I just received an .Net API that uses Identity server for Authentication. I have never used Identity server before. So I'm lost looking for info.
Here is my code for authentication.
[HttpPost]
public async Task<IHttpActionResult> Post([FromBody] Login loginInfo)
{
OperationResult<string> result = new OperationResult<string>();
result = await GetAuth(loginInfo);
return Ok(result);
}
private async Task<TokenResponse> GetAuth(Login loginInfo)
{
var client = new TokenClient(Constants.IdSrvToken, Constants.ClientId, Constants.ClientSecret);
return await client.RequestResourceOwnerPasswordAsync(loginInfo.Usuario, loginInfo.Password, Constants.Scope);
}
This works ok. But I need to create a new API method that receives the current and a new password and change it. The TokenClient class doesn't have any useful methods that I can use, and can't find information related to how implent the password change.
Any suggestions where I can find info?
Thanks in advance.
There will not be one. The whole point of using Identity Server - and other providers like it - is to delegate responsibility for authentication to it, primarily so that apps and APIs have no visibility of user credentials. IS also has very little awareness of "users"; they’re just an abstract concept to it. Something like ASP.NET Identity is more focused on users.
Using resource-owner flow is quite counter to the whole intent of OAuth2, and should not be used in virtually all circumstances. If you’re using IS just for that, adding it to the equation is largely pointless. It doesn’t solve most of the problems OAuth2 was designed to solve, and you also get no Single Sign On.
In practice usually you would have web pages on (or alongside, on the same server) IS that provide the password change functionality, and you would give users a link or redirect them to those pages. I suspect most people using IS who want to manage users either integrate something like ASP.NET Identity or add their own pages. There are many articles written on the former; here is one as a starting point. It’s not exactly trivial but quite doable.
If what you have is a legacy app that is unlikely to migrate to using OAuth2 as intended, then ultimately your code just needs to change the stored password (or hash as it hopefully is) wherever the users are stored; e.g. a database table somewhere. IS won’t help with that though; you need to write your own code for that.
I'm trying to understand the proper way to do authentication in ASP.NET Core. I've looked at several Resource (Most of which are out dated).
Simple-Implementation-Of-Microsoft-Identity
Introduction to Authentication with ASP.Core
MSDNs Introduction to Identity
Some people provide altenative solutions stating to use a cloud based solution such as Azure AD, or to Use IdentityServer4 and host my own Token Server.
In Older version Of .Net one of the simpler forms of authentication would be to create an Custom Iprinciple and store additional authentication user data inside.
public interface ICustomPrincipal : System.Security.Principal.IPrincipal
{
string FirstName { get; set; }
string LastName { get; set; }
}
public class CustomPrincipal : ICustomPrincipal
{
public IIdentity Identity { get; private set; }
public CustomPrincipal(string username)
{
this.Identity = new GenericIdentity(username);
}
public bool IsInRole(string role)
{
return Identity != null && Identity.IsAuthenticated &&
!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(role) && Roles.IsUserInRole(Identity.Name, role);
}
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
public string FullName { get { return FirstName + " " + LastName; } }
}
public class CustomPrincipalSerializedModel
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
}
Then you would Serialize your data into a cookie and return it back to the client.
public void CreateAuthenticationTicket(string username) {
var authUser = Repository.Find(u => u.Username == username);
CustomPrincipalSerializedModel serializeModel = new CustomPrincipalSerializedModel();
serializeModel.FirstName = authUser.FirstName;
serializeModel.LastName = authUser.LastName;
JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
string userData = serializer.Serialize(serializeModel);
FormsAuthenticationTicket authTicket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(
1,username,DateTime.Now,DateTime.Now.AddHours(8),false,userData);
string encTicket = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(authTicket);
HttpCookie faCookie = new HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, encTicket);
Response.Cookies.Add(faCookie);
}
My questions are:
How can I authenticate similar to the way done in previous version's of .Net does the old way still work or is there a newer version.
What are the pros and cons of using your own token server verses creating your own custom principle?
When using a cloud based solution or a separate Token server how would you Integrate that with your current application, would I would still need a users table in my application how would you associate the two?
Being that there are so many different solutions how can I create an enterprise application, to allow Login through Gmail/Facebook while still being able to expand to other SSO's
What are some simple implementations of these technologies?
