I've been playing around with ASP.NET Application Services. I've implemented the Authentication Service, Profile Service and Role Service successfully, able to log in and get Profile information for the logged in user and Role information.
Now I've noticed a major shortfall in the fact that I can't work out how to create a new user account with the Application Services stuff. Does anybody know how?
Seems like the Application Services AuthenticationService only supports validating existing users. You should enable creating users through some other part of your application, either your own web service or a web page.
I'm not sure about Application Services, but I know that you can create new users with Membership Services.
That's like this:
Dim mbmr As MembershipUser
mbmr = Membership.CreateUser(newUserName,newUserPwd)
There are something like 6 overrides for the CreateUser method.
I think not many people are not fully understanding the role of application services and thus feel frustrated when they do not find the full asp.net provider stack exposed over a store bought json endpoint......
Application services are exposed publicly. They are meant to provide an authentication and identification facility.
Think...
Your user is not logged in. To log in you must access application services to authenticate.
Right?
Do you really think that exposing membership management api such as Create/Delete user on that endpoint is wise?
Exposing management functions on a public facing api presents a huge challenge to get right for ONE scenario, much less to capably facilitate every scenario so perhaps you can see why application services exposes only what you need to do identify and authenticate a user.
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/
I'm very new to the identity management world, so please spare me. :)
What I would like to do, is to have multiple client (MVC) applications that talk to a single Web API application to authenticate their users against. In that Web API application, I would like to use ASP.NET Identity to talk to a database with users.
That way, I could use SSO for the client applications (I guess).
Does that make sense? Could someone help me on my way to implement this (links are also welcome of course)?
I don't know if IdentityServer could help me with what I want?
And as a side question: when I could implement this the way I would like to, how do I deal with the same-origin policy?
Thank you for all the help. :)
I did some research myself during the last few months and I learnt a lot about the identity management stuff. Many of that also thanks to the guys from IdentityServer (and their other projects).
What I finally did was the following (very briefly):
IdentityServer is used as a provider for all client applications. The cookie and OIDC middleware are used.
I used the ASP.NET Identity user service to store the users in an SQL Server database. (The IdentityServer configuration is by the way also stored in a database.)
I set up a Web API service that uses the ASP.NET Identity user manager for user configuration (change password, create new users, ...). It uses bearer authentication with the application with IdentityServer as provider.
As a side note, IdentityManager is used as an internal admin tool to manage all the users.
If anyone is looking for some help setting up his / her identity management system (and thinks I can help): please ask. ;)
Many articles on active profile e.g. Federated Security: How to setup and call a WCF service secured by ADFS 2.0. But that article assumes you want to use AD?
I'm guessing you want to use ASP.NET Identity for the provisioning?
IdentityServer OOTB supports a SQL DB and has basic user provisioning built in. It allows users to authenticate against the DB and supports WIF.
This scenario is also close to what you need, take a look at the answers:
How to implement an OWIN Authentication server with a MVC Web Api content server and an Android end-user apk
I also recommend reading this article:
Decouple OWIN Authorization Server from Resource Server
I've been reading a lot about OpenID and OAuth but having trouble making just a few connections about how they would work in a service-based architecture.
Here's my scenario:
I'm writing new ASP.NET Web API services (RESTful/JSON)
These services will be used by client applications (current desktop website, new mobile website, and possibly a PHP website or JavaScript-only client in the future)
Our desktop website currently uses ASP.NET Membership Provider (webforms)
The new set of API services we are creating should handle everything, including Authentication and Authorization.
My questions are:
Since we have explicit control over the client applications accessing our API (i.e. this isn't a public API but rather one for integrating approved partners) do we necessarily need OAuth?
Would OpenID replace our .NET Membership functionality, or complement it?
Given that we would need to authenticate users with the legacy system using Membership Provider, do we need to use some sort of .NET Membership OpenID Provider, or do we just authenticate as usual and grant the user a Membership Token like we currently do?
I guess, in summary:
I'm writing some new services
They should be usable by ANY approved client application, for users of that client application
We need to continue to support our .NET Membership data
Sorry these are basic questions but I'm sure they're easily answered. Thank you!
Look at ThinkTecture's Identity Server
https://github.com/thinktecture/Thinktecture.IdentityServer.v2
It uses repository patterns for user stores, and uses the default membership provider as the user store - you would be able to easily plug-in your legacy membership provider.
OpenID connect would work on top of your membership provider, and you'd enable the option to only allow registered relying parties - meaning that only your approved clients (applications) would have access.
This seems like a perfect fit - hope this helps.
Matt
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!
i'd like to recieve comments on the way i'm trying to build an asp.net web application which uses a WCF service that is hosted in another asp.net application. Both applications will live on the same machine, but the app with the WCF service will not be accessible from the outside. there will be two web servers sharing the load behind a load balancer.
The app pool of both applications will use the same local user account (web server is not part of a domain) and so i was thinking to use WsHttpBinding with windows security for communication between client and internal wcf service.
The fron-end asp.net app uses forms authentication through a custom membership/role provider to athenticate and authorize users. The user database is in a sql server database.
i need to somehow pass to the wcf service the user details (username + roles) so that in the wcf it will be possible to validate and authorize according to the roles of who is logged in the front-end. I read i need to use "support tokens", but i haven't figured out how to use this.
I read also something about claims and WIF, which seems interesting but have no idea how i could use these in my scenario.
is there anyone who can give me recommendations about the architecture and maybe also show me how to pass the username to the wcf service and also show me if possible to use claims based authorization?
First of all, if both servers are behind the corporate firewall on a corporate LAN, I would strongly suggest using netTcpBinding instead of any http based binding. NetTcpBinding is much faster due to encoding the message in a binary format.
As for username / password: your ASP.NET front-end server could set the client credentials for the user calling for the WCF service - after all, the ASP.NET servers do have access to the ASP.NET membership database, don't they?
Or if you cannot pass on the user's credentials, you could pass on some headers to your WCF service that would describe the user - actually, you probably only ever need the user's unique ID - since the WCF service could fish out the rest of the info from the ASP.NET user database again, if really needed.
As for claims - I don't think they'd be a good idea here - you don't really have to deal with a multitude of different authorization schemes, and you're not using any federation (e.g. allowing users from a different company or domain to use your services) - so those obvious benefits probably won't really be applicable to your case.