Cannot access CSS file from ASP.NET login page - asp.net

I have just noticed a problem accessing a CSS file using forms authentication from an ASP.NET application.
Until I have logged in, then any styles I have set in my login page are not used, as IIS seems to be preventing the login page from accessing this file.
Is there an easy solution for this?

Place the css file in a publicly accessible folder. This will require a change in your web.config that will look something like this:
<location path="css">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow users="*"/>
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
Granted, this shouldn't be how you setup the permissions in the first place. The css folder ought always to be publicly accessible.

My CSS didn't display in the login page as well.
I noticed that Anonymous Access was using the IUSR account not the IIS_IUSRS account so I just added IUSR to the website folder and everything got back to normal.

Related

ASP.Net Web Forms Identity\OWIN Login Page Access Issues

I have recently been re-working a web form application from .net2.0 to .net4.7 and decide to add Identity and OWIn for local and social authentication.
I create a new web forms app and then copied the account, app_start and models folders over to the existing app as well as the startup.vb file.
Now all this is OK and the app compiles without issue however whenever we try to login using /Accoount/Login itsimply redirects us back to the default.aspx page in the root of the app.
there is a web.config file in the Account folder and it looks like this, although i do not think this is the issue:
<configuration>
<location path="Manage.aspx">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow users="?"/>
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
</configuration>
Although this allows authenticated access to manage.aspx all other files in the account folder should be anonymous access but something is redirecting away from login.aspx and I cannot figure out what?
Anyone come across this?

IIS 7.5 and making anonymous authentication/forms authentication play nicely together

I've got an ASP.NET MVC 4 application that I run under the site level of an IIS web site.
So the dir structure looks like this:
\IIS
\Site
\bin
\Content
\Views
The MVC 4 app uses Forms Authentication via Username and Password, but I have a requirement to lock down the full site and turn off anonymous authentication at the IIS level.
The goal of this requirement is to allow users only to land on a home page and logon page. The problem is if I turn off anonymous authentication then users can't even get to home or login.
Another thing we want to prevent a user from being able to go to /Content/Scripts/MyScript.js in their browser.
I'm using bundling so those file are there and don't get used by me besides when I bundle things up.
Is this even possible since IIS and MVC 4 auth are at completely different level? If it is possible what options do I have?
Chris Pratts answer is correct. You can successfully turn of anonymous authentication and let MVC4 handle all of that for you.
Make sure in your web.config you have the following
<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"></modules>
In your system.webserver section.
Another thing you can do is make use of the locations tags in IIS to prevent user access to different parts of the site.
For example, you could put this in your web.config
<location>
<system.web>
<authorization>
<deny users="?" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
This ensures that only authenticated users can access the site. You can then further refine this.
<location path="External">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow users="*" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
Basically, now any request to /External will be allowed for all users (regardless of authentication). You will probably want to put all your scripts in here that you need unauthenticated users to access.
If there was a specific directory you didn't want anyone to access, you could do something like
<location path="/Content/Scripts">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<deny users="*" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
Now any access to that location will be prevented by default in IIS. Give that a try, it should satisfy your requirement to have the scripts available for bundling, but not accessible if someone browses directly to it.
I only halfway got what I wanted, but here is what I ended up doing. I have anonymous authentication enabled at the site level and used Forms authentication for specific controllers. This was how I originally had it so nothing changed here.
Since I am using bundles the users never really need to look at the .js so I used Request Filtering by file extension so block any .js and even .css I don't want exposed.
This works because the bundling doesn't make http requests to those files and the bundles themselves don't have the normal JavaScript and CSS file extensions.
You don't handle this at the IIS-level. You simply allow Anonymous Auth and then add [Authorize] to every controller. Then only on your home and login actions add the attribute [AllowAnonymous].
As to the second part of your question, you can't really stop this. MVC bundles on the fly, so it needs the actual files to be there. If they're never referenced, though, they're black holes: the user would have no way of knowing what file to request, so it's kind of security by obscurity.

