If i had two different application running under the same solution but using different Databases can i share User credentials between those applications ?? any solution other Than The SSO and the Machine key in the web.config where the authentication is based on the default Asp.net Database ( i guess it's called the membership database )
if their is a solution could You please help
Are it two seperate IIS websites? And what are the real requirements you have? Just share some variables or move data from one application to another?
I'd think you'd probably better look into creating a service layer to receive and send information between sites. This way you can eventually seperate the two applications on different web front ends without problems.
This service layer can be implemented using different techniques like XML Web Services, WCF, or maybe you could look at the new ASP.NET Web API http://www.asp.net/web-api
edit:
Ok clear from the comments I got some more info:
Imho you could do two things: schedule a synchronisation using some mechanism (could be xml export / import) every day or so. But if you'd want realtime SSO, you could simply create a service on the webserver connected to the authentication database where the only functionality is to authenticate users. Something like a: bool validatecredentials(string username, string passwordHash). If you're not talking about thousands of authentication requests this will perform quite good using standard WCF or some other service technology. If you are talking about larger systems or implementations you should look at Claims based authentication, .NET has a technique called WIF to implement that. It works using a seperate STS (Security Token Service) to issue tokens with claims who a user is and what he is allowed to do, etc.
Related
ASP.NET Identity - Windows Authentication and Web Services
All of the web applications I create for my job I do for the Intranet so we use Windows Authentication. However, in order to get any other information for the current user (email, phone, office) I need to consume a web service that is provided by another department. To get the information I pass the User's Name property to the web service and use a class I've written to store the information. I then store this object in a session and use it whenever needed.
While this works fine I know there must be a better way. I've recently looked into the identity framework and while it looks great I'm not exactly sure if it's the right fit for my situation. Most of the examples I look at have it work with a database to register and log in users. My users will never need to log in nor will they need to be created, at least not within the application. I basically just need to be able to store the data from the web service in the identity. Is this possible?
After enough looking around I was able to solve my problem. Using these links I figured out where I needed to load my user data, set my claims, and then how to use the claims to authorize my controllers.
http://www.mytechnotes.me/2015/08/04/56/
http://leastprivilege.com/2012/10/26/using-claims-based-authorization-in-mvc-and-web-api/
We have multitenant asp.net MVC web site which supports multiple partners. Currently we are using forms authentication to authenticate users. Now some of the partners have asked for single sign on support with SAML.
I did quick POC to test it against “Thinktecture” identity provider. All I did was to install “Identity and access” extension for VS 2012 and configure the identity provider. I noticed that the extension added configuration settings like URL of the IP and realm in the web.config file. It also added “WSFederationAuthenticationModule” module to handle the authentication. This module was handling all the redirects and the validation of response behind the scene.
In my case since we will have multiple identity providers, depending upon the partner, I will be choosing the Identity provider. The URLs of the different IPs will be stored in the database. I cannot list all the IPs in web.config. Hence I need mechanism in which I can redirect user to appropriate IP URL and once the IP posts back the result, verify the result and retrieve user information through claims. I don’t want to do the XML parsing of the result and validate the response, but just want to call methods in “WSFederationAuthenticationModule” to do the heavy duty work. But I am not sure which methods will be useful for me. Can somebody help me out or list of the sequence of methods I need to execute to achieve this?
Take a look at my simple example
http://www.wiktorzychla.com/2014/11/simplest-saml11-federated-authentication.html
The trick is not to have the WSFam module in the pipleline but rather use its api to trigger redirects and consume responses. If you follow my code, you'll see there are two clauses
// wsfed response or not
if ( !fam.IsSignInResponse(...) )
// redirect to provider
else
// create local config and validate the incoming token
This simple example is perfectly suitable for multitenant scenario, in fact we use ws-fed daily in multitenant environment and most clients are based on this core approach.
Namely, creating the SecurityTokenHandlerConfiguration programatically in the branch that consumes the response gives you total control over how you validate tokens for different tenants.
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!
Something I can't wrap my head around is how secure web services are.
For example we're writing a desktop application that will interact with data on one of our websites as well as local data. This data is sensitive though and the last thing we want is anybody calling the web services.
I've not yet found anything that says web services has some kind of authentication methods and the only security I've seen people talk about is using certificates to encrypt the message.
I'm no guru on this and would appreciate anyone's input and perhaps a link to somewhere that will explain this in simple terms.
Thanks
Jacques
If you are using ASP.NET to create a response / request Service you have only 3 options
ASMX
WCF
Normal .NET pages (or handlers) to process requests
as you specify Services, you can choose between ASMX and WCF then (you can read the difference between ASMX and WCF in my answer here)
keep in mind this
ASMX is considered deprecated technology and replaced by WCF. So if you are going to start new development which requires exposing reusable services, WCF is the way to go.
This days, there is a common pattern when we need to secure Services, and that's using a session key.
The Service normally has a Method for Login where it gets a User and some kind of Password (normally hashed, salted, etc) and that returns a "ticket" that has a limit of time (slided or not - means per each call to a method the period get's reseted or not), and all calls need to have that ticket included in the message body.
Services API like Magento and others uses this.
