I have tried my best to search the web before asking this question. I've seen similar questions on stackoverflow, however, none has been answered satisfactorily for a long time now. This is one more attempt to get this recurring question answered.
The Problem
How to build an ASP.NET MVC 5 website which uses "Windows Auth" for Intranet users and "Forms Auth" for Internet users? We'd like to accomplish this using ASP.NET Identity. Moreover, we don't want to use Active Directory Groups for authorization. For Intranet users, we want to authenticate them using Active Directory and then fall back to ASP.NET Identity to manage their roles and other profile data.
It'll be nice if we don't ask the end user to choose auth method. The web app should log in intranet users seamlessly. They shouldn't even know that there is a login screen. Likewise, the internet users shouldn't be asked to enter their domain credentials. They should see form based login screen right away.
Is there any recommended way of solving this? Or could you comment if any of the following are proper solutions?
http://world.episerver.com/blogs/Dan-Matthews/Dates/2014/8/Mixing-Forms-and-Windows-Authentication/
https://github.com/MohammadYounes/MVC5-MixedAuth
http://mvolo.com/iis-70-twolevel-authentication-with-forms-authentication-and-windows-authentication/
FYI This is 2004 article, may not be helpful now:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972958.aspx
IIS configuration
Enable Anonymous Authentication status in IIS for the whole site and Windows Authentication for some folder under root directory (for example, /WindowsLogin). In this folder place aspx file (for WebForms project) or create ApiController (for MVC project).
Site setup
On login page add button “Login with Windows/ActiveDirectory account” (in similar way as it is common practice to add buttons Login with Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc.). When user presses this button, they will be redirected to the page or controller in /WindowsLogin folder, which require Windows authentication. If site uses some Single Sign-On functionality, locate it in that page or controller, in other case just save Session for Windows users there. If user accessed that page or controller, they had been authenticated as Windows users already.
One of the possible ways could be creating two sites in IIS, but having the same target folder, where sources of site are located. First site is for internal users with enabled Windows Authentication mode and binding to 80 port, while second site is for external users with Anonymous mode enabled and binding to 8080 port, for example. Then, on firewall you will have to configure NAT, that all requests coming from within local network or VPN, will be redirected to local IIS server on port 80 and all requests coming from Internet, will be redirected to port 8080 of IIS server.
The term for this is Mixed-Mode Authentication. I have done this multiple times. You only need to tweak your main site. Here is how I have done it.
Keep your main MVC site as-is but run it as Anonymous vs. under Windows Auth.
Internal Site
Create a Redirect URL Site: Setup this site as Window Auth so you can pull the User ID from Active Directory. Give your users this URL and/or make it the link they click on your Intranet. Then this site calls your MVC Site and passes the user credentials (login id).
a. This can be done either via an encrypted string on the URL or encrypted value in a cookie. You can encrypt with an expiration date/time value too.
b. (Speaking from Forms Auth) Create a Forms Authentication Ticket with that user ID. Run any other login logic you have. Done.
External Site - No Changes required. Let the users login as-is.
Are you wanting to handle forms and AD authentication from one URL? I have used thinktecture (claims based auth) as the framework for WIF and marshaling various forms of authentication. However to handle if from one URL I had to handle some logic at login that associated the user to AD or Forms based. In a more recent project, this was handled at user management when we created the user account (it was associated to AD of Forms Auth). Then when the user logged in they would preface the AD domain name as part of the login. There are a number of ways to implement this, this was just one I have used. An example, instead of requiring the domain, just use the username, then check for AD or forms based flags on the username and then handle authentication accordingly
EDIT
Just an update in re-reading your question. Are the internet users and intranet users the same? If so you need to just go forms based auth across the board and manage the users in the product DB independent of AD. If they are the same then they could login prefacing the domain name to username. if you wanted to rely solely on AD.
I did a proof of concept of this some time ago, at my previous job, so the details are hazy and I don't have any code to refer to...