TL;DR
IdentityServer = token encryption and validation services via OAuth 2.0/OpenId-Connect
ASP.NET Identity = current Identity Management strategy in ASP.NET
How can I authenticate similar to the way done in previous version's of .Net does the old way still work or is there a newer version.
I see no reason why you couldn't achieve the old way in ASP.NET Core, but in general, that strategy was replaced with ASP.NET Identity, and ASP.NET Identity is alive and well in ASP.NET Core.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/identity
ASP.NET Identity uses a backing store like SQL Server to hold user information like username, password (hashed), email, phone and easily be extended to hold FirstName, LastName or whatever else. So, there really no reason to encrypt user information into a cookie and pass it back and forth from client to server. It supports notions like user claims, user tokens, user roles, and external logins. Here are the entities in ASP.NET Identity:
AspNetUsers
AspNetUserRoles
AspNetUserClaims
AspNetUserLogins (for linking external identity providers, like Google, AAD)
AspNetUserTokens (for storing things like access_tokens and refresh_tokens amassed by the user)
What are the pros and cons of using your own token server verses creating your own custom principle?
A token server would be a system that generates a simple data structure containing Authorization and/or Authentication information. Authorization usually takes the for of a token named access_token. This would be the "keys to the house", so to speak, letting you through the doorway and into the residence of a protected resource, usually a web api. For Authentication, the id_token contains a unique identifier for a user/person. While it is common to put such an identifier in the access_token, there is now a dedicated protocol for doing that: OpenID-Connect.
The reason to have your own Security Token Service (STS), would to be to safeguard your information assets, via cryptography, and control which clients (applications) can access those resources. Furthermore, the standards for identity controls now exist in OpenID-Connect specifications. IdentityServer is an example of a OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server combined with an OpenID-Connect Authentication server.
But none of this is necessary if you just want a user table in your application. You don't need a token server- just use ASP.NET Identity. ASP.NET Identity maps your User to a ClaimsIdentity object on the server- no need for a custom IPrincipal class.
When using a cloud based solution or a separate Token server how would you Integrate that with your current application, would I would still need a users table in my application how would you associate the two?
See these tutorials for integrating separate identity solutions with an application:
https://identityserver4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstarts/0_overview.html
https://auth0.com/docs/quickstart/webapp/aspnet-core
At a minimum you would need a two column table mapping the username to the external provider's user identifier. This is what the AspNetUserLogins table does in ASP.NET Identity. The rows in that table however are dependent on the being a User record in AspNetUsers.
ASP.NET Identity supports external providers like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, any OpenID-Connect provider, Azure AD are already there. (Google and Microsoft have already implemented the OpenID-Connect protocol so you don't need their custom integration packages either, like this one, for example). Also, ADFS is not yet available on ASP.NET Core Identity.
See this doc to get started with external providers in ASP.NET Identity:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/social/
Being that there are so many different solutions how can I create an enterprise application, to allow Login through Gmail/Facebook while still being able to expand to other SSO's
As explained above, ASP.NET Identity already does this. It's fairly easy to create an "External Providers" table and data drive your external login process. So when a new "SSO" comes along, just add a new row with the properties like the provider's url, the client id and secret they give you. ASP.NET Identity already has the UI built in there Visual Studio templates, but see Social Login for cooler buttons.
Summary
If you just need a users table with password sign in capabilities and a user profile, then ASP.NET Identity is perfect. No need to involve external authorities. But, if have many applications needing to access many apis, then an independent authority to secure and validate identity and access tokens makes sense. IdentityServer is a good fit, or see openiddict-core, or Auth0 for a cloud solution.
My apologies is this isn't hitting the mark or if it is too introductory. Please feel free to interact to get to the bulls-eye you are looking for.
Addendum: Cookie Authentication
To do bare bones authentication with cookies, follow these steps. But, to my knowledge a custom claims principal is not supported. To achieve the same effect, utilize the Claims list of the ClaimPrincipal object.
