I am hoping someone can clear up how these things can work together.
I want to be my own identity provider, so in my web api I have an OAuth token provider. I want users to register with me and then be authenticated using my token provider. The idea in the future is that more of my mobile apps and web apps will be accessible using the OAuth login sharing the user's identity.
So, if I use azure mobile services how do I implement the normal asp.net identity stuff?
And, how would a normal web app be able to use the data stored in azure mobile services? Would I have two dbcontexts one for mobile and one for web?
I've been reading and watching a lot of stuff on azure but nothing seems to show how I can do this. Most of it has to do with using external providers like facebook, ms, twitter, etc. I want to be one of those external providers, just not sure how to do it and allow my websites to still use the .net identity data.
If you could point me to or post some example / tutorial / blogs that would be great.
This is a supported scenario, although it isn't documented very well at the moment.
The Mobile Services .NET runtime is built on the ASP.NET Katana authentication middleware. The mobile service abstracts these middleware using the LoginProvider base class. The authentication model was recently made extensible for situations such as yours. In order to have Mobile Services recognize and use your identity provider, you would have to create your own LoginProvider.
There are currently two examples of this:
Adding a Katana middleware as an identity provider - part of this post.
Creating a custom username/password setup - tutorial here.
You could certainly use these techniques to wrap the standard ASP.NET identity functionality.
As to your question about accessing the data, there are a variety of approaches. Your web app could treat Mobile Services as a backend and pass through requests. This is basically treating the web app as an additional client platform, peer to your mobile apps. Another option is to, as you said, create multiple DBContexts. While you might get slightly better performance, this comes with a code maintainability tradeoff. It also wouldn't scale well if you build multiple web apps on the same data backend.
Related
I am trying to resolve the following problem using best practices.
We have an API server, which uses Authorization with JWT token to call our api endpoints. Now we need to develop Multi platform application (Android, iOS, Web) to consume this api.
We are planning to use .net MAUI for Mobile and Blazor for Web application. All these applications will have a common user base.
Also we would like to share api to third parties, and we would like also to put their users in our common user base.
What would be the proper approach to do it ? Should we add Identity server to our Web API project ? Should we create separate Identity Server project which will share userbase ?
I would recommend to use IdentityServer and also do host it in a separate service is a best practice.
Because otherwise it will be harder to debug and troubleshoot when you mix IdentityServer with other services.
I would like to write a SPA application in React that will communicate with the .net core API.
I think it would be easier to have two separate projects (API + UI) on different domains.
API should be protected, that only authenticated users could make requests.
In react i'd like to have login and registration forms that will allow me to register and login users, and also I would like to have social providers. I would like to create whole UI for managing users in react SPA, and saving this data using API.
I did a lot of research, and I'm a little confused.
I would really like to use Core Identity because it simply looks like made for it
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/identity?view=aspnetcore-5.0
it has a ready to go model of Users, Claims, Roles etc.
it has built in services for managing passwords, users, roles etc
it has features to customize authentication schemes, policies, roles etc,
there are lot of reasons why i think this is a good solution.
Unfortunatelly, on the documentation site there is an information that for SPA integration it works combined with Identity Server.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/identity-api-authorization?view=aspnetcore-5.0
Last year I went throug every episode of this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhfvbl_KbWo&ab_channel=RawCodingRawCoding (btw. great tutorial), and I'm pretty sure, that I don't want to use Identity Server 4 for this scenario. As far as I know - this is the best solution when you want to have SSO for multiple applications, and you would like to provide one common way to authenticate user for all of it. And it has it's own UI for managing user registration, login and managing. This is not what I need - I just want to have it all written in React, cause I want all application to have the same mui theme without redirects to Identity Server.
But maybe I'm wrong, and Identity Server will work for me. But I found it to be quite lot of work to provide my own UI rather than MVC
(https://medium.com/#piotrkarpaa/using-spa-react-angular-ui-with-identity-server-4-dc1f57e90b2c)
For now I think, that I should use Identity Core on the backend, and communicate with it from React SPA with custom controllers like in here:
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/authentication-and-authorization-in-asp-net-core-web-api-with-json-web-tokens/
Authenticating React SPA with API with JWT token - I think that this will work according to this example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSUa8Vd-td0&ab_channel=Geek%27sLesson - but in here this is without Identity Core.
But I'm not sure that this is the best approach, and I don't know if I will be able to add Social Providers this way.
Also, I found serveral tutorials how to comine React App with .net core backend (and authentication) like this one:
https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/development/dotnet-development/integrate-create-react-app-with-net-core-5/
but I would like to have two separate applications, API and UI.
What is the best approach to achieve this goal?
EDIT:
Few months later, I already have SPA application, API and IS4. There is lot of problems to make Identity Server views (registration, login etc) look similar to SPA Application. (React app in MUI, MVC with bootstrap... ).
Now I think it was a bad decision, causing lot of problems:
2 way integration of users from API and Identity Server 4
changes in SPA layout, styles, colors - it all needs to be maintened on Identity Server 4 too
Bad user expirience - editing user profile on another application, on another domain with slightly different styles
Now I'm about to rewrite application, not to use Identity Server 4. Components for registration, login and editing user profile will be in SPA application, maintaining users will be done using API.
The only think I do not know is how can I use social providers with this aproach?
My question is still remaining without answer, can someone help me with providing proper solution?