The requirements were:
Single URL for internal (LAN) and external (internet) access
Two types of users, people on the domain and external (non-AD) users
Windows authentication for domain users both internally and externally
The ability to enter domain logon details when using iPads (no windows auth)
The core idea in the solution I came up with was that we used Active Directory Group Policy to add a custom string to http request header user agent, the content doesn't matter, in fact we used a long random string of characters.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770379.aspx
Then the landing page for the site checks for this, and if found redirects to a virtual directory, with windows auth, that checked their AD account, populated the ASP.NET authentication token and then redirected them to their home page.
If the custom header isn't there then it just displayed the normal login form.
The only other thing was to add an AD email/password check to the normal login form so that if a domain user accessed the site from a non-windows device (iPad) then they could use their normal login details.
Why not put your website code on the server, robocopy it to two separate websites and just handle the changes in authentication by configuring the web.config. (one would be setup with anonymous and one with windows authentication.)
It's not as snazzy as other methods but it's relatively painless. There are two sites but the content (except for the web.config) are identical.
I am trying to find the best authentication type for my asp.net MVC 4 web application. What my requirement is something MIX between form-based and windows-based.
The requirement is to allow the company employees to automatically login to the application if they already login to the company active directory.
If a company employee accesses the application from his own PC outside the company network, then he should also be able to login (but I think he should enter hi username and password).
Also we have external customers (that currently do not have an active directory username) , they also need to be able to access the mvc 4 web application.
So which approach I should set and implement for managing my asp.net MVC authentication ?, as I find that form-based alone will be able to achieve ONLY part of the requirements and same apply to windows-based ?
Best Regards
I had this scenario at a previous place of work.
Here's what I did:
Implement Forms Authentication, have your own custom table to store user's details. Have a property in the table to indicate whether it's an Active Directory account or not.
When someone logs in, if it's an Active Directory account, authenticate it with AD. If not, just authenticate it with what you have in your table.
As for signing up, you should allow someone to enter their AD credentials, authenticate with AD, then add them to your database. If they don't specify AD credentials, you should just add them as a user in your database and then set them as a non Active Directory user.
I have multiple websites in different virtual folders on the same server. I created a UserManager Website for an admin to create the user accounts for the websites. I am using aspnet tables and login forms.
The problem is when I add a login page to another website, the login is successfull but wont redirect them to the Main page of that website because the ApplicationID doesn't exist. Is this possible?
You should look into AD FS authentication. It's basically like a single sign for Active Directory.
If you are using forms authentication in order to authenticate to all applications you should:
Make sure to make your cookie is a domain cookie (add a period to the beginning of the cookie name in the forms authentication tag of the web.config file)
Add machine key to make sure the applications can decrypt the cookie
I need to get current username of user who start silverlight application.
I was able to do it, when I get User.Identity.Name in aspx page and pass it to silverlight app.
But it requires windows authentication, so asks users to sign in with domain user(with same domain as iis server).
Is it possible to get windows username, without asking user to sign in, and get name even if user is in another domain?
It is not possible. You should use windows authentication within your service.
I need help on authenticating users based on their location. The problem is this: If the users come to the web site out of domain then the user must fill a login page and the credentials he provided must be authenticated from a custom credential store. If the user is an Active Directory user, he must be directed to the resource he wants without asking for credentials.
If I enable both Anonymous Auth and Windows Auth for the web server, Anonymous Auth comes first and even the user is an Active Directory user I can't access his domain information.
Anyone can help?
One way I know is to set a single page, like AdLogin.aspx, to deny anonymous users and have that page log them into the Forms Authenication module. You then have to create a custom 401 error page that redirects to your Forms login page from your AdLogin. The one thing I don't like is that AD users try to login through the Forms login page all of the time, and it's hard to bookmark the AdLogin page because it just does an automatic redirect. I also don't like that it's so dependent on a custom IIS configuration.
See my answered here for details: ASP.NET Application to authenticate to Active Directory or SQL via Windows Authentication or Forms Authentication
How about publishing the website with 2 different Webapplications?
You could configer the internal one to use Windows Auth, and the external one to use Anonymous. If the user requests a site that requiers auth, you allow them to authenticate.
You can also post an "Login" Link on your (external) webpage, that will allow the user to manually log in on the external site. But if you allow a Page to use anonymous, then you have to consider that you wont know who the user is currently.