I have a classic ASP Web application that's been running on a Windows Server 2003 server with IIS 6.0 for several years. I have to move it to a Windows Server 2008 server with IIS 7.0. I've got it working, but the ServerVariable LOGON_USER doesn’t get populated. This seems to be because I have enabled Anonymous Authentication and allowed Anonymous Authorization to the site. However, if I disable/deny either of those, then I get an Authentication or Authorization error when attempting to open it. I have to have the LOGON_USER variable for the program to work correctly, but no matter what combination of Authentication/Authorization I use, I get errored out if I don't allow anonymous login. Rather at a loss at this point as to what to try next. Any suggestions?
When you disable anonumous access, the site will become inaccessible for users that are not logged in.
You will need to add at least read-rights in Windows Explorer to the folder your web-application is running in.
If you do that, IIS will then prompt you for a username and password. You can use the credentials of the user you have assigned read rights to.
This will then authenticate you as that specific user, and allow you to run the site. This will also fill the LOGON_USER servervariable with the username of the user you added.
Here's some more documentation on how to create a user for access using basic authentication in IIS:
http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/cc772009%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa292114%28v=vs.71%29.aspx
How do I create a user account for basic authentication?
Related
I'm currently experiencing an issue with some users of an ASP.NET 4.8 Web API application hosted on Windows Server 2012 and IIS. The following properties are not returning that user's correct user name, and instead returning the name of a service account used for this server:
HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name
HttpContext.Current.Request.LogonUserIdentity.Name
I have no idea how to begin troubleshooting this - myself and most other users do not experience this issue, but for a handful of users the above does not return the correct username, returning the username of a service account used to remotely connect to the server in question. Forcing a login via a browser private window does rectify the issue, and the application correctly returns the expected username for each of the above properties.
What could be a cause for Windows Authentication not returning the correct user name and what is the best way to troubleshoot an issue like this?
edit: I was able to resolve the issue, see my answer below
After some additional research and troubleshooting, I determined that the users experiencing the issue described above had the service account in question stored in the Windows Credential Manager:
Removing the service account in question allowed them to be authenticated with the Intranet site with their normal Windows domain\username. As #pcalkins suggested, at some point the affected users had used these credentials on their machine, and Chrome, Edge, IE were using that saved credential when authenticating with the Intranet site.
Please check the following steps:
Make sure that windows authentication is enable and Anonymous Authentication is disable for the website.
Enable integrated security in Interner Explorer (Options/Advanced and checkin the "Enable Integrated Windows Authentication" option).
Add your website to Local Intranet zone and select at least "Automatic logon only in Intranet Zone" option under Options/Security Settings/Local intranet/Custom level).
Aake sure the user and application server are in the same domain.
Wondering if you can help me here, been battering away at this for days now.
i have an IIS site with windows authentication installed, which is working exactly the way it should do. This particular IIS Server houses approx 6 other sites so i have create a new Site called Helpdeskv6, with Application Pool Helpdeskv6 set to .NET 4 integrated using ApplicationPoolIndentity. We are currently working on a 2008 R2 domain, no windows firewall etc.
So i have now created a A Record that gives it a nice little name for our intranet users, the A record is called helpdesk (FQDN: helpdesk.my.domain). The IIS site is setup with bindings on standard port 80 for both helpdesk and the FQDN. but yet when i try and browse to the A record address it constantly prompts me for username and password. When i enter my details they work but i dont want users to be prompted.
i have ASP.NET Impersonation and Windows Authentiation enabled - Providers are NTLM and Negotiate. ASP Impersonation is Auth User. NTLM Authentication is ticked in my ASP Project Web Property page.
i have tried just enabling and disabling so many different settings, i have used setsnp -S HTTP/helpdesk.my.domain webserver001 and i have used setsmp -S HTTP/helpdesk webserver001 as i have read alot that apparently needs these in but nothing seems to work.
i have never used ASP Auth with a A Record before so i am at a severe loss please help, hope i supplied enough information as i do not want to have users entere their windows authentication constantly it should be auto so i am just fearfull i am missing a trick here as when i browse via netbios name it works but this is not appropriate for our environment
Forgot to close this out,
The issue was becuase the site wasnt being registered as a Intranet site and Auth details where not being transported over.
Short version:
For IIS 7.5 web applications with Windows Authentication does the end
user need to have Read file access?