Finally I found proper solution for me:
https://mahdikarimipour.com/blog/google-auth-for-react-with-aspnet-identity
thank you for your post: Mahdi Karimipour
I'm working on building a series of micro-services using Aspnet Core. A mobile application, desktop application and web-application will consume the services over Http REST APIs.
For user auth, I'm utilizing the Aspnet Core Identity platform, but I'm exposing the creation of user accounts via a REST API. The clients make a REST call with the credential information and my API uses the Microsoft Identity APIs to provision the user. The user would be authorized to hit the individual resource servers with an auth server using IdentityServer4.
I have two questions that I've not been able to find clear guidance on from a security stand-point. Should the Aspnet Core project that utilizes Microsoft Identity for user creation be in an independent Aspnet Core project from the project that handles auth via IdentityServer4? Are there downsides do separating the two out that I need to consider?
The Microsoft Identity API has template and Razor Views that can be used to handle the auth from a server-side perspective, including redirects on account creation or sign-in etc. If I'm doing everything via SPA or Client-side native apps, is there anything wrong with just providing a POST API that accepts the user information, creates the account via UserManager<T> and returns the UserId?
I want to provide a dedicated sign-in page, similar to FB/Google/Twitter etc for Auth to happen across any app that wants to authorize a user for my services. I don't typically see account creation as part of the OAuth process though. Is it typical that you would allow for redirects to an account creation page, that redirects back to a client upon successful account creation or is that process typically just used for Auth via OAuth flows?
I would suggest to consider using one service for IDS4 and ASP.NET Identity since they can be integrated and give you the full functionality you're looking for(auth, and users management).
IDS4 has examples and good documentations regarding that.
To me, I think separating them would be an over engineering.
one example: when IDS4 generate access token for a user, you should get claims, roles and validate username and password, all of that are stored in ASP.NET Identity.
So for more details you can check the docs of Identity Server 4: http://docs.identityserver.io/en/latest/quickstarts/0_overview.html
or it's my pleasure to check my little blog post that I tried to give some more detailed and step by step.
https://feras.blog/how-to-use-asp-net-identity-and-identityserver4-in-your-solution/
Start with IDS4 link because it might be enough :)
The main point when thinking about security management UI is how to secure that UI. And the most safe approach for today is cookie-based auth with same-site cookie (the way, MVC uses by default). Consider that when and if selecting serverless SPA pattern. For management purposes-app having strict backend is much more secure than token-based access to distributed api-s.
Regarding the application hosting, #VidmantasBlazevicius is absolutely right, there is no the only strategy: hosting all the services in one app is simpler, so it better fit lo to middle loaded systems. But with raise of the number of users and authentication requests, you might want to scale, and separating management UI from authentication is one of the ways to handle that.
I am developing a solution using .NET ASP Core. It's current version is monolithic, and I want to switch it to a service architecture consisting of an HTTP API which is used by the iOS/Android apps and web site. Here is a visual:
I am using .NET ASP Core on the website and service layers. I have almost finished implementing the changes, but I'm hung up on how to handle authentication on the area of the website that allows administrators to edit the content of the system. The monolithic version uses Identity Core (custom implementation, not using Entity) which works great. I could move the identity authentication code into the service, but I'm not sure how to then handle the authentication on the web site (the apps are public content only, no auth needed). How do I pass the username/password from the website to the service? How do I then track the session between the end user and service layer? Or is another option like OAUTH make more sense? I'd prefer a solution that doesn't require me to implement duplicate roles/policies on the website and service.
Any suggestions welcome, I have no experience with a setup like this so I'm not really even sure where to begin. Thanks!
OpenID Connect or OAuth makes sense because all of the claims/roles you already have will be encapsulated into the token. I presently use IdentityServer4 and it works just fine for your exact situation.
Since you are already using Identity database implementation doesn't matter as long as you have a back end. In the end the calls to the site are till http in nature, all very well documented.
http://www.identityserver.io
We are starting a project which will consist in:
Web project (ASP.NET MVC)
IOS app
and both will consume data from a .NET WEB API service.
The WEB API service will expose a POST Method with the url "user/create". But i don't know how can i avoid another apps for making post to this url? I know i need a security protocol, but i wanted to know which one you recommend me, and if you have, an article where is it explained.
Thanks
web api 2 provides oauth authentication. You will need to get a token from the token end point of web api and pass that token in subsequent requests.
You should find lot of online resources if you search for web api 2 oauth.
We did something similar recently using OWIN OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server
Reference this ASP.NET page for details. Sample code is included as well for several different implementations.
For our purposes, we used the Client Credentials Grant section about half-way down the page. Our implementation involved server-server OAuth (Web API to MVC), but I bet it's pretty similar to have iOS connect. The only thing I would caution is to somehow encrypt the login credentials on the iOS side, and I'm sure there is a way to do that.
So you want the WebAPI to only be used by the MVC page? The best architectural method is to separate the two rather than leave both in one project. Why? Because the MVC app is a experience layer for humans. The WebAPI is an experience layer for the MVC app. Move it back where it can't be accessed.
You can add on tokens, etc, but the MVC app sits on the server, but is accessed on the client computer. The wider the scope of the application (ie, intranet or internet or something in between?), the more difficult the problem and the harder it is for your users to access the application. Moving the WebAPI internal and leaving the MVC app exposed guarantees external users cannot use the API.
The main reason WebAPI and MVC exist together in a single project (still a mistake in most instances, IMO) is you are exposing both to the same audience. If that is not your intent, don't do it.