We have built a WCF service for an application and everything is working out well, using WSHttpBinding. We now have been asked to make sure the communication between the Web Application -> WCF -> Database is secure and have been asked to use SSL. Along with that they are requesting we make sure the WCF service can not be accessed by another application.
If we setup SSL, does that block others from trying to get in, or we do still need to setup the clientCredentialType setting on the service? Also the entire application (site, wcf, db) will be within a company's network, so if we setup the clientCredentialType="Windows" which account is used, how does WCF know to allow the website to talk to it, which Windows account are they using, or this an account we need to setup?
Thanks.
SSL has nothing to do with Authentication or Authorization.
It does 2 things:
prevents third parties from intercepting your traffic.
verifies that people are who they say they are.
The requirement "make sure the WCF service can not be accessed by another application" needs to be handled through some Authentication / Authorization mechanism. You could use Basic or Windows depending on your needs.
Since you're in the company's network, I'd attempt to use Windows Authentication. This will force clients to be authenticated through your domain, however it looks like you don't want just any domain user to have access. In this case, you need to set up either Role based authorization, or user based. Either war, you can drop a Web.config file into the same folder as the WCF service endpoint specifying what accounts are authorized. Other users will see a 401 Unauthorized.
This is the general approach I'd take.
Related
I have the following scenario:
(Client/Browser) => (Web Service/Web API) => (SharePoint REST-Api).
Basically what I want to achive is to have the middle application (WebService/Web API) to act as a facade infront of the SharePoint-REST-API to ease the development for anybody that needs to communicate with our SharePoint-application. (Basically we wrap a few SharePoint-request-calls into one single call in the Web API/Facade).
Now the problem is that I also want to be able to send the logged in Windows user (AD-user) from the Client to the Web Service, and then the web service should act on behalf of that Windows user and perform whatever actions needed in the SharePoint REST-API (this is to make sure that permissions to files and so on are actually set based on the authenticated user).
What we have tried so far is setting uo the Web Service on one server, and SharePoint on a different server.. and then we have tried to setup authentication using Kerberos and delegation, but we could not get this working.
Based on the information I have provided, do you guys think that a "double hop" like this would work if we manage to get Kerberos setup properly?
Another thought that hit me is that maybe we dont have to host the Web Service and the SharePoint applications in two different servers, but we could actually host them both on the same server within one single IIS-server with two sites.
Would this still require Kerberos to be setup with a double hop? Or does a "hop" only count once the ticket actually leaves one server to another.. cause in the case described here, the request from the Web Service to the SharePoint-REST-API would never leave the actual server, but it might cross domains (as in web-domains.. not AD-domains).
Could this work, instead of having to hassle with Kerberos double hop, SPNs and what not..?
when you use integrated authentication, anonymous is disabled at that time and impersonate is enabled.so security settings will not allow your site to access resources on any network servers.
When you authenticate to the IIS server using Integrated Authentication, that uses up your first 'hop'. When IIS tries to access a network device, that would be the double or second hop which is not allowed. iis will not pass those credential to the next network device.
if you use anonymous enable and impersonate off this issue will not occur.
to configure Kerberos Authentication in iis you could follow the below steps:
1)open iis manager and select site.
2)select the authentication feature from the middle pane.
3)enable windows authentication and disable anonymous.
4)With Windows Authentication, click on the Providers from the Action pane.
5)set the provider in below manner:
Negotiate
NTLM
save the changes.
6)go back and select the configuration editor.
from section dropdown select system.webServer/security/authentication/windowsAuthentication.
“useAppPoolCredentials” set to true.
"useKernelMode" to "True" and save the settings.
7)restart the iis.
8)Configure SPNs
open the command prompt as administrator and run below command to check the machine name:
hostname
When you have a custom hostname and you want to register it to a domain account, you need to create a SPN a below.
setspn -a HOST/${FQDN_HOST} ${MACHINE_NAME}
setspn -a http/${FQDN_HOST} ${MACHINE_NAME}
9)after doing that set application pool identity to the custom account and set the username and password.
You could refer this below article for more detailed information:
https://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/iis-windows-authentication-and-the-double-hop-issue
https://active-directory-wp.com/docs/Networking/Single_Sign_On/SSO_with_IIS_on_Windows.html
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/IIS-Support-Blog/Setting-up-Kerberos-Authentication-for-a-Website-in-IIS/ba-p/324644
I have three asp.net applications. Only one of them has a forms authentication login. I redirect anonymous users to that one login page for all three applications to login. Once they log in, they automatically redirected back to the application and page they were attempting to access.
I enabled this functionality by setting the same MachineKey in all three applications.
Is there a way to do this for ADFS 3.0 WIF authentication as well? It doesn't seem to work the same in my testing. When I log into the application that is wired up to ADFS, I still can't access the other two.
WIF and ADFS don't work the same way as traditional forms authentication. These technologies rely on issuing access tokens, and require that dependent applications (also known as Relying Parties, or RPs) configure a trust relationship with the token provider (AKA Identity Provider, or IP). You can't share the cookie with MachineKey between apps that have not directly authenticated with an IP, and to be quite honest you don't want to.