Or having a pre generated key that is given to the user / application to be used with every call
Services API like Campaign Monitor and MailChimp and others uses this.
The other normal way is to have the user and other credential in the message header all the time.
Services API like SuperOffice CRM and others uses this.
None of this services uses SSL, as I would only use if I really needed to protected the data in the "wire" keeping in mind that SSL expands the response time on every call made.
I hope this helps
Authentication:
Consider securing your web services with SSL. Distribute client certificates to those who need to consume those web services. Configure IIS to "Require Client Certificates".
Authorization: Consider developing a scheme where the user is sending a username and password of some kind in the querystring. When you can determine that those credentials are permitted to perform the operation that they're requesting, you can allow them to proceed. Indeed, this is custom logic that the application developer needs to write. There are no built-in conventions in ASP.NET web service for this.
The SSL encryption occurs at a lower level from the application. It's the applications job to then determine who is allowed to perform what operations.
Our webservices are encrypted through SSL (the certificates part) which is https://www.yousite.com instead of http://www.yoursite.com. This just provides basic encryption for the data stream. See SSL.
They are also authenticated by the authentication method that is chosen for our website. If it's is windows auth, or forms auth. See the msdn page on ASP .NET authentication.
For XML Web-Services you should take into account the following best practices:
Secure the transport Layer: the infromation or data in XML cannot be interrupted and read in transit.
Mask internal resources: Use Network Addres Translation (NAT).
Implement XML filtering: With the heklp of XMLand SOAP, affective filtering policies can be set to a content level that requieres a fully parsed or processed XML document.
Validate, Transform, Sign and Timestamp al messages: Use XML Schemma Validation, use XSLT for transforming XML, sing all messages, use Network Time Protocool (NTP) for synchronizing all XML nodes to a single authoritative reference time source.
Encrypt message fields.
Implement secure auditing.
Use existing security methods such as HTTPS.
Perform XSL transformations on the server.
Source: EC-Council Secure Programmer.
To expound on previous answers: Web Services are as secure as you make them. In general, there are two types of security. Securing the Transmission, and securing the access. Use of SSL can make your transmission secure (). Using Authentication (demand a username and password) allows you to secure access.
Web Services accessed via public internet (that is: not a VPN or only internal resources) are, indeed, less secure than Windows applications, since anyone can have access to them and, potentially, attempt to break your security. By using both transmission and access security, you can mitigate that to acceptable levels (acceptable to the point that banks use them for financial transactions, and you don't know paranoid until you've talked to a banker who has to face an FDIC inspection).
All web applications are exposed to the attacker and are a great surface area for attack. The biggest problem with web services, such as SOAP(WCF) is that often times the programmer doesn't realize that its trivial for an attacker to gain full access to the service. Often times programmers expose nasty functionally like execute_sql_query().
You should read the entire OWASP top 10.
Here's a primer on Securing XML Web Services Created using ASP.NET.
Scenario
I have an HTML/javascript website that uses javascriptSOAPClient communicate with an ASP.NET 1.1 web service in order to read/write to a SQL database. (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/ajax/JavaScriptSOAPClient.aspx). The database contains anonymous demographic information--no names, no credit cards, no addresses. Essentially the data collected is for data mining purposes.
The site is live, but we want to introduce a more secure communication between the javascript/ajax client and the wbe service for both this and future projects. Working as contractors in the financial industry, at some point we're going to get nailed with the question: is this website hackable? If we don't have a solution we could be out on our ears.
I am already following best practices such as communicating with the database via command parameters and stored procedures). However, currently anyone could browse to our web service description and figure out how to consume our exposed services.
Questions
With my hybrid solution (i.e. not end-to-end Microsoft) how should I go about authenticating client requests on the web service?
If I start passing a username/password or some other identifiable element into the web service as authentication, should I be concerned about how that key is generated/stored on the client side?
A few suggestions to consider:
List the threats, and compare each to your current setup.
Use SSL / HTTPS. This alleviates a whole class of vulnerabilities.
Use username/password, generated on the server side and sent out of band (in the post or by phone) to the user. (Hope this answers question 2).
Use 2-factor authentication. To do this, you can look at security tokens such as RSA's keyfob-type gizmos or look at Steve Gibson's Perfect Paper Passwords
The easiest solution from a programming standpoint is to use two way HTTPS. That is, the server presents a certificate to the client, and the client presents a certificate to the server. Then only clients with proper certs (issued by you) can connect.
That helps reassure clients that your site is not generally accessible, yet the security is transparent to the application and, once they've signed up and received a cert, to them. The downside is that you have admin overhead in issuing and tracking the user certs -- but that's probably less than you'd have dealing with username/password combos.
There are a few simple options:
SSL + Cookie
If the web app is also ASP.NET and hosted along with your web service, then you should have access to the User/Membership/Session of the web app inside your web service (essentially #1, but you get it without doing any work).
If the web app and web service are not on the same domain, then cookies are out due to cross-domain issues - so you can have the web app embed a GUID into a hidden form field, and use that GUID as a sort of cookie (and it will need to be passed as a parameter on all web service requests).
Can you incorporate a certificate authentication mechanism? So that only clients that have keys you can verify can communicate? That's how the product I work with has its managed devices communicate back to the core.