Disabling folder with pages in asp.net

i have a simple question
How to disable a folder with aspx pages in asp.net
Thw folder is "Administration" and i want to disable it that it cannot be called in browser by typing .../Administratin/edit.aspx, or that simple to redirect to a login page if we want to go to the administration part
First enable forms based authentication. This can be done for VB and C#.
Next you have to specify who will have access to what. This can be done in the web.config.
Apologies if these articles are a little out of date.
Use a locations element and config settings to restrict access to folders.
<location path="Administration">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow roles="Administrators" />
<deny users="*" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
Change the NTFS security permissions on the Administration Folder for
<drive>:\intepub\wwwroot\...\Administration
and restrict access via that way.
You can also right click go to properties in IIS for the folder and remove various granular browsing permissions.
You can also edit the web.config and change permissions there.

Unauthenticated users can't see images in website

When I run my website through debug mode in visual studio everything looks great and all the images on the page show up fine. But once I deploy my website to an IIS7 web server (doubt that other versions would make any difference, but you never know) then users can't see the images on the site until they log in.
The website is an asp.net MVC site and I'm new to MVC, though I do have lots of experience with asp.net forms. It seems that only authenticated users are allowed to access the images folder, and there is an authorization section in my web.config saying that only admins can access the site, so how do I make it so that all users, authenticated or otherwise can view the images?
-- Update --
I tried putting in the configuration block suggested, which from everything I can tell makes perfect sense, but it didn't seem to make a difference. The sample below has Content/Images for the path but before that I tried just Content, since it's OK for everything in there to be accessible. I also tried setting the allowOverride setting to false, which also didn't seem to make a difference.
<location path="Content/Images">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow users ="*" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
--Update 2--
Funny thing is that I don't even see any explicit deny entries in my web.config, just an allow for admin's, and when I went into IIS 7 and used the UI to allow all users access to the Content directory it didn't show any deny's on the list either. But then again, this project works fine when I just debug it from my personal computer, it's only after I deploy it that I have problems...
<authorization>
<allow roles="admin" />
</authorization>
<authentication mode="Forms">
<forms loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn" timeout="2880" />
</authentication>
In your web.config file, after the </system.web> tag, add the following
<location path="images">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow users ="*" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
where path="images" is the name of the folder with your images/css.
Update:
If you're using ASP.NET MVC, I would remove the authorization declaration in the web.config file and use the [Authorize] attribute on the controllers that need to be locked down.
You can also specify the roles you want to grant access to using [Authorize("admin")].
By default, the configuration you define in a Web.config file, applies to every subdirectory of its containing folder. If you have a Web.config in the application root, that configuration will propagate to every subdirectory, including those where you have images and Css style sheets. So, if you have in your root Web.config a rule like this one:
<system.web>
...
<authorization>
<deny users="?"/>
</authorization>
...
</system.web>
anonymous users will not be able to access the resources needed to display the page like you would expect it.
To fix it, you need to include another Web.config in every subdirectory that has presentation resources, and apply the rules you want to override. In your case, this should do the work:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow users="*"/>
</authorization>
</system.web>
</configuration>
If you are using Themes, place a single Web.config file in the theme folder.
Just ran into the same problem. We noticed it on our Login page. The CSS and images weren't loading (they were under the content directory). Adding IUSR to the folder with Read privileges fixed it for us.
Old question but I came across the same problem and found the answer.
I had created a new folder for the Membership pages that I wanted logged-in users to have access to, but the images wouldn't show up in them!
It turns out that no matter what I tried I couldn't set a relative path to the images from within the Members folder.
The problem was the html image (as far as I could tell anyway, correct me if I'm wrong).
I swapped it out for an asp:image with a relative path and now it works great.
My new code: asp:image runat="server" id="Logo" ImageUrl="~/Images/logo.jpg"
Notice the ' ~/ ', that wouldn't work for me with
I tried: img src="../Images/logo.jpg", img src="~/Images/logo.jpg", img src="/Images/logo.jpg", etc. to no avail.
Hope this answer helps someone solve this problem more quickly in the future.
Try browsing the image file directly and see if that comes up for an anonymous user. In IIS 7, there is a way in which you can authorize anonymous users directly from your UI [which in turn would create the web.config if it doesn't exist].
Folder -> .NET Authorization Rules -> Add Allow Rule
Are you using membership framework. I suspect that you have misconfigured your permission settings in web.config and your images folder is only allowing authorised requests. This can be easily change via web.config. Just remove the folder name from your authorised section and this should solve the problem.
For your reference this should be the section in web.config if you are using membership framework :
<authorization>
<deny roles="xyz" />
</authorization>
We came across the same problem in our project and found a solution, although we are not sure about the reasons of this behaviours.
We had a similar scenario, with a folder containing all our png images. Our marketing colleague wanted to rename some of them, so to make it easier for her, we shared (this might be the key) that folder, granting read/writer rights to her.
From this point, the images started behaving as you describe, requiring authorization for being accessed. No unauthorized user could see them any more.
We realized that the problem was related to sharing the folder because it started happening at that point of time. Otherwise we still don't see any relationship among ASP.NET MVP user authorization/login and hard disk user rights. We could have expected an IO Exception or something similar, but not this behaviour.
After checking the folder, and comparing with other folders, we realized that after sharing, the permissions on the folder had slightly changed. Mainly they did not inherit from its parent folder anymore and some permissions such as CREATOR OWNER and MACHINE_NAME\Users had dissapeared (although IUSR and the app pool user were still there).
So, we renamed that folder, created a new one with the same name, and copied the content from the old folder to the new one. The new folder had the permissions inherited from its parent and everything started to work perfectly again.
It solved our problem, but we are still not sure why this all happened this way.
Regards

