Passing Auth to API calls with Web Service References - asp.net

I am new to web services. The last time I dealt with SOAP was when I created a bunch of wrapper classes that sent requests and received responses back per some response objects/classes I had created. So I had an object to send certain API requests and likewise a set of objects to hold the response back as an object so I could utilize that 3rd party API.
Then someone came to me and said why not just use the wsdl and a web service. Ok, so today I went and created a "Service Reference". I see that this is what's called a "Proxy Class". You just instantiate an instance of this and then walla you have access to all the methods from the wsdl.
But this leaves me with auth questions. Back when I created my own classes manually, I had a class which exposed properties that I would set then access for things like signature, username, password that got sent along with the Http request that were required by whatever 3rd party API I was using to make API calls.
But then with using a Service Reference, how then would I pass this information just like I had done in my custom classes? For instance I'm going to be working with the PayPal API. It requires you to send a signature and a few other pieces of information like username and password.
// Determins if API call needs to use a session based URI
string requestURI = UseAuthURI == true ? _requestURIAuthBased + aSessionID : _requestURI;
byte[] data = XmlUtil.DocumentToBytes(doc);
// Create the atual Request instance
HttpWebRequest request = CreateWebRequest(requestURI, data.Length);
So how do I pass username, password, signature, etc. when using web service references for each method call? Is it as simple as specifying it as a param to the method or do you use the .Credentials and .URL methods of your proxy class object? It seems to me Credentials means windows credentials but I could be wrong. Is it limited to that or can you use that to specify those required header values that PayPal expects with each method call/API request?

Using Web Service or Web Service Reference

Related

How to use end client state parameter in IdentityServer 3?

I have configured IdentityServer 3 to use external IdentityProvider which is pointing to AAD.
As of now, when I send a request to IdentityServer, I am properly redirected to the AAD for login, however, the 'state' parameter that I am sending to IdentityServer is overridden, and the value of OpenIdConnect.AuthenticationProperties is encrypted and sent to the AAD as the state in the query string.
For eg:
https://localhost:44333/idpaad/connect/authorize?client_id=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx&redirect_uri=https://localhost:44394/&response_mode=query&response_type=code&scope=openid%20email&state=9b0e82c3-e623-42f1-bede-493243c103e7
Here,
https://localhost:44333/idpaad/connect/authorize -> IdentityServer endpoint
state=9b0e82c3-e623-42f1-bede-493243c103e7 -> client generated GUID sent as querystring.
when I see in the "RedirectToIdentityProvider" middleware in the StartUp.cs of IdentityServer OpenIdConnectAuthenticationNotifications, the value of state is updated to
OpenIdConnect.AuthenticationProperties=(protected values) instead of the GUID and the same is also returned as a query string back to the Redirect URI.
enter image description here
Is there a way to send the original state and not override it by IdentityServer3?
While using wsFederation, I am not getting this issue and the same is forwarded directly to the IdP.
Any help is deeply appreciated.
Most of the time it's advisable for an Azure Active Directory integrated application to maintain an application state when sending request to Azure AD for login. And the recommended way to achieve this is to use the ‘state’ parameter as defined in the OpenID Connect standards.
If you check this document form OpenID, you will find that primary reason for using the state parameter is to mitigate CSRF attacks.
RECOMMENDED. Opaque value used to maintain state between the request and the callback. Typically, Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF, XSRF) mitigation is done by cryptographically binding the value of this parameter with a browser cookie.
The ‘state’ parameter is used for both preventing cross-site request forgery attacks and to maintain user’s state before authentication request occurs.
In an ASP.NET or ASP.NET CORE web application using OpenID Connect OWIN middleware, the ‘state’ parameter is maintained automatically by the middleware when sending out an authentication request, this is the only reason you are seeing the state parameter getting overridden in your case.
But if you want you can add custom data in your state parameter. Use the following code in OpenIdConnectNotifications’s RedirectToIdentityProvider event to inject custom data into the ‘state’ parameter.
var stateQueryString = notification.ProtocolMessage.State.Split('=');
var protectedState = stateQueryString[1];
var state = notification.Options.StateDataFormat.Unprotect(protectedState);
state.Dictionary.Add("MyData","123");
notification.ProtocolMessage.State = stateQueryString[0] + "=" + notification.Options.StateDataFormat.Protect(state);
Check this document and Microsoft identity platform and OpenID Connect protocol for detailed information.

C#/OWIN/ASP.NET: can I *manually* generate and get a valid bearer token string in my API code?

