The latest version of ASP.NET includes the new authentication framework ASP.NET Identity, which should be the core building block for user management in all new and near future ASP.NET projects and websites.
I have seen that it can integrate with the WebAPI quite nicely, but haven't seen any example of integration as authentication for mobile client devices. For example - suppose I have a ASP.NET website with Identity implemented in use. Now I want to build client applications for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8. I see two main issues that are limiting this.
Firstly - ASP.NET Identity apparently issues only short-lived auth. tokens, which is quite a bad user experience for mobile applications. I have seen some attempts to create a refresh token mechanism - http://leastprivilege.com/2013/11/15/adding-refresh-tokens-to-a-web-api-v2-authorization-server/ . This is quite a nice approach, but it would still be more interesting to see a really built in solution.
Second - and maybe more important - external authentication provider support. On the ASP.NET Identity website it is quite clear and easy to see a way to authenticate via WebAPI, but I haven't seen this in use with external authentication. How is it possible to get the authentication URLs for Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter and how can the authentication flow be completed from within the app?
Has anyone some experience with this? It would be great to find a complete walkthrough, I will gladly reward the correct solution with some bounty points :-) .
The problem is that security is complicated and that Microsoft's solutions only address the simple scenarios.
Also, you're consing terminology (which increases everyone's confusion, including your own). ASP.NET Identity manages users' credentials stored in a database. It's unrelated to the type of application that needs to validate credentials (mobile, api, browser, desktop, etc).
Katana middleware is what allows an application to authenticate the caller. There's cookie middleware for browser applications, external middleware for google, facebook, WS-Fed, etc, and then there's OAuth2 for API applications. Each work differently based upon the nature of the application. Some of them interact as well, depending on the requirements of the application.
I don't mean to pick on you -- this is more of a complaint about Microsoft's lack of education/documentation in the frameworks they provide. And I suppose this is an answer to your question -- Microsoft doesn't have what you're asking for. They have bits and pieces, but you're left to connect the dots.
Some links that might help:
http://www.asp.net/identity
http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/security
http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/authentication
http://brockallen.com/category/owin-katana/
http://leastprivilege.com/category/katana/
http://leastprivilege.com/category/webapi/
HTH
Related
i have a major challenge to implement Passwordless MFA for an existing ASP.NET (4.8) WebForms application.
Currently it asks for username/password, then sending a PIN to their phone to provide as a second factor. Now we need to find a way to get this working passwordless with MFA (offering more factors to use).
My biggest challenge is the stuff about Windows-Hello/PIN (Microsoft), FaceID/TouchID (Apple), FaceID/TouchID (Google) and YubiKey.
I haven't found a way to handle all, like a libraries or so. What is the best practice to support those.
One only supporting Microsoft is https://fido2-net-lib.passwordless.dev/. But how about the Apple and Google part?
Delegating all this to an external provider is also an option, but i want to figure out what is currently possible with a legacy WebForms application running on ASP.NET.
I need all your inputs for a use case with SSO implementation. Let me explain you my use case. I have couple of applications which written way back in 2004 – 2005 with ASP.NET, C#, SQL etc.. and uses ASP.NET cookie based Form Authentication to maintain the SSO between these web applications. It is working great and no issues so far. Now in early 2015, we are in the initial stage of building next generation application using HTML5, Angular JS & Web API which should work in all platforms & devices. So we decided to move with JWT Token based authentication in the new applications to maintain the SSO between. But the curtail use case pitch in now that is, the new set of application also should allow user to go back to their old applications by not asking any login information ( eventually, SSO between new applications vs old application). Since both uses different way of authentication, it is not going to be a straight forward implementation (My guess ).
Would any of you come across such situation before? Any suggestions?. Advance thanks for all of you.!!
We are planning to receive a SAML assertion from another website into ours (ASP.NET). No one here has ever worked with SAML. We simply need to verify the signed assertion, decrypt the token containing a user id and if we can verify it, log them into our site (authenticate/authorize). We are using Forms Authentication for all other authentication. I would like to avoid installing WIF if possible because my understanding is we'd have to install the runtime on all the developers machines and servers. Our machines are locked down by policy such that it would be a lot of paper work to get it installed. Are there alternatives to WIF and are they realistic to use in an enterprise environment? If so, can someone point me in the right direction, a good tutorial, video, book or anything with examples would be helpful? I looked at some third party components but I'd have the same issue as with WIF on our servers (not to mention dealing with procurement).
