For my current ASP.NET Core MVC application I authenticate directly with a web app registered in Azure AD Portal. This provides me with an access token so on the backend of my web application I can use MS Graph with my users specific account (ie add files to their onedrive , email, etc). However, my organization also has Okta which a lot of applications authenticate against. So I was trying to determine to authenticate through Okta (which has a much cleaner sign in process IMO) as well as authenticate against Azure AD and get an access token. Through my research I found something in my web application registration in Azure AD called Workload Identity Federation. This led me to this useful video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ0gCJYMUKI
and also microsofts info site:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/workload-identity-federation
This seems to answer what I want which is to use Okta but allow me to still use MS Graph for my users since it will authenticate against Azure AD (correct me if I am wrong and this is for something else). My issue is none of these resources really go into depth regarding how the access token is passed to my application so I can use MS Graph. My research this is called client credential flow since my application only has delegated permissions so it requires the users to log in and it basically allows my web app to act on their behalf when using MS Graph. So I am trying to understand and fill this void of information regarding how client credential flow fits into Workload Identity Federation and is this the solution to my problem.
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I have been able to set up Azure AD Authentication with Auth0. According to my research, Azure AD is similar to AWS Cognito and Firebase. So can we use Azure AD to handle flows like User Creation, Password Reset, Expire Password etc. from a NodeJS Admin Backend?
Azure Ad is microsoft's identity platform. while yes in some ways is similar to aws cognito, it is a bit different as well. it's not designed specifically for developers, it's designed as an identity platform for your organization.
to answer your second question, it really depends on what you are expecting it to do. For example, there is an api, called graph api, which lets you interact and do almost everything you want to azure ad through that api. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-graph-api create users, groups etcetc. but if you are looking for user signup using their own emails and that sort of thing, the closest thing you should be looking at is Azure Ad B2C.
Azure B2c Takes care of some of the more common scenarios like signups and such
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/active-directory/external-identities/b2c/
I'm working on an application that has an angular 6 front end and a .net core 2.0 back-end and am trying to set it up so that my application authenticates users via Azure active directory. The issue is that I want the .net core back-end to do all the authentication programmatically when I have the front end pass an email and password. Everything that I've seen so far online suggests to have the front end redirect to the Microsoft login page but we are using our application as a boiler plate project and want to be able to change the type of authentication easily in the back-end without having to change the angular front-end. Does anyone know how I could go about this?
You can use Resource Owner Password Credentials Grant .The process will like that you collect the user credentials in Angular app and post to .net core back end , then finish the authentication in back-end app with user's credential. But that is not recommended because The ROPC flow requires a high degree of trust and user exposure and you should only use this flow when other, more secure, flows can't be used.
Also :
The Microsoft identity platform endpoint only supports ROPC for Azure AD tenants, not personal accounts. This means that you must use a tenant-specific endpoint (https://login.microsoftonline.com/{TenantId_or_Name}) or the organizations endpoint.
Personal accounts that are invited to an Azure AD tenant can't use ROPC.
Accounts that don't have passwords can't sign in through ROPC. For this scenario, we recommend that you use a different flow for your app instead.
If users need to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to log in to the application, they will be blocked instead.
Reference : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth-ropc
I am building a custom mobile application that has a client, custom backend server (I'm building) and interacts with numerous other api's. One of these api's is Microsoft bookings.
The problem I'm facing is I need to be authenticated via server to server, with a shared client secret. I'm aware of the numerous docs from MS but have yet to find a solution. I'm wondering if Server to server is even possible with Bookings.
I am able to get an access_token server to server with these permissions. (I have granted 'all permissions' to this app in Azure AD already).
"roles": [
"Calls.JoinGroupCall.All",
"OnlineMeetings.Read.All",
"OnlineMeetings.ReadWrite.All",
"Application.ReadWrite.OwnedBy",
"Calendars.Read",
"People.Read.All",
"Application.ReadWrite.All",
"Calls.InitiateGroupCall.All",
"Directory.ReadWrite.All",
"Calls.JoinGroupCallAsGuest.All",
"Sites.Read.All",
"Sites.ReadWrite.All",
"Sites.Manage.All",
"Files.ReadWrite.All",
"Directory.Read.All",
"User.Read.All",
"Calendars.ReadWrite",
"Mail.Send",
"ProgramControl.Read.All",
"ProgramControl.ReadWrite.All",
"Calls.Initiate.All"
],
Those are the permissions from the decoded token. When I go to make calls to the Bookings api I receive 401.
I can however use this token to access different graph endpoints no problem.
I will note, that I am able to make successful calls to the bookings api through Graph Explorer with my account, not related to this 'Application in Azure AD'.
Does this resource in Azure AD need a bookings License?
Is this even possible S2S?
Are there any other ways to bypass this without user credentials?
Thanks.
So I spent over a week trying to solve this problem due to the MS doc nightmare. I'm only posting to help others!
Bookings doesn't support service to service yet. So if you wan't to implement this without a user physically signing in, IE. If you have a dedicated booking admin account credentials you have to hard code the clients credentials.
I found my answer here https://stackoverflow.com/a/49814924/9105626
Microsoft Bookings API doesn't seem to support "Application Permissions" so far.
Only permissions available are "Delegated Permissions", which means your token has to be acquired with the context of a signed-in user.
Here are two Microsoft documentation sources that I came across:
Microsoft Graph Permissions Reference - Please look at the "Bookings Permissions" section.
Microsoft Bookings Samples
I know you mention Server to Server authentication using a client secret. AFAIK, that case will NOT work directly, because clientId and clientSecret only provide an application's identity (which can't be assigned any permissions because there are no relevant application permissions available for this API).
Just in case you can have some User context involved, here is code from bookings samples link above, to acquire the token in a Native application using ADAL
var authenticationContext = new AuthenticationContext("https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/");
var authenticationResult = await authenticationContext.AcquireTokenAsync(
"https://graph.microsoft.com/",
clientApplication_ClientId,
clientApplication_RedirectUri,
new PlatformParameters(PromptBehavior.RefreshSession));
// The results of this call are sent as the Authorization header of each HTTPS request to Graph.
var authorizationHeader = authenticationResult.CreateAuthorizationHeader();
Suggestions on ways to make this scenario work
On Behalf Of Flow
Your mobile application client could prompt a user for credentials to act on Behalf of the user and call your backend web API, which in turn calls the downstream API like Bookings API. This is called Service to Service Calls on behalf of the User
Here is a code sample which shows exactly this with a native application (WPF) and an SPA. In your case, just replace the WPF application with your mobile client application for understanding purposes and rest of the scenario becomes very similar.
Calling a downstream web API from a web API using Azure AD
ROPC Grant (Not Recommended)
Resource Owner Password Credentials grant can help as your application will have end user password available to it, but it has multiple issues and any security guidance will discourage you from using it.
ROPC opens up security risks, doesn't follow best practices and has functionality issues as well. ROPC doesn't work with MFA enabled users as well as federated authentication users.
For all practical purposes, you should avoid ROPC as long as possible. You can find the same recommendation in ADAL documentation itself and multiple other documentations from Microsoft or even generally about OAuth 2.0.
I am developing a office add-in.
This office Add-In is supposed to retrieve the term store from SharePoint.
By following this tutorial:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/develop/create-sso-office-add-ins-aspnet
I managed to get an access token to be used for Graph api. However the Graph does not expose any way of getting the term store. Is there a way we can generate an access token to be used with SharePoint and maintain the SSO?
It might be possible by registering an Azure AD v1 app but I could not find any documentation describing that.
I have a similar requirement, but in my research I wasn't able to find a good solution for this scenario.
I think it is probably possible to use a provider hosted SharePoint add-in. And then use the Authorization Code flow for obtaining an access token. Since the SharePoint add-in is trusted it will not require user login.
Of course this does mean the add-in needs to be deployed in SharePoint. If your Office add-in is distributed through the store this isn't really a great solution.
Hopefully there are other ways of achieving the same.
You could call SharePoint Online APIs (via REST or CSOM) with Azure Active Directory Apps. To call APIs secured by Azure AD, your app must acquire an access token from Azure Active Directory.
Please first refer to this document for integrating applications with Azure Active Directory. Then use Azure Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to easily authenticate users to cloud or on-premises Active Directory (AD), and obtain access tokens for securing API calls.
I'm currently trying to implement a multi-tenant Azure AD application that will use Microsoft Graph API's to monitor and analyze Office 365 "metadata" for members of the tenant domain. For example, the application might monitor One Drive user space over time. The architecture of the application will include an AngularJS SPA client along with a web application back-end. The idea is that the web application allows for both local registration (e.g. traditional sign up using an email address and password) in addition to Azure AD authentication. In the case of local registration, the user might be able to associate an Azure AD tenancy with the local account in the future, for example.
I'm struggling to understand how various authentication mechanisms should work. For example, I think that there should be two levels of authentication in the case of Azure AD: one authentication for the users of the client SPA, and another authentication used by the back-end for making continuous calls to the Microsoft API's, requesting refresh tokens, etc.
How might this architecture be implemented using the various Azure AD authentication scenarios Microsoft has already provided examples for?
If my initial inclination that I will have two applications registered with Azure AD (for example, the SPA registered as a native application, say, and the web application registered by itself), how will users allow access to both of them, and what would this workflow look like? In addition, what would the flow of user requests look like? The SPA would make a request to the back-end using its Azure AD token, but what will the back-end do to receive its authentication token and make calls to the Microsoft API's?
How might I best incorporate Azure AD authentication along with local registration into my application?
Generally speaking, you can associate your each user to his entity in Azure AD tenant in your backend server / database. As every user in Azure AD has several unique properties in the entity object. You can use the user's email or objectId as mentioned at Claims in Azure AD Security Tokens as the external column in your user table.
When your user authenticate your site via ADAL.JS, you can grab the access token in your backend server via the Authentication header. You can use the access token to request for the resources protected by Azure AD. And the access token is a JWT token, which you can decode directly to get the user basic claims as we mentioned before. You can retrieve the claim which you stored in your user table and match the special user registered in your server for requesting the resource protected by your self.