I am using the OWIN OAuthAuthorizationServer library in an OWIN ASP.NET C# web API to generate and process bearer tokens.
Right now, I have a single endpoint (which you set in the OAuthAuthorizationServerOptions struct) that accepts the grant_type, username and password fields from the frontend. I created a provider class that performs the validation, and then calls context.Validated() or context.SetError() accordingly. The middleware then handles generating the token and returning it to the user, and also "takes over" the login endpoint, doing all the work internally.
Now, I am adding a new feature to my API where the user can change their "role" (e.g. an admin can set themselves as a regular user to view the results of their work, a user can select among multiple roles, etc.) Since I already handle this through the bearer token (I store the user's role there and all my endpoints use the bearer token to determine the current role), I now have a reason to update the contents of the bearer token from the API backend.
What I'm looking to do is to allow the frontend to call an endpoint (e.g. api/set_role) that will accept a parameter. The user requests a certain role, and their current bearer token would accompany the request. The server then would check if the user in question is allowed to use that specific role and, if so, would generate a new token and return it to the user in the response body. The frontend would then update its token in local storage. Or, of course, if the user is not permitted to switch to that role, the backend would return an appropriate error and the frontend would react accordingly.
To do this I basically want to be able to manually generate a token. Similar to how I use identity.AddClaim() in my login provider, I'd like to be able to do that at any arbitrary position within the API's code. The method would take responsibility for transferring over any necessary existing information (e.g. the user's username) into the new token, since it already has the existing one.
Pseudocode for what I want:
if (!userCanUseRole(requestedRoleId)) return Request.CreateErrorResponse(...);
// we have a struct containing parsed information for the current token in the variable cToken
bearerToken newToken = new bearerToken();
newToken.AddClaim(new Claim("user", cToken.user));
newToken.AddClaim(new Claim("role", requestedRoleId));
string tokenToReturnToFrontend = newToken.getTokenString(); // string suitable for using in Authorization Bearer header
return Request.CreateResponse(new StringContent(tokenToReturnToFrontend));
I am not too familiar with "refresh" tokens, but the only way I am using them right now is extending token expiration. To that end the frontend explicitly requests a refresh token and provides its own, which the backend simply copies to a new token and edits the expiry time. The problem with this is that there's a single method for getting a refresh token, and since I have now at least one other reason to refresh a token (and possibly, future developments could add even more reasons to change token contents at various times), I'd then have to deal with storing transient data somewhere (E.g. "when requesting a refresh token, what is the thing the user wanted to do? has it been too long since they requested to do that? etc.) It'd be much easier if I could simply generate a bearer token on demand in the same way that the OAuthAuthorizationServer itself does. (I know it uses the MachineKey to do this, but I don't know exactly how it does it, nor how I would go about doing what I'm trying to do.)
Of note: In another project I provided internal access to the OAuthBearerAuthenticationOptions class that is passed to the authorization server instance, and was able to use that to decode a bearer token inside of a test. I haven't seen anything obvious thought that would let me encode a bearer token this way.
EDIT: I explored the (extremely tersely, almost uselessly documented) OWIN namespace and found the AccessTokenFormat class which appears that it should do what I want. I wrote this code:
Microsoft.Owin.Security.AuthenticationTicket at = new Microsoft.Owin.Security.AuthenticationTicket(new ClaimsIdentity
{
Label="claims"
}
, new Microsoft.Owin.Security.AuthenticationProperties
{
AllowRefresh=true,
IsPersistent=true,
IssuedUtc=DateTime.UtcNow,
ExpiresUtc=DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(5),
});
at.Identity.AddClaim(new Claim("hello", "world"));
string token = Startup.oabao.AccessTokenFormat.Protect(at);
return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, new StringContent(token, System.Text.Encoding.ASCII, "text/plain"));
which seems like it should work. (I again allow access to the OAuthBearerAuthenticationOptions class passed to the OAuthAuthorizationServer instance.) However, this code throws an ArgumentNull exception. The stacktrace indicates that it is writing to a BinaryWriter but the OWIN code is passing a null value to the Write method on the BinaryWriter.
Still have no solution.
I did figure out the code to make this work. One could argue I'm "not using OAuth right", but strictly, this code WILL accomplish what I want - to generate a token in code at any arbitrary point and get the string.
First, as I said, I have to provide access to the OAuthBearerAuthenticationOptions class instance. When the OAuth server initializes I'm guessing it populates this class with all of the various objects used for tokens. The key is that we do have access to Protect and Unprotect which can both encode and decode bearer tokens directly.
This code will generate a token assuming that oabao is the OAuthBearerAuthenticationOptions class that has been passed to the OAuthAuthorizationServer instance:
Microsoft.Owin.Security.AuthenticationTicket at = new Microsoft.Owin.Security.AuthenticationTicket(new ClaimsIdentity("Bearer", "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/role"),
new Microsoft.Owin.Security.AuthenticationProperties
{
AllowRefresh = true,
IsPersistent = true,
IssuedUtc = DateTime.UtcNow,
ExpiresUtc = DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(1) // whenever you want your new token's expiration to happen
});
// add any claims you want here like this:
at.Identity.AddClaim(new Claim("userRole", role));
// and so on
string token = oabao.AccessTokenFormat.Protect(at);
// You now have the token string in the token variable.

