I want to try and avoid forcing users to logon to use my applications, so I am wondering if there is a secure was I can use a Windows authenticated user?
I can't see this working, personally, because at some point my application is going to have to send the users login username and grab the permissions.
Assuming this connection is encrypted...I'm guessing a malicious user could still decompile my application, change the code to impersonate a user and recompile. Even if I obfuscated the code, I am sure there must exist methods around this.
Any ideas?
Related
I am working for the DOD. The application they have requested is web based, and will be on their internal network. The request is for CAC authentication, which is easy enough... The remaining problem is authenticating a user. The CAC authentication is happening at the IIS level, so by the time the user gets to the application, all I am doing (or had planned on doing) is checking the ID on the CAC, and comparing it to a user table in the database. If the user exists (and has been approved), then they are off and running in the system. If they do not exist, then they are pushed to the registration screen.
Given my lack of experience with web development, I am unsure if I need to actually authenticate the user in some way beyond the CAC authentication, or if I can just manually assign roles to the user and let the roles dictate what can or cannot be done in the application. Windows authentication is not an option; while this application is internal for the military, it is accessible from different mil networks.
If I do indeed need to authenticate a user... this is where I run into trouble. I have not found anything that says there is a way to manually authenticate a user. I could use the standard ASP tables in the database, but it seems... messy... to include things that won't be used (meaning the password field would always be an empty string - why include it in the db if it isn't being used?).
Thanks in advance for any help... If there's links to where I can read more about the authentication process, those would be very much appreciated as will.
I'm working on several DOE projects that use the same idea. What we normally do for web applications is to enable Windows authentication on the app. This will allow pass-through of user credentials and keep out anyone without credentials.
I also like to add role based authorization into the mix and then use AD groups to allow/deny users on specific apps.
We have a website running on a different AD domian then we need to authenticate with. For reasons I will not go into, we can not allow a trust between them.
So we have:
Rackspace.Domain
SuperDuperEnterpriseDomain
The website is running at rackspace under their domain and we need to be sure they are authenticated on
Is there a way to in C# to check to see if a user exists on another domain? If so how?
Assuming that you are getting a SuperDuperEnterpriseDomain's username and password, use DsBindWithCred. Note that this function fails with Access Denied even when the credentials are technically valid, such as the account being locked out. Since you are not joined to the target domain, you won't be able to call LogonUser to get finer details on why the credentials are invalid.
For code, see my answer to another question. You can replace the SecureString's with regular strings if you don't mind the security implications.
Could anyone please share any thought on authenticating Active Directory users using the AuthType.Kerberos method.
Ideally, I would like to pass the Username and Password to validate the user credentials using the AuthType.Kerberos method
This type of validation uses LDAP connection (LdapConnection)
Any comments or feedback will be very appreciated.
Cheers! :)
Kerberos doesnt use a username and password in the sense you are talking about here, it uses a ticket based auth system with a central server. Kerberos is quite complicated to implement and is normally only used in cases where you want to do double hop authentication with the logged in user. This means the application wants to use the credentials of the user who has logged in to access a secondry system. For example if you have a SharePoint site which pulls data from exchange server you may want to pass the currently logged in users details from sharepoint to exchange. This is normally done with Kerberos and Constrained Delegation.
In reality what you probably want for your application is Windows authentication (NTLM) which allows the application to authenticate domain users, (However again in the common case this doesnt use a username and password at your application level either).
===EDIT===
To implement kerberos with a .Net webapp you will need to do the following
Enable Constrained delegation for the app pool http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnetremoting/archive/2006/07/06/662599.aspx
Setup SPN's for your site http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929650
Setup your code to use kerberos when you call the remote service, this is basically just setting the protocol. You dont need to actually send the username or password
This article has some good advice around how to troubleshoot problems with the system
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2008/05/29/kerberos-authentication-problems-service-principal-name-spn-issues-part-1.aspx
HI am interested in obtaining getting the Enviroment.UserName in a Wpf Browser application.
But I have run into a SecurityException. What changes should I make obtain the enviroment variables.
Update:
the application is run on my company intranet.
The Environment.UserName property getter asks for a demand on the EnvironmentPermission.Read permission. Yeah, that's going to blow in a sand-boxed environment such as created to run code securely inside a browser. A web app has no business obtaining privileged information such as the user name. It is half-way to being able to crack the user's login credentials, albeit that the password would be a bit harder to guess.
No can do, if you want the user to reveal her user name then you are going to have to ask her politely. And do make sure that's a name that you provide, don't expect her to reveal the name she uses to logon to her machine.
Right now we have AD/Exchange to manage all of our users logins/e-mail on-site at the office. The major app that everyone uses maintains its own login accounts and all users have a tendency to forget login information for at least one of the two logins.
What I'm considering doing is using AD to authenticate the user in the application so that they don't even have to login to the app after they've logged into their machine.
The problem is that there are small number of users that work off-site (the app can work over the internet) and just use the machine's local account (which is causing problems of its own).
What I'm wondering is, will using AD to authenticate users on-site still be an option if a user works off-site?
The answer to almost any question posed to a programmer is "Yes..." It's what comes after the ellipses that is important. You may not want to do the things that come after the ellipses.
Based on the information in your question I think the answer is "No" but there are several scenarios where we could change that to a "yes".
If the AD account is only being used to authenticate that a user knows the password, then you could make a web service, host it in your domain, set it up to use windows authentication and SSL, modify the application to prompt the user for credentials, and call a method in the web service using those credentials. In that scenario, a successful call to the web service means that the user is authenticated. You could use the user's credentials to continue from there.
Detecting weather the application needs to prompt the user for credentials or not could be done by attempting to call the web service with the user's logged in credentials first. If this call fails then you know you need to prompt the user.
Not knowing the rest of the details of your application however means that there are many scenarios where this would not be enough.
I have done something very similar to what I described above. My scenario was the reverse: the application worked over the internet but I wanted it to be easier to log in in the cases where the machine has domain membership.
As an aside, the members who work from home: are they using laptops that are part of the domain or are they using machines that are not connected? In this case you may be able to use cached credentials but you should ask that question over at ServerFault.
Yes, you can definitely do that. It'll be a bit of work though.
What your app would have to do is either find out automagically whether it's directly connected to the office LAN, or working away from the office. Or you could have the user tell you, of course :-)
If it's on the LAN, no problem - you authenticate against AD.
If it's away from the office, you could e.g. call a WCF service on the company LAN, pass your Windows credentials, and have it authenticate you against the company AD. If you provide the right set of credentials, you'll be authenticated and allowed to work - if you're not allowed to log in, the call to the WCF service would fail.
You could do this almost automatically by using Windows credentials - in which case the "remote" user would still have to log on to your domain and use his / her normal Windows credentials; or you can pass username/password over the wire to WCF, or even install a certificate on the remote user's machine that WCF will then map to an AD account on the server side.
The options are plentiful! :-)
Marc