Long version:
I have an intranet ASP.NET web app that uses windows authentication. It's installed at dozens of different companies and normally the authentication works fine: users navigate to the site e.g. http://appserver/MyApp, the app recognizes who they're logged in as and displays pages accordingly. I just installed it at a new client and encountered a problem:
When connecting e.g. to http://appserver/MyApp I'm prompted for windows credentials but after entering them I'm repeatedly prompted. After several re-entering credentials I'm shown a 401 error page saying "401 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.". So not only is it not passing through my identity but even when entering the username & password it's still denying access.
Giving Read & Execute permissions to the end users of the app solves this problem, but I don't think this should be necessary at all.
In the windows Application Event Log there's a message "File authorization failed for the request" along with Thread account name: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE and User: [the correct workstation users's domain account]. This suggests that the file access is being performed with the User's identity, not the AppPool identity of Network Service. Sure enough if I grant the end user Read & Execute permission (I didn't try Read only) to the application's directory then everything works correctly: when the user browses to the site they're authenticated automatically, not prompted, and the web site correctly recognizes their identity! Therefore my workaround solution is to give Read & Execute permission to Everybody on the application directory...but this is not an ideal solution.
This seems very strange. I've never needed to do this before in IIS 7.5, so far as I recall, and definitely never needed to in IIS 6 or IIS 7. Is this a new IIS7.5 thing? The documentation says that Impersonation is turned off by default. I added a element to the web.config to be sure, removed file permissions other than Network Service, but the problem remained.
Any thoughts? Is it normal for Windows Authenticated sites on IIS 7.5 for end users to need file permissions on the web server files?
Some relevant details:
Network Service
has Full Control file permissions to the app folder.
When connecting from the server itself I was prompted for credentials
but after entering them i'm authenticated and the application works
correctly including displaying my windows login and connecting and
retrieving data from the db. I later determined that it was prompting
for credentials because http://localhost was in the trusted sites
and therefore not recognised as the Intranet Zone and thus not
passing identity through. I also determined that it was working as
this user identity because it's an admin user who has file
permissions.
The web server is running Windows Server 2008 R2 / IIS
7.5. It didn't have IIS on it until I installed it. I installed the default features as well as Windows Authentication, ASP.NET, and
possibly a couple of other items. A separate WCF app I installed that
uses IIS, anonymous authentication & .net 2.0 is working fine on
that web server.
The app install process is a manual copy of files,
creation of IIS App Pools & web apps, updating connection strings,
etc.
I checked the IE security settings. It was recognizing the
server as in the Intranet zone and had the option 'Automatic logon
only in Intranet zone' selected. Also on Advanced Settings the
'Enable Integrated Windows Authentication' option was checked.
After
installing IIS I ran aspnet_regiis -i for .net 2.0 and
aspnet_regiis -iru for .net 4.0.
Anonymous authentication is
disabled for my app and Windows Authentication enabled.
The app is
running on ASP.NET v4 but there's another app I installed
experiencing the same issue running ASP.NET v2.
The app is running
with Identity = Network Service and in 32-bit mode.
Database
connection string includes Trusted Connection=True and database
permissions are granted to the web server account [domain]\[server]$
e.g. DGM\MyServer$.
In IIS > Authentication > Windows Authentication > Providers the list was Negotiate first then NTLM. I tried reordering so NTLM is first.
In the Windows Security Event Log there
were a series of Microsoft Windows security auditing events: Logon
and Logoff. They indicated that the Logon was successful and was
displaying the User Id of the workstation user. This are from when
I'm connecting from another workstation and receive a 401
Unauthorized after several attempts.
I see someone has had this problem reported here but with no solution. Originally I posted in the ASP and then the IIS forums with no answers so far.
Update:
This msdn article says
When Windows authentication is enabled but impersonation is disabled, ASP.NET performs file access checks in the file authorization module using the credentials that are sent from the browser (my emphasis). Impersonation does not need to be enabled, because the FileAuthorizationModule module ensures that the requesting user is allowed read access or write access to the resource, depending on the request verb (for example, GET or POST) before executing the request. This behavior applies to any requests that enter managed code. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, accessing files based on URIs such as "Default.aspx" triggered the access check. In ASP.NET MVC applications, where access to resources is typically performed using extensionless URLs, this check typically does not apply, because there is not a physical file to check. In that case, the FileAuthorizationModule class falls back to checking access-control lists (ACLs) for the folder.