Spring-Security-OAuth2 - how to add fields to access token request?

I have a Spring Boot application, that is using Spring Security with OAuth 2.0. Currently, it is operating against an Authentication Server based on Spring Example code. However, running our own Auth Server has always been a short-term target to facilitate development, not a long-term goal. We have been using the authorization_code grant type and would like to continue using that, irrespective of the Auth Server implementation.
I am attempting to make changes to use OAuth 2.0 Endpoints in Azure Active Directory, to behave as our Authentication Server. So far, I have a successful call to the /authorize endpoint. But the call to get the /token fails with an invalid request error. I can see the requests going out.
It appears that parameters that Azure states as mandatory are not being populated in the POST request. Looking at the Azure doco, it expects the client_id to be defined in the body of the message posted to the endpoint, and that is not added, by default, by Spring.
Can anyone point me in the right direction for how I can add fields to the Form Map that is used when constructing the Access Token request? I can see where the AccessTokenRequest object is being setup in OAuth2ClientConfiguration....
#Bean
#Scope(value = "request", proxyMode = ScopedProxyMode.INTERFACES)
protected AccessTokenRequest accessTokenRequest(#Value("#{request.parameterMap}")
Map<String, String[]> parameters, #Value("#{request.getAttribute('currentUri')}")
String currentUri) {
DefaultAccessTokenRequest request = new DefaultAccessTokenRequest(parameters);
request.setCurrentUri(currentUri);
return request;
}
Should I be trying to define the map in a request.parameterMap spring property? If so, I'm not too sure how that works.
Or should I be using one of the interfaces defined in the AuthorizationServerConfigurerAdapter class?
I have the information to include when sending the AccessTokenRequest, I just don't know the best way to configure Spring to include it? Thanks for any help.
Actually, I found this out. I needed to change the client authentication scheme. Simply adding the following to my application properties added the client_id to the form....
security.oauth2.client.clientAuthenticationScheme=form
If you're using yaml, then yaml-ize it. Thank you Spring!

