We're developing a SAAS solution for a big company in which doctors can view patients and make mutations, order products, provide licenses.
This project is for 4 separate companies under one umbrella company. For each company we developed a portal. All portals use the same code but have a strict separated database because the database contains all the patient information.
We're using Sitecore as CMS.
The client decided to use virtual folders instead of subdomains for the production environment. Our staging evironment url is for example: acc-portal1.umbrella.com. For the production environment they would like a URL such as: acc.umbrella.com/portal1. One SSL certificate is being used for all portals and requests.
We're using Membership Provider (forms authentication) for the authentication of users. Users can not log in with the same account in for example portal1 and portal3 because of the usage of separated databases.
Because we're using formsauthentication the ".ASPXAUTH" cookie is being used. Of course the "ASP.NET_SessionId" cookie is used also.
Because the client wants to use virtual folders instead of subdomains, the cookies are shared over all portals. It is possible to set the "path" on the node in web.config but this path is dynamically read by Sitecore and resolved in a pipeline. I did not find a way to override this path after it is being loaded in the web.config. Also I did not find a way to alter the ASP.NET_SessionId cookie path.
My question is: is it a (security) risk to share these cookies over multiple portals (remember, they should be separated completely)? Are there any other problems this setup could cause?
Hope somebody can help!
Yes, there is a huge security risk. What you do is called a multitenant application. You have to take special steps to ensure that cookies and other sensitive data cannot be shared.
My advice would be to store the tenant name (portal1) in the custom data section of the forms authentication cookie. You set the custom data when you issue the forms cookie.
Then, have a custom module or just a handler of the Application_AuthorizeRequest event, where the identity is already established based on the cookie.
In your handler, you decrypt the forms authentication ticket from the cookie, retrieve the user data and compare to the actual url. If there is a match - nothing happens. If there is no match, it means that user is authenticated in one portal but tries to access another. You can gently clear the response and render a message "well, this portal is not meant for you" or just log the user out.
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I am creating a project which has a login portal with multiple applications and websites. I want to allow the user to login and then click any application and have access to it. Some considerations are: each application is defined in a user profile, ie which users can see what. also each application privileges are different for each user. so user a may be an administrator of application a but just a normal users in application b.
What i know.
I can have one auth cookie created in the main portal which with setting the machine key and same authcookie name, each application can use it. I have done a test with this and it seems to work.
My problem
As each site/ virtual directory has different privileges per user and per application when the user access a site i need to get his privileges from the databases but I cant then overwrite the auth cookie userdata with the new details because he may have multiple tabs etc open at a time on different sites. So how can i have an extra cookie store per user and per application for holding application specific details. I know I could go to the database each time but that's allot of overhead for each post back.
Maybe another option is to use the main authcooke for checking the user is logged in then have a new auth cookie per aplication and user, but how can i have 2 authcookies, that may get confusing and the second needs to timeout when the main one does et c i think
Any help suggestions would be gratefully appreciated
THanks
------------------- EDIT -----------------------------
we have one user table for all all sites not 1 per each site. then we map the user to an application and then the user application and role. so when you get to an application it has to check if the user has access and what there role is. all other user details are already in the auth cookie when loggedinto the main site. We do it this way because we have to manage users in one application not each application. Hope this helps understand my requirements.
What you are describing is a 'classic' SSO (single sign-on) example. There are lots of ways people have tried this and they are well documented on Google.
One way to do this is to have your SSO server (e.g. the first place you land and log in) to issue a security 'token' (e.g. a Guid) and then either store this in a cookie or append to URLs. Each subsequent call to an application can look-up the token in a database, verify it's validity and carry on (or boot the user out if invalid).
Using a database also allows you to set a timeout for all applications for which the token is valid.
This can then be extended to allow the database to store which apps each user can access etc. I've described this in very broad terms but it may be a good starting point.
Hope this helps
BTW: querying the database on each request isn't too much of an overhead. I have applications that do just that and are still performant when loaded with 300+ users.
Big picture: I have been asked to create a search engine for our company's intranet. Such a search engine will crawl pages supplied to it by XML files for each independent application on the intranet. Problem is, the entire intranet is using Forms Authentication, and so the crawler will have to have access to each application without actually having user credentials (e.g. username and password).
Each application within the intranet has its access controlled by a permission manager, which is essentially a wrapper on the default Role Manager ASP.NET comes with. Each application can define its own roles and assign people who have those roles.
Please note that there are potentially hundreds of applications.
The crawler has access to the permission manager's database, so it knows what all the roles are. Therefore my idea was to have the crawler create a cookie that identifies it as having all roles for each application.
The problem I'm running into is this: how do I create a forms authentication cookie which already has the roles assigned in it without creating a corresponding user (IPrincipal).
It is entirely possible that I've failed to completely understand how Forms Authentication works, and if so, please tell me what I can do differently.
This is probably not what you want to hear, but...