Thanks
Is this internal or an external facing application? You may want to checkout PingOne.com Application Provider Services (APS) [Note: I work for Ping]. PingOne handles all the SAML protocol stuff for you and provides self-service capabilities, reporting, etc. No need to install WIF... just a few lines of .NET code (or whatever) to integrate with the RESTful service that PingOne provides.
HTH - Ian
I'm currently developing a web application that will use Facebook as a authentication service. Does it make sense to implement it as an ASP.NET Forms Authentication custom membership provider? While I made my research, I didn't come across any concrete significant advantage of using the Forms Authentication. However, it instinctively seems to me as a good thing to do, because aside from creating a completely custom implementation of authentication using Facebook, I didn't find any extensibility point inside ASP.NET where I could plug in the Facebook auth behavior.
Can you then tell me whether the Forms Authentication is a good idea or not. And if not, is there any other way than completely custom code (I'd like to avoid managing the session cookies, loading the current user, etc. manually).
I'm using ASP.NET MVC 3, Entity Framework and I'd like to avoid the Facebook C# SDK (the extensive use of dynamic types is a bit of a turnoff for me :-) ).
Thanks for any advice.
A simple answer is to use .NET 4.5 oAuth templates, they are incredibly easy to link Facebook up to forms authentication.
http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/videos/oauth-in-the-default-aspnet-45-templates
However you may struggle to find a decent server if you are planning on releasing immediately. In a couple of months plenty of servers will support .NET 4.5.
The OAuth templates work for both v4.0 and v4.5 so you can publish them onto a server today itself :)
Currently, we have many web applications (external & internal) developed using Classic ASP through .NET 2.0 technologies. Each of those web applications have their own login screen authenticating against their own custom database or using Windows authentication. Users have access to one or more of these applications, meaning they have to log out and log back into applications that they would like to access. All applications share some part of the back-end data sources. Also, the business logic is embedded in the UI in addition to being duplicated across applications because there is no code/business logic sharing. Screenshot #1 gives a brief idea of the existing architecture.
Screenshot #2 shows the suggested architecture, which I hope will help in faster development, code/business re-usability and may be simpler maintenance. Users will access either external or internal url. In external, users will provide credentials and will be authenticated against custom database. In internal site, users will be automatically logged in using Windows authentication. After creating some samples, I have begun to like ASP.NET MVC 3. It keeps business logic separate from UI and I also like the unit testing capabilities.
Here are my questions:
Based on what I have found on the web so far, multiple authentications are not feasible within a single website. My understanding is that I have to host one website for each type of authentication (Forms and Windows). How do I redirect users to common landing page after they are authenticated so they can see the modules (links/menus) that they are authorized to access? Should I have to publish the same code set (dlls and content) to both the websites?
Has anyone faced a similar architecture problem? If yes, could you please share the challenges that you faced and how you tackled them? What are the industry standards in designing applications of this sort?
Does the suggested architecture make any sense or is it a really bad design? Are there any drawbacks in doing this in ASP.NET MVC 3?
I would really appreciate your inputs.
Thanks in advance.
I would set up a seperate web site which only handles the windows authentication. I would then rely on something like OpenID and/or OAuth to ask for credentials/token to make sure to user has proper access.
The user that want to sign in using windows credentials go through that process because you are right in that a IIS server running windows authentication is hard to mix with other stuff.
You can set up some kind of claim based network of thrust in which you applications get thier credentials from trusted sources and through that process you can negotiate and control access privileges cross many web sites. As long as your not doing custom hosting or white label branding you can have everything in one place (or even if you did you could design it so that you have a central solution of handing out authentication tokens).
Keep in mind the difference between Authentication and Authorization. You presumably want a single authentication mechanism (or maybe two, one for internal and one for external users). There is a similar post here that lays out some pretty good guidelines: How to allow multiple authentication methods in ASP.NET?
On one project we built a common controller class used in every page of the site. It handled authentication and access control. When a user tried to access any page it checked to see if they had a session identification cookie. If they did not they were required to authenticate(login). A challenge was doing a good implementation of the security. Current browsers have many flaws that make this difficult.