Implementing Authorization in a Self Hosted SignalR Server accessed from Web

I'm looking for some guidance on how to implement authorization security for SignalR on a back end service running in a self-hosted (non-IIS) environment, that is called from a Web application. The backend app is basically a monitor that fires SignalR events back to the HTML based client. This all works fine (amazingly well actually).
However, we need to restrict access to the server for authenticated users from the Web site. So basically if a user is authenticated on the Web site, we need to somehow pick up the crendentials (user name is enough) and validation state in the backend app to decide whether to allow the connection as to avoid unauthorized access.
Can anybody point at some strategies or patterns on how to accomplish this sort of auth forwarding?
I am having similar issues here, as in my web app I use a simple cookie authentication system which uses an AoP style approach to check for any controllers with an attribute, then will get the current context (be it from the static HttpContext.Current or from the target invocation object depending on the type of interceptor) and then verify the cookie exists, it contains right data, then finally verify the token with the db or cache etc.
Anyway this approach can also be used for Signalr, although its a bit more long winded and you are using dependency injection. You would basically wrap the hub calls with the desired attribute, then set up your DI/IoC configuration to intercept these calls, then either get the hub instance within your interceptor and get the cookie (or your custom authentication mechanism) from the request, verify it is all valid or not, and if not then throw a new HttpException("403", "Not authenticated"); which should kick the user out and return back before it even hits your hub method, this way you can put the logic in one place (your interceptor, or a class the interceptor consumes) then just wrap any method that needs to use this authentication using your attribute.
I use Ninject and the interception extension, but most major DI frameworks these days have some form of IoC plugin/extensions, such as Autofac, Windsor, Spring etc.
If you were not happy going down the route of introducing DI and/or AOP to your current project, then maybe you could just create a custom hub instance which contains your authentication logic and then just use that in your hubs, so ok you will still be manually calling some authentication logic from within each hub method you want to protect, but its less code, so something like:
public class AuthorisableHub : Hub
{
private ISomeAuthenticationToken GetSomeAuthenticationTokenFromRequest(Request request) // probably a SignalR specific request object
{
// Get your token from the querystring or cookie etc
}
private bool IsAuthenticationTokenValid(ISomeAuthenticationToken token)
{
// Perform some validation, be it simple or db based and return result
}
protected void PerformUserAuthentication()
{
var token = GetSomeAuthenticationTokenFromRequest(Context.Request);
var isRequestValid = IsAuthenticationTokenValid(token);
if(!isRequestValid)
{ throw new HttpException(403, "<Some forbidden message here>"); }
}
}
public class MyFancyPantsHub : AuthorisableHub
{
public void TellAllClientsSomethingSecret(ISecret secret)
{
PerformUserAuthentication();
// Do stuff with the secret as it should have bombed the user out
// before it reaches here if working correctly
}
}
It is not perfect but would work (I think), also I am sure I once read somewhere that Hubs are newly instantiated for each request, and if this is indeed true, you could possibly just put this logic in your constructor if you want to apply the authentication to every action within the hub.
Hope that helps, or gives you ideas... would be interested in knowing how you did solve it in the end.
SignalR does not provide any additional features for authentication. Instead, it is designed to work with the authentication mechanism of your application.
Hubs
You should do authentication as you normally would and then use the Authorize attribute provided by SignalR to enforce the results of the authentication on the Hubs.
The Authorize attribute can be applied to an entire Hub or particular methods in the Hub. Some examples:
[Authorize] – only authenticated users
[Authorize(Roles = "Admin,Manager")] – only authenticated users in the specified .NET roles
[Authorize(Users = "user1,user2")] – only authenticated users with the specified user names
You can also require all Hubs to require authentication by adding the following method in the Application_Start method:
GlobalHost.HubPipeline.RequireAuthentication();
Persistent Connections
You can use the user object in the request to see if the user is authenticated:
request.User.IsAuthenticated

Custom HTTP Basic Authentication for ASP.NET Web Services on .NET 3.5/VS 2008

I am refactoring a working ASP.NET Web Application to expose Web Services interface using ASP.NET Web Service. According to Web Services authentication - best practices, Basic Auth over https is the way to go. Let's assume it is, as opposed to doing WS-Security, X509, etc..
On .NET 3.5/VS 2008, what's the simplest way of implementing custom http Basic Authentication (non-Windows account), for example, accepting only if user name is "foo" and password is "bar". Ultimately, I'd like Thread.CurrentPrincipal set.
Do I write my own HttpModule or can this be done simpler?
Likely using Custom Basic Authentication for IIS, written by Dominick Baier is the way to go. As he points out WCF 3.5's usernames over transport security cannot be used on IIS-hosted service, although my question was regarding ASP.NET Web Services not WCF.
There's another implementation of HTTP Module called Basic authentication in ASP.NET against custom datasource by Santosh Sahoo.
Although it's not what I wanted, I found QuickStart Tutorial's SOAP Headers sample to be informative workaround. Sending password in plain text over http is clearly insecure, but this example could be extended to add more security, for instance running on https or sending hash of "password + one-time GUID + timestamp".
Grab the value of the Authorization header, parse it and validate the username/password.
The value is username:password, encoded as a Base64 string.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication for details.
Edit: if you want this done for every request, using the custom auth scheme, then it would be easier to write an HttpModule to handle parsing the header and setting the thread's principal.
If you are considering WCF, you can use usernameOverTransport security for basicHttpBinding. i.e. username and passowrd reside in the SOAP header of the request and all the traffic are protected by SSL encryption over the wire.
A custom UserNamePasswordValidator validator can be used to authenticate the incoming credentials against e.g. database.
You can set the thread principal within a custom IAuthorizationPolicy in the service behavior.
e.g. Evaluate method implementation for IAuthorizationPolicy for setting current principal
public bool Evaluate(EvaluationContext evaluationContext, ref object state)
{
Object obj;
if( evaluationContext.Properties.TryGetValue( "Identities", out obj ))
{
// get the authenticated identity
IIdentity client = (obj as IList<IIdentity>)[0];
evaluationContext.Properties["Principal"] = ... // create principal obj here for the identity
// this will set thread's current principal
}
return true;
}

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