This does suggest that the end user needs permissions to the files (in the case of .aspx) or the folder (for MVC) ... although still this seems slightly tucked away and non-definitive. This article about App Pools says they're used as the identity for securing resources, which contradicts the idea of needing to grant privileges to end users. Unless the rules are different for App Pools and NETWORK SERVICE, which could be the case but would be surprising.
Are authenticated users allowed to the app folder?
We were also fighting with this issue, and started setting up security groups so we could give our users file level permissions. Then one of our server admins stumbled across a couple of new properties that allow the app to authenticate to the file system under set credentials, and resolved the need for the users to have access. Here is what he came up with…
There are two IIS settings that control this:
Physical Path Credentials Physical Path Credentials Logon type
By default, Physical Path Credentials is set to Application User
(Pass-through authentication). This means that IIS doesn’t do any
impersonation when handling Windows Authentication requests. This can,
however, be set to a specific user (though not, unfortunately, the
application pool identity, which would be ideal). Physical Path
Credentials Logon Type is set by default to Clear-Text. For my testing
I set this to Interactive (though this may not be the correct value).
Possible values are Clear-Text, Batch, Interactive, and Network.
To set this up I did the following:
Created a local account (IIS-AccessUser)
Granted IIS-AccessUser read and execute access to the /home directory of the site.
Added IIS-AccessUser to IIS_IUSRS group (necessary for accessing .NET temporary files)
Set IIS-AccessUser as the Physical Path Credentials
Set Physical Path Credentials Logon Type to Interactive
Doing the above allowed me to log in to the application directly,
without having to allow Authenticated Users, or me having to be a
member of any of the groups in the /home folder. It also still
preserved .NET Authorization roles, so I still could not access parts
of the site that I was not allowed to.
The short answer is NO. You are not required to grant file access permissions when using Windows Authentication in IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5.
We were only able to discover this because our server admin smelled the security and management issues that arise from taking the route of granting file level access to users and groups.
For anyone dealing with this issue or if you are setting up a new IIS7/IIS7.5 server and/or moving from IIS 6, here is an article that gives you all of the Windows Authentication options and configurations that need to be modified to avoid granting file level access to individuals or groups.
Please read the two comments in at the end of the POST for some valid critiques of the methods used in this article.
http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/iis-using-windows-authentication-with-minimal-permissions-granted-to-disk
In addition to the information in the article, please be aware that IIS 7.5 is not using the web configuration tags for system.web (at least not in my MVC 4 application).
It is looking in the system.webserver tags for authorization configuration (where you will need to list the windows domain\groups a user needs to be in to access your application).
-- DSB
How to get windows authenticated user name in .net application? My app is hosted on IIS. There is no Login form. But, I want to get the windows user name of the persons browsing it. I tried all the request objects. principal object getcurrent().name returns IIS app pool user name. But not the actual user. Please help. Thanks.
You cannot. Unless your application is using windows auth (and they could be prompted at some point like in firefox) you cannot get this information. If you do allow it, then access it via http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.httpcontext.user.aspx
HttpContext.User.Identity.Name
again though - they could be prompted for a login at some point.
You can't unless you enable windows authenication.
I have an application we bought that I need to integrate, and it uses jakarta connection to get to the application from IIS.
So, the basic operation is:
user goes to the url
Gets redirected to the application
SSO is enabled, so redirected back
to IIS for fetching of domain
credentials
Back to application
If username is blank show login
page, else let user in.
This is a simplification of all the steps, but the basic idea is here.
My difficulty is that I need both Windows Integrated Auth and anonymous on, as some users won't have credentials, and need to be prompted for a username/password.
I have looked at: IIS Windows Authentication before Anonymous already, but the user doesn't get to click on a link to decide. The application goes back to IIS looking for login.aspx and from there I want to either get their domain credentials or pass back to the application empty strings to signify that there are no credentials.
It seems this isn't going to be possible though as if anonymous is on it doesn't make the 401 request so the credentials aren't passed.
If I can't get this to work with just using an ASP.NET page, could it be done using an ISAPI filter, or a module?
UPDATE:
I found a possible solution, but I need to figure out how to get it to work, as my login page is on the JBoss server.
http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2008/02/11/IIS-7.0-Two_2D00_Level-Authentication-with-Forms-Authentication-and-Windows-Authentication.aspx
Keep the Authentication in the IIS as the Anonymous.
When loading the home page check the ACTIVE DIRECTORY for the current logged in USERNAME if exist
provide the extra functionality to current user or else with fewer options.
Refer --> Active Directory Cheking