Create a new ASP.NET Core 1.1 Web Application in Visual Studio 2015/2017 choosing "No Authentication" in the dialog. Then add package:
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Cookies
Under the Configure method in Startup.cs place this (before app.UseMvc):
app.UseCookieAuthentication(new CookieAuthenticationOptions
{
AuthenticationScheme = "MyCookieMiddlewareInstance",
LoginPath = new PathString("/Controller/Login/"),
AutomaticAuthenticate = true,
AutomaticChallenge = true
});
Then build a login ui and post the html Form to an Action Method like this:
[HttpPost]
[ValidateAntiForgeryToken]
public async Task<IActionResult> Login(String username, String password, String returnUrl = null)
{
ViewData["ReturnUrl"] = returnUrl;
if (ModelState.IsValid)
{
// check user's password hash in database
// retrieve user info
var claims = new List<Claim>
{
new Claim(ClaimTypes.Name, username),
new Claim("FirstName", "Alice"),
new Claim("LastName", "Smith")
};
var identity = new ClaimsIdentity(claims, "Password");
var principal = new ClaimsPrincipal(identity);
await HttpContext.Authentication.SignInAsync("MyCookieMiddlewareInstance", principal);
return RedirectToLocal(returnUrl);
}
ModelState.AddModelError(String.Empty, "Invalid login attempt.");
return View();
}
The HttpContext.User object should have your custom claims and are easily retrievable the List collection of the ClaimPrincipal.
I hope this suffices, as a full Solution/Project seems a bit much for a StackOverflow post.
TL;DR
I would really like to Show A Full posting on how to properly implement IdentityServer4 but I tried to fit All of the Text in but it was beyond the limit of what StackOverflow Accepts so instead I will right some tips and things I've learned.
What are the Benefits of using a Token Server Vs ASP Identity?
A token server, has a lot of benefit's but it isn't right for everyone. If you are implementing an enterprise like solution, where you want multiple client to be able to login, Token server is your best bet, but if you just making a simple website that want to support External Logins, You can get Away With ASP Identity and some Middleware.
Identity Server 4 Tips
Identity server 4 is pretty well documented compared to a lot of other frameworks I've seen but it's hard to start from scratch and see the whole picture.
My first mistak was trying to use OAuth as authentication, Yes, there are ways to do so but OAuth is for Authorization not authentication, if you want to Authenticate use OpenIdConnect (OIDC)
In my case I wanted to create A javascript client, who connects to a web api.
I looked at a lot of the solutions, but initially I tried to use the the webapi to call the Authenticate against Identity Server and was just going to have that token persist because it was verified against the server. That flow potentially can work but It has a lot of flaws.
Finally the proper flow when I found the Javascript Client sample I got the right flow. You Client logs in, and sets a token. Then you have your web api consume the OIdc Client, which will verify your access token against IdentityServer.
Connecting to Stores and Migrations
I had a lot of a few misconceptions with migrations at first. I was under the impression that running a migration Generated the SQL from the dll internally, instead of using you're configured Context to figure out how to create the SQL.
There are two syntaxes for Migrations knowing which one your computer uses is important:
dotnet ef migrations add InitialIdentityServerMigration -c ApplicationDbContext
Add-Migration InitialIdentityServerDbMigration -c ApplicationDbContext
I think the parameter after the Migration is the name, why you need a name I'm not sure, the ApplicationDbContext is a Code-First DbContext in which you want to create.
Migrations use some auto-magic to find you're Connection string from how your start up is configured, I just assumed it used a connection from the Server Explorer.
If you have multiple projects make sure you have the project with the ApplicationDbContext set as your start up.
There is a lot of moving parts when Implementing Authorization and Authentication, Hopefully, this post helps someone. The easiest way to full understand authentications is to pick apart their examples to piece everything together and make sure your read the documentation
ASP.NET Identity - this is the build in a way to authenticate your application whether it is Bearer or Basic Authentication, It gives us the readymade code to perform User registration, login, change the password and all.
Now consider we have 10 different applications and it is not feasible to do the same thing in all 10 apps. that very fragile and very bad practice.
to resolve this issue what we can able to do is centralize our Authentication and authorization so whenever any change with this will not affect all our 10 apps.
The identity server provides you the capability to do the same. we can create one sample web app which just used as Identity service and it will validate your user and provide s some JWT access token.
I have always used the built in ASP.NET Identity (and previously Membership) authorisation/authentication, I have implemented Auth0 recently (https://auth0.com) and recommend this as something else to try.
