I have a base web site (Asp.net WebForms application) running under ie.
http://localhost:90/
Then I created a new (this time Asp.net MVC) application and added it under
http://localhost:90/mvc/
but not just as a simple virtual folder, but as an application folder by defining a different application pool to run it, compared to the parent application.
Since browsers can't know that there are two different application basically on the same domain it would work like:
user accesses http://localhost:90/
parent app redirects the user to forms authentication screen
user successfully logs in
parent web adds an authentication cookie
user accesses http://localhost:90/mvc
browser attaches the same cookie from parent app
Is it possible that I authenticate the user based on this same cookie? I would configure my MVC application to login redirect to parent app to have a shared authentication screen. But I'd like to know who authenticated and work from that point on.
I've read something about sharing the same system.web/machineKey values to provide this kind of functionality, but I would like some real world examples.
I'm aware that these two applications will not be able to share Session state and that's not a problem, because I don't want them to. All I want is a kind of single login (SSO/SSS)
Is this possible? How?
Important
I've read other questions/answers about this, but they are either asking about cross-domain/cross-server etc. This one is on the same IIS web site.
I found it myself.
This is the article on MSDN that talks exactly about this scenario. I decided to keep this question anyway for anyone that would be chasing the same information some time later.
MSDN: Forms Authentication Across Applications
In brief
You have to configure machine keys in web.config of both applications so they match hence they'll be able to decode data that the other party generated. And that's the whole trick. MSDN article explains this in great detail including how to generate those keys.
If in case anyone is still not able to share the keys use
compatibilityMode="Framework20SP1"
<machineKey validationKey="same key all over"
decryptionKey="same key all over"
validation="SHA1" decryption="AES"
compatibilityMode="Framework20SP1"/>
Related
Is there any way to have two different IIS sites point at the same code, but only enable forms authentication on one of them?
Some back story, to save your breath 'why the hell do you want to do that?!' type questions...we have inherited a web app that has a major security hole; javascript in the user's browser needs to talk to the service layer directly, and there is no security on the service layer whatsoever. Unfortunately the website and service layer are coupled in such a way that they are impossible to seperate without basically rewriting the app. We simply do not have the time to perform the code refactorings nescassary (believe me, we've fought for it)
The user facing part of the website however uses forms auth, so our solution is to share the forms auth ticket between the website and the service layer, as the services live in a virtual directory and so are on the same domain. This works but the problem is that we now need two copies of the application, one with forms auth enabled, and one without, which is a bit of pain for development as we have to constantly update the code in both places.
I'm working on adding a new webapp to an existing website. I've been directed to write the webapp in ASP.NET. The existing website is written in ColdFusion. For the most part, the ASP.NET webapp is completely stand-alone, but it needs to interact with the ColdFusion code in one important way - if somebody logs in to the ColdFusion site, we don't want them to have to log in again when visiting an ASP.NET page.
When someone logs in to the ColdFusion site, their username is stored in a cookie, along with a login token that can be looked up in our database. My .NET is a little rusty, so I'm having trouble visualizing how the ASP.NET code should use this data. I've already written a simple MembershipProvider that can be used to log in/out out the ASP.NET app using the data in our existing database tables, which are shared with the ColdFusion code.
What I'd like to know is - how can I make sure the ASP.NET app detects the cookies set by the ColdFusion app (I imagine they'd be sent to the ASP.NET pages, since everything is hosted on one domain), and automatically logs the user in using the MembershipProvider and Forms Authentication, using the credentials supplied in the cookie? I'm thinking that putting some kind of cookie check and log in function in the Global.asax file, set to run every page load for every page... but that seems kind of clunky. Also, do people still use the Global.asax file anyway? I had thought there was a more modern method.... Also, how can I manually log someone in using Forms Authentication and a custom membership provider? Currently my code allows the user to log in using the provided login control, but I'm not sure how to log the user in without them having to do anything.
Thanks in advance for any help. Looking over the MembershipProvider tutorials and the MSDN documentation it seems to me like the answer should be staring me in the face, but for some reason I just can't see it. Maybe not enough coffee....
Not sure if this is what you're looking for:
FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie("the username goes here",false);
Reference
I'm a CF developer ususally, but we had to do some integration with a .NET application recently and the way we approached it was to keep the CF and .NET sessions separate but ensure that login happened on both so when the user moved from one to the other they were still logged in.
So is there perhaps a way for you to hit your ASP.NET application with a request to login a user when you login using the CF application? Perhaps you could have an iframe on the page that you can load when the CF login is complete that holds a login service for the .NET app?
This way you would not need to worry about one app server reading the other app server's cookies, instead there would be two sets of cookies, one for ASP and one for CF.
Hope that helps!
The way I would approach it, is I would have a specific page that acts as a liaison between the CF and .NET layer. That page would implement your business layer and just check to see if the Cookie is there, if so read it in, do the lookup and login the user or whatever business logic that needs to be done. How would you accomplish the login/authentication, well that’s all based on your login/authentication code.
The only link I can offer is the basic of cookies in ASP.net
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa289495(v=vs.71).aspx
Edit: found another link that might be helpful.
http://www.aspnettutorials.com/tutorials/network/cookies-csharp.aspx
I have a solution with more than one ASP.NET web-application. Every application has its own virtual directory on the same IIS. One application is calling aspx pages in the other applications.