The typical web scenario (also known as Passive Federation) is to have a separate application that functions as a Security Token Service (STS). This application houses the Login.aspx page and is protected with Forms or Windows Authentication like you would find in a classic ASP.NET scenario. When you attempt to access a web application that requires authentication, it needs to be set up to redirect you to the STS website, rather than handling it by itself. Once you log into the central STS, it will issue you a token that you then provide to applications to gain access. If you use WIF properly, this is all handled behind the scenes and is just a matter of configuration.
Each of your three web applications should be configured with a trust relationship to your IP. You said that you have a web application wired up to ADFS already, if that's via the proper trust relationship, then you should simply have to replicate that set up to your other 2 applications.
I'm using WCF services ensuring that UserName/Password must be provided for each request. I need use same service from many clients, but I need impersonate the call to access the appropriate resources for each client. When I call the service directly from the client there is no problem, because I use for each client a pair UserName/Password defined in theirs web.config. The problem came when I need to call a second Web service from a call to the first-one using the same identity. This second Web service requires UserName/Password, but I only know who is the caller (UserName) but not the password.
How I can impersonate this second call without knowing the password for the corresponding username?
EDIT: The app (Web App and Services) is running in a shared hosting environment where I can't use Windows Authentication to configure Kerberos for Delegation. I have defined a UserNameValidator to process on each call the pair UserName/Password against a custom SQLServer database. Moreover, the intended customers of this app will use it from Internet, without requiring a windows account, that is because I need a more flexible, SQL-based, authentication schema.
You need to look at using Kerberos to handle the passing of authentication onwards to other services from your first WCF service.
Have you taken a look at the declarative security options? The linked article by Juval Lowy includes an internet application scenario as well.
i'd like to recieve comments on the way i'm trying to build an asp.net web application which uses a WCF service that is hosted in another asp.net application. Both applications will live on the same machine, but the app with the WCF service will not be accessible from the outside. there will be two web servers sharing the load behind a load balancer.
The app pool of both applications will use the same local user account (web server is not part of a domain) and so i was thinking to use WsHttpBinding with windows security for communication between client and internal wcf service.
The fron-end asp.net app uses forms authentication through a custom membership/role provider to athenticate and authorize users. The user database is in a sql server database.
i need to somehow pass to the wcf service the user details (username + roles) so that in the wcf it will be possible to validate and authorize according to the roles of who is logged in the front-end. I read i need to use "support tokens", but i haven't figured out how to use this.
I read also something about claims and WIF, which seems interesting but have no idea how i could use these in my scenario.
is there anyone who can give me recommendations about the architecture and maybe also show me how to pass the username to the wcf service and also show me if possible to use claims based authorization?
First of all, if both servers are behind the corporate firewall on a corporate LAN, I would strongly suggest using netTcpBinding instead of any http based binding. NetTcpBinding is much faster due to encoding the message in a binary format.
As for username / password: your ASP.NET front-end server could set the client credentials for the user calling for the WCF service - after all, the ASP.NET servers do have access to the ASP.NET membership database, don't they?
Or if you cannot pass on the user's credentials, you could pass on some headers to your WCF service that would describe the user - actually, you probably only ever need the user's unique ID - since the WCF service could fish out the rest of the info from the ASP.NET user database again, if really needed.
As for claims - I don't think they'd be a good idea here - you don't really have to deal with a multitude of different authorization schemes, and you're not using any federation (e.g. allowing users from a different company or domain to use your services) - so those obvious benefits probably won't really be applicable to your case.
I have a fairly complex business application written in ASP.NET that is deployed on a hosted server. The site uses Forms Authentication, and there are about a dozen different roles defined. Employees and customers are both users of the application.
Now I have the requirement to develop a Windows Mobile client for the application that allows a very specialized set of tasks to be performed from a device, as opposed to a browser on a laptop. The client wants to increase productivity with this measure. Only employees will use this application.
I feel that it would make sense to re-use the security infrastructure that is already in place. The client does not need offline capability.
My thought is to deploy a set of web services to a folder of the existing site that only the new role "web service" has access to, and to use Forms Authentication (from a Windows Mobile 5/.Net 3.5 client).
I did see this question and I am aware of the limitations that Forms Authentication poses. Since security is not my primary motivator (I use SSL and can restrict access by IP address), but rather using existing user accounts and roles, my decision tree is somewhat different as well.
Can I do this, is it a good idea, and are there any code examples/references that you can point me to?
I ended up with a combination of things. First, forms authentication does not really work in this scenario, because of the redirects that you get when a users is not logged in or the credentials are incorrect.
Because I want to use the user accounts from the web app, I worked around this by just calling Membership.ValidateUser prior to processing each service call on the server.
A user is prompted for an id and password when logging on to the client. I store both values encrypted in the proxy class and pass them transparently with each call using a host header, so that the application does not have to bother with this once the user is logged in, i.e. the credentials were validated once by calling the Login() service method (which only calls Membership.ValidateUser).
I use the CryptoApi on both the server and the client side.
I understand that host headers are somewhat outdated for security applications, but since I use strong encryption AND SSL, it is perfectly adequate.