Social logins are not hard to implement with Identity, but there is some initial setup involved and sometimes the steps you find online in the docs are not identical, usually you can find help for that under the developers section of the platform you are trying to setup the social logins for. Identity is the replacement of the old membership functionality found in legacy versions of the .net framework.What I have found surprising is that edge use cases, like passing a jwt token you already have to a web api are not covered anywhere in the examples online even on pluralsight, I am sure you don't need your own token authority to do this but I have not found a single example on how to pass data in a get or post that isn't dealing with a self-hosted server.
I am writing an MVC 3 application, which doens't use the classic approach of accesing the database using the Entity Framework. Instead I have another application combined of WCF Services, which are used to manage the database access. Now I want to used those services in my MVC application, as the database access. This part is simple. The point where it gets harder is managing authentication and authorization in this scenario.
For authentication and authorization, I have created custom membership and role providers. I have implemented the necessary methods, but here I have ran into the problem. My services require username and password, to get the list of user roles.
I am wondering how can I store the username and password provided by user on logon, somewhere in the backed of my application, to make sure it is save, and to have the possability to use it in my role provider?
Is session the right choice for this? If so, how can I access user's session in my role provider?
You should never use passwords, use password hashes instead (properly salted, of course). So, now you can pass username and password hash to your role provider which in turn will pass that to your wcf which will grant or not grant the necessary roles.
Update
IsUserInRole method should look like so:
public class WcfRoleProvider: RoleProvider
{
public bool IsUserInRole(string username, roleName)
{
bool result = false;
using(WcfRoleService roleService = new WcfRoleService())
{
result = roleService.IsUserInRole(username, roleName);
}
return result;
}
}
I have written a set of Interfaces and associated clases to Authenticate users using Entity Framework rather that the sotred procs provided with the builtin and rather dated ASP.NET Membership provider.
What would be the best way to implement my AuthenticationService with my MVC 3 application?
Should I write a custom provider and override the Membership Provider? This looks easy but I don't really care for the provider factory of factories model that Microsoft has given us.
Thoughts?
I wrote my own membership service based on the interface that came with MVC 2. Since authorization in my application is a little more complicated than the out of the box role-based stuff, I couldn't use the System.Web.Security.MembershipProvider. I still use FormsAuthentication though for keeping track of the logged in user. You lose out on being able to use the [Authorize(Roles="Admin")] and other framework bits, but like I said my application doesn't use Role based auth.
public class MyMembershipService : IMembershipService
{
private readonly IUserRepository userRepository;
public MyMembershipService(IUserRepository userRepository)
{
this.userRepository = userRepository;
}
public virtual bool IsValid(string username, string password)
{
var user = userRepository.FindByUsername(username);
return user != null && user.PasswordMatches(password);
}
public virtual bool AllowedToLogIn(string username)
{
var user = userRepository.FindByUsername(username) ?? new User();
return user.AllowedToLogIn();
}
}
It might be a good time to look into Access Control Service (ACS) 2.0, it provides you with SSO and centralized authentication. It just went into production release and it is free until end of the year. Works great with MVC3, you will need to get Windows Identity Foundation. There are plenty of resources online of how to integrate it. Great blog post to get you started, Announcing the commercial release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching and Access Control.
Today, I implemented a custom authentication provider for my WCF service. It is able to determine if my user is valid or not, just as expected.
So, now I have this class:
public class MyCustomValidator : UserNamePasswordValidator
{
public override void Validate(string userName, string password)
{
User apiUser = User.Login(userName, password);
// other logic goes here.
}
}
The behaviour of my application depends on what objects the User can access. So, how can I get my User object from here to my service class? There is no immediately obvious way that I can see, as my service class does not inherit from anything by default, unlike the ASP.NET controllers.
My first instinct is to set up a static parameter in MyCustomValidator and then read it from there, but I suspect that a race condition could occur. Can anyone confirm or deny my suspicions?
And most importantly: Is there a better way to do this? This is the first time I have ever used WCF, so I'm not aware of the best practices involved here.
Thank you for your time.
You want to pass some data from validator to service instance. It is bad because you can't do it. UserNamePasswordValidator is only for validating credentials (user name and password). You don't have access to anything from your validator. It even doesn't see current operation context because it runs in different thread. Using static parameter is not a sloution - as you mentioned it is race condition.
I think you need to implement custom authentication and authorization and it is not easy:
WCF Authorizaton, Custom Authorization, Custom credentials and validation