ASP.NET web.config authorization settings ignored

I have an asp.net (dynamic data) website set up as an application in a subdirectory of another site. This site requires different security settings from the top level site. Something like:
<authorization>
<allow roles="ADMIN"/>
<deny users="*"/>
</authorization>
These settings are ignored in the sub site. However, they work on the top level site, but even when set on the top level site, they are not inherited by the sub-site, and it's freely accessible. What could cause these settings to be ignored? I've tried adding:
<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
to the top level web.config and then setting the above authorization rule in the sub site, even tried just denying all users. When visiting the site it looks like: http://mysite/mybrokensite
I am using windows authentication.
I think the key thing is this
website set up as an application in a
subdirectory of another site
If it's a separate application within IIS it should have it's own web.config file and the security settings can be set from there. So you'll have one web.config for the main site and one for the subsite. really they are two applications.
If it's just a subfolder under your website then this doesn't apply. It depends how you've set it up under IIS. If it's a seperate app then the icon will be a world/cabbage type icon. If it's a sub-folder they the icon will be ... well a folder.
To elaborate on Tim's answer, make sure in IIS that it is set up as a virtual directory. Look at the property page for that directory in IIS Admin, Directory (or Home Directory) tab. If the Application label is greyed out, hit the Create button. Now IIS will load the web.config from that directory.
I typed up a summary since many were facing the same situation regarding subfolder authentication.
Subfolder Authorization
ASP.NET can only have a single
authentication mode for one
application.
The different
applications CANNOT share resource
among them.
Scenario
Let's say the home page should not prompt login dialog. It should let users pass through without whatever login is. However, in the same applicatiopn, in a different folder presumably, another page needs to check user permission against database table using user network login ID. By default IE treats all web site with only hostname a Intranet. By its default intranet setting, it will not prompt the login dialog and pass user login and password to the application if Windows Authentication is used. However, the tricky party is, if the application has an actual domain, IE will think it is an Internet site, and it will prompt the login and password if Windows Authentication is used.
The only way to not to promopt login dialog for Internet site using Windows Authentication, is to also turn on the anonymous authentication in IIS. However, you will lose the ability to capture the login info because the Anonymous has precedence over the Windows Authentication. The good news is there is a way to resolve that issue. If an application subfolder needs to capture the login information, you will need to overwrite the parent authorization in Location element in web.config.
1 In IIS, configure Authentication as follows:
Enable Anonymous Authentication,
Enable Windows Authentication
2 Add the followings in Web.Config.
<authentication mode="Windows" />
<authorization>
<allow users="*" />
</authorization>
<!-- secured is the relative subfolder name. deny anonymous user, so only the authenticated login will pass through -->
<location path="secured" allowOverride="true">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<deny users="?" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>

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