal with such issues.
For your last question, yes there are. Microsoft does include a basic one with their web project templates (if you choose) and there are other providers out there such as Google or Facebook. There are many other options out there that are open source. A quick search on NuGet yielded over 2k results (https://www.nuget.org/packages?q=user+authentication).
I'm trying to set-up ADFS as a relying party, and I've read several tutorials which requires me to install ADDS first before I can configure ADFS.
Question: Is it possible to configure ADFS as a relying partner without utilizing ADDS? The user info will be validated from an SQL server instead and not from ADDS.
Based on this link:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758187%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
Claims-aware applications do not require a local user store. All information about a given identity is contained in the token that is presented by the application. The application may store additional information that links to the identity that is presented in the token, but a user account in Active Directory is not required.
I think this answers my question.
We are running a Saas ASP.NET 3.5 Web application using Forms authentication on a IIS 7.5 public server with protected content for thousands of users. We also have some subapplications running ASP.NET MVC 2.
Usernames and passwords are stored in our database and every user has roles and groups attached, with privileges and access rights defined.
Now we have been asked to also facilitate for simple SSO login via Active Directory so that users do not have to enter username and passwords twice to login. These users will originate from different networks and domains.
No user "sync" should take place from our servers to LDAP serves. We are not sure that any communication with LDAP is needed since all users will be created in our system and maintained there. Forms authentication will be used for most of our users.
From here on we are unsure which is the best path to choose. For our scenario what would be the "best practice" way to proceed?
The simple answer is SAML. It is considered the "best practice" and many large SAAS providers support it.
SAML protocol defines the single sign on flow between multiple systems. It establishes trust between systems using certificates. Your application accepts an assertion containing attributes (user id, name, email address, etc.) from other systems. Your app will map the user into your user store.
In .NET world there are several options. You can find a library that implements SAML (ComponentSpace has one) and hook it into ASP.NET authentication. You can create your own using Windows Identify Framework (WIF). Here's the boatload of WIF videos http://www.cloudidentity.com/blog/2010/06/23/ALL-WILL-BE-REVEALED-7-HOURS-RECORDINGS-FROM-THE-WIF-WORKSHOPS/. You can try IdentityServer http://thinktecture.github.io/
Depending on how secure your app must be, you can opt for a simple option of passing user id from trusted networks using a simplified method. I've seen apps that allow user id to be sent via URL parameter or form field. Of course, this is horribly insecure, and you are taking on more risk, because the trust between two networks is not cryptographically enforced. You can mitigate it somewhat by checking referrer string or IP address (if you can isolate IP range of a corporate network for example). But you are still open to spoofing because any user can impersonate others by simply replacing user id within HTTP request.
It probably doesn't answer your question fully, but hopefully points you in the right direction.
I recommend looking into ADFS 2.0 it is very powerful in terms of claims mapping and works with AD: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335705.aspx
What you would make is a token consuming portion of your app that would receive and parse the final claims returned to your web server after the authentication loop.
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!