I would just have the crawler authenticate like anyone else.
Given that this is a crawler you control, why fight Forms Authentication? Seems logical to create a user with all required roles in each application (hopefully you have a central administration point for the hundreds of apps, else I would not want to be an administrator there ;-)
If you do anything that allows "just the crawler" special access (bypass user-based authentication based on... what? The crawler's user agent? A specific origin IP?), you create a security hole that a hacker can leverage to gain access to all of the intranet applications that have otherwise been diligently secured with user IDs, passwords and roles (in fact, the security hole is particularly wide because you propose granting access to EVERY role in the system).
It sounds like what you want is an appropriately encrypted System.Web.Security.FormsAuthenticationTicket (which then gets attached to HTTP requests as a cookie).
The encryption logic is located in System.Web.Security.FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(), which I think uses the MachineKey as the encryption key. Also have a look at the GetAuthCookie() logic (using Reflector).
You might have to write your own version of the encryption method, but what you want to do should be possible, provided you have a copy of the remote site's encryption keys. You don't need the user's passwords -- only the user name is encoded into the Ticket.
It seems to me that the problem is not yet well defined, (at least to me!).
Why do you need to crawl the pages and index them if there are fine grained permissions on them?! How do you show search results without violating the permissions? Why not index the back end by passing the pages altogether (I mean index the database records not the pages)....
I have several websites that use a HTTPModule (wrapped in a dll) to authenticate users and store an authentication object in the application cache for ~10 hours. I then set a cookie containing the cache key on the users machine.
I'm now looking for a way to allow admins to clear a specific cache object for all websites for any given user (effectively logging them out) causing them to automatically log back in (via windows authentication) next time they visit any of the sites.
I was planning to have a single administration website with the facility to reset logins - but I can't change the application cache for other websites for obvious security reasons.
Is there any way of passing a signal to those sites that use the authentication module so that they can clear their own application cache?
Note: I have read up on memcached but I would like to avoid a solution that isn't 'Standard ASP.NET' if possible.
Here are two ideas:
If they are on the same server, you could have a file containing the active logins in the file system, that all projects can access.
Add a generic handler to each project, that resets the login of a given user. Call this from another project when he gets logged out there. You could add a passphrase for security reasons.
EDIT: I just thought of a better solution:
Create a central "authentication" project that keeps track of the login status. Call it from the websites (e.g. through generic handlers, webservice, ...) to log out a user or check his status.
I've opted to piggyback code onto the existing HTTPModule.
I check for a custom user-agent string, if it exists I clear the relevant cache entries based on a query string and return a custom HTTP header upon success.
The only extra overhead is checking the user-agent for each request which I can live with.
With this setup I can now use a WebRequest object (injecting my custom user-agent string) from my central site to send messages to all sites using the module.
I'm wanting to secure ELMAH in an internet facing application. The system uses Forms Authentication, but doesn't currently have any non-user accounts (e.g. Admins). The user accounts are set up in an automated fashion.
I don't really want to shoehorn any admin accounts into the system (the current DB schema for the users would be quite inappropriate for storing an admin user in), so I was thinking of corrupting the Forms authentication by checking for an SSL client certificate. If I pick all the right options in IIS, I believe I can ensure that only certificates issued by our internal CA (currently used for non-production sites needing SSL certs) will get passed through to ASP.Net.
I can then use the presence of a Valid ClientCertificate (checking IsPresent and IsValid properties of Request.ClientCertificate) to know that this is a connection from an internal user, and set the Forms Authentication cookie as "Diagnostic" or "Admin" (Or any other special username), and then secure elmah.axd using any of the usual methods suggested for doing it via Forms Authentication.
So my question is - am I overcomplicating things, missing something obvious, opening a massive security hole, etc?
Why don't you just store an admin user account credentials within Web.Config and lock down the URL using Forms Authentication anyway?
Edit
Ok, if the application is entirely internal anyway, why not secure a subdirectory of your site (e.g. myapplication.domain.com/exceptions/elmah.axd or even just myapplication.domain.com/elmah.axd) using Active Directory and set authorisation through IIS?
I am building a suite of applications using ASP.NET.
Each application can be hosted on separate servers.
All the applications share an integrated database.
All applications require user authentication before use.
I want to build the ability to transfer users from one application to another without having to relogin.
Is there a way to recognize that a user is logged in one application and allow quick navigation to another application on a different server?
Currently I am storing the password hashes in the database; but I wouldn't be opposed to other suggestions if they solve the problem.
Here is what I have done in the past.
Each application must share a forms authentication ticket. To do this the forms authentication cookie name must have the same name, the machineKeys must be the same, and the protection mode must be the same.
This works across domains, but does not work across IPs. What I do to get around this is to serialize the ticket info and store it in the database with the session id as the key. If a user is not authenticated the server will look for the session id in the database and rebuild the FA ticket if found.