At the company I work for, we have our own Active Directory setup. We also have a number of external partners who each have their own Active Directory setups. We are trying to use Azure AD B2C to create a single location to sign on. Adding multiple identity providers is easy, but buttons show up for each provider and due to privacy concerns we can not allow our partners to know who else we partner with. We wish to ask for an email, and direct the user to the correct identity provider based on the domain of the email.
I know there are ways to do this, however all of the ones I have found so far are extremely convoluted. The requirements for this feel like they would be very common in many businesses, so the concept that the easiest ways to implement this require approximately a hundred steps doesn't seem right.
I'm aware of Home Realm Discovery, but like above all examples I see of it require immensely complex setups (custom policies with claims providers calling an azure function to query from a database to return the idP), we already have to setup the Identity Providers is there really no simple way to say "emails from parter1.com use this provider, emails from partner2.com use this one"? If not, could someone explain the lease complex way of achieving this?
See this sample which collects email and does the HRD based on domain name.
https://github.com/azure-ad-b2c/samples/tree/master/policies/home-realm-discovery-modern
You must use custom policy if you collect email in the B2C page.
If you collect email in the app, then you could use a User Flow with a domain_hint param. You don’t need to do any xml work, just pass a domain_hint parameter equal to the idp name in the portal.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-b2c/direct-signin#redirect-sign-in-to-a-social-provider
Related
We are looking at integrating our apps with Openid connect for our react based apps. We have ui and relevant permissions based on user - menus, navigations etc.
Can anyone point to spec or suggest on how do we handle such permissions in relation to openid connect or oauth. Basically how do we make this permissions available to ui, one approach is dedicated API for ui permissions again authorized by access token.
Another approach is permissions in token itself. Scope is one way of holding info, but it is for delegated access. Hence we are thinking to use multivalued custom attributes for holding roles and permissions in access token. But these permissions can also be huge sometimes and thinking hence if it is good idea to keep permissions in access token.
Any valuable pointers or any design approaches for handling ui permissions list please let know, we highly appreciate it.
The most flexible option is a custom API endpoint. An access token should hold important identity values such as these:
User ID
Roles
Company ID
Tenant ID
Country Code
Subscription level
These are claims, and are populated at runtime for each user, unlike scopes, which are fixed at design time.
Access tokens are designed only to be used by APIs, and clients should never read their payload. A good practice can be to return opaque unreadable access tokens to clients, to enforce this.
The actual permissions for a role can be looked up by the API once, then cached. This is preferable to storing large payloads in access tokens.
Finally, permissions for UIs may originate from two data sources: the identity data and your business data. The API can combine a result from both data sources, and transform the result to what the UI needs. Eg which columns are visible, which are read only and so on.
This is my first question, so I hope I don't miss a thing. To be clear from the start: I don't expect an answer which dives deep into detail. This is just about getting a general understanding of how to work with this kind of software.
So I don't know if "Identity Management System" is a suitable term for what I mean but when I talk about Identity Management Systems I think of something like Azure AD, which as far as I know provides e.g. web developers the possibility to integrate a way users can authenticate (including access privilege etc.) on their website.
What I'm quite unsure about is how to work with/ integrate such tools in a project. I will try to make it clear with an example: Assuming I have a website let's say this website is a blog. The blog consist of different posts which are stored in my own database which is connected to the website. The posts are written by different users which authenticate with a tool like Azure AD. The user's data is stored somewhere on a server run by e.g. Microsoft. If I want to display the posts togethere with the name, email.... of the user who wrote them, how would I do this?
Is it possible to query the user's data directly from the Identity Management System and display it? This does not sound ideal to me as the consequence would be that data the website uses is stored in two different locations.
Would you kind of copy the user's data from the Identity Management System to the websites database and query it from there? This does not sound like a good solution either because then data would be duplicated.
So whats the "right workflow"?
I appreciate any hints and further information I can get:-)
AFAIK To get the user's information like name, email etc. you can add these claims while generating the JWT token.
To generate access token, you have multiple authentication flows such as Authorization code flow, ROPC flow, Implicit flow.
To add the claims that you need to return with the token, you can make settings like below:
Go to Azure Portal -> Azure Active Directory -> App Registrations -> Your app -> Token configuration -> Add optional claims
When you decode the token via JSON Web Tokens - jwt.io you can find the user information that you need.
To know how to generate access token, you can refer SO Thread which I solved it before.
We are removing User, User Group and Permission models from our backend in favor of Auth0.
Our first idea was to just delete User, Group and Permission tables from DB and replace related foreign keys with varchar field. In this field we would then enter IDs that we get from Auth0 in JWT (pointing to something not present in our DB).
Is this good approach? I somehow feel that there must be more "relational" way of doing this.
Generally OAuth will not do all of the permission checks for you. Instead it gives you general mechanisms to sign the user in and issue + validate tokens.
In most real world architectures you also need to manage a second level of authorization in your back end - using domain specific user data for roles, permissions etc.
A couple of write ups of mine may help:
User Data Management
API Authorization
Auth0 Community Manager Dan here,
In this scenario you may be able to leverage the RBAC to replace your existing users/groups/permissions setup.
You would register a user's roles and the associated permissions of each role in the Auth0 dashboard or programmatically via the management API. Then you can setup a rule to add user roles to the token.
To connect this user to your existing user data store you can store the Auth0 id, similarly to how you have described.
This allows you to lookup the user when the token is received, and to associate any permissions or roles the user has. You can make roles API-specific by adding a prefix to the role, or have roles be general depending on your needs.
So from what I have read on IdentityServer I should be storing details about the user such as first name and last name inside claims. How would a web application then be able to access the claim information? Since the User Info endpoint requires a valid access token representing the user, I suppose I would need to make an API that could access that returned the profile information of other users? Is this the right way to do it? (use case, web page needs to display contact details that are stored in claims of another user)
Also what would be the way for multiple language profile information be stored and retrieved in the claims? For example a user can have a name/title in multiple languages. I'm thinking of making [LanguageCode]_[ClaimType] (fