ASP.NET 6 WebAPI Authentication with SSO - azure-active-directory

Question

I have an ASP.NET 6.0 Web API project. I would like to add authentication and authorization to it, but it must use SSO via Azure.
We already have a SPA application that does this, it uses the Angular MSAL library to redirect the user to an SSO Login page, then returns to the SPA with an access token. The access token is then added to the header of each request to the Web API, which uses it to enforce authentication.
Now we want to share our web API with other teams within our organization, and we would like to have that login process just be another API call, rather than a web page.
Conceptually, a client would hit the /login endpoint of our API, passing in a userID and password. The web API would then get an access token from Azure, then return it as the payload of the login request. It's then up to the client to add that token to subsequent request headers.
I have done this with regular ASP.NET Identity, where all of the user and role data is stored in a SQL database, but since our organization uses SSO via Azure Active Directory, we would rather use that.
I have researched this topic online, and so far all of the examples I have seen use a separate SPA, just like we already have. But as this is a web api, not a front-end, we need to have an API method that does this instead.
Is this even possible? I know Microsoft would rather not have user credentials flow through our own web server, where a dishonest programmer might store them for later misuse. I understand that. But I'm not sure there's a way around this.
Thanks.

Answer 1

I believe you are looking for the Resource Owner Password (ROP) flow. You can use IdentityModel.OidcClient to implement it.
Sample code:
public class Program
{
static async Task Main()
{
// call this in your /login endpoint and return the access token to the client
var response = await RequestTokenAsync("bob", "bob");
if (!response.IsError)
{
var accessToken = response.AccessToken;
Console.WriteLine(accessToken);
}
}
static async Task<TokenResponse> RequestTokenAsync(string userName, string password)
{
var client = new HttpClient();
var disco = await client.GetDiscoveryDocumentAsync(Constants.Authority);
if (disco.IsError) throw new Exception(disco.Error);
var response = await client.RequestPasswordTokenAsync(new PasswordTokenRequest
{
Address = disco.TokenEndpoint,
ClientId = "roclient",
ClientSecret = "secret",
UserName = userName,
Password = password,
Scope = "resource1.scope1 resource2.scope1",
Parameters =
{
{ "acr_values", "tenant:custom_account_store1 foo bar quux" }
}
});
if (response.IsError) throw new Exception(response.Error);
return response;
}
}
Sample taken from IdentityServer4 repository where you can find more ROP flow client examples.
I would recommend that you don't go with this implementation and instead have all clients obtain their access tokens directly from Azure AD like you did with your Angular SPA.