How can I share some information (e.g. user/password) between these applications. Is the only way using querystrings (in this case, I must encrypt the information). Or are there other possibilities / techniques ?
Maybe this will help, I asked and answered this question myself
Using one Asp.net Membership database with multiple applications
I had two asp.net applications on one IIS server. It was my goal to make it so when user logged onto app1 their user credentials would be available in app2. Configuring the asp.net membership provider is only one step of what I was looking for. Even if both apps were using the same back end database and provider I still wouldn't be authenticated when I hit app2. What I was looking for was a Single Sign On solution.
Once you have both apps pointing at your asp_membership database by placing the following in the system.web section of your web config
make sure both have the same applicationname property set.
I was using IIS 6 so I configured it to autogenerate a machine key for both applications. Because both of these applications live on the same machine the key would be identical, this is the critical part to making the SSO work. After setting up IIS the following was added to my web.config
<machineKey decryptionKey="AutoGenerate" validation="SHA1" validationKey="AutoGenerate" />
That was all there was to it. Once that was done I could log into app1 and then browse to app2 and keep my security credentials.
Thanks for the push in the right direction.
Our customer has a requirement to extend the functionality of their existing large government project. It is an ASP.NET 3.5 (recently upgraded from 2.0) project.
The existing solution is quite a behemoth that is almost unmaintainable so they have decided that they want to provide the new functionality by hosting it on another website that is shown within the existing website.
As to how this is best to be done I'm not quite sure right now and if there is any security issues preventing it or that need to be considered.
Essentially the user would log on to the existing web site as normal and when cliicking on a certain link the page would load as normal with some kind of frame or control that has within it the contents of the page from the other site. IE. They do not want to simply redirect to the other site they want to show it embedded within the current one such that the existing menus etc are still available.
I believe if information needed to be passed to the embedded page it would be done using query strings as I'm not sure if there is even another way to accomplish this.
Can anyone give me some pointers on where to start at looking to implement this or any potential pitfalls I should be aware of.
Thanks
if the 2 sites are hosted from the same network (low latency between them) you could use state server for session management. that way, when you authenticate on one site, you will also be authenticated on the other, and share user state across them.
its pretty simple, in your web config of each web server you'd point to the state server (which could be located on one of the web servers)
<configuration>
<system.web>
<sessionState mode="StateServer"
stateConnectionString="192.168.1.103:42424"
/>
</system.web>
</configuration>
http://en.csharp-online.net/ASP.NET_State_Management%E2%80%94Storing_Session_State_out_of_Process
create a virtual directory under the primary domain. If your domain is www.mydomain.com then create a virtual directory www.mydomain.com/site and port the new website application under /site virtual directory. This was linking should become very much relavant. With this the virtual-directory application will also retain all domain cookies set by primary domain.
I would suggest to make the second website look exactly like the first one or at least use the same MasterPage, so you can redirect from one site to another without any visual difference.
If your site needs authentication, consider that you would need to do something to prevent the user to log in twice, an option could be to send an encrypted token to the second site.
All of this if you are forced to have a second site, if not just use a virtual directory
You could use something like UFrame. I've used it a couple of times and seems to do quite a good job with it...
"goodness of UpdatePanel and IFRAME combined"
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/uframe.aspx
I would use an iFrame to embed that website in within your existing application. Just set the "src" attribute and pass in any query string parameters the other site needs to render correctly.
You can still pass in sensitive data in the query string, however it would make sure to encrypt it before sending it in.
I know it is not the most elegant solution, but it gets the job done. And from the description of the existing app, it doesn't seem like your customer cares for "elegance" :)
Hope this helps
I have been Googling a problem that I have with trying to integrate the web application that I am working on with SharePoint 2010.
The web application is a wiki style tool that allows users to log in via forms authentication or WIA against Active Directory and create content for themselves and others.
What we would like to do is to allow a user have a page with the content they have created in our web application mixed in with content that they have living on the SharePoint server. For example, they may want to see a list of documents that they have on the SharePoint server mixed in with some of their content.
To accomplish this, we would like to take the credentials the user has logged into our web application with (for example MYDOMAIN\jsmith) and be able to query SharePoint for the documents of that same user (MYDOMAIN\jsmith) WITHOUT the user being prompted to re-enter their credentials to access the SharePoint server (we are trying to avoid the double-hop problem)
We have come up with some options for how we want to do this, but we are unsure of what the best approach is.
For example, we could
- Have a global user, shared by all users to get information we need from SharePoint. The downside is that we cannot filter SharePoint content to a particular user
- We could store the users credentials when they log in, but that would only work for users authenticating via forms auth and would be a security issue that some users/clients would not like
- Writing a SharePoint extension using WCF to allow us to access the information we need, however we'd still have the issue of figuring out how to impersonate the user we want.
Neither of these options are ideal and in our investigation we came across the Claims Authentication/STS option which seems like it is trying to solve the problem we are having.
So my question is, based on what I have written, is Claims/STS the best approach for us? We have not been able to find much direction on how to use this method to call into SharePoint from a Web Application and pass along the existing credentials.
Does anyone have any experience with any of these issues?
It sounds like you may be overcomplicating the problem. The reason that the user gets asked for credentials twice is that the two parts of the system are on different servers. The easiest solution is probably to implement your custom web app as custom pages/web parts within SharePoint.
If that isn't an option, a smaller amount of code on the SharePoint server (maybe a custom web service) should give you a few more options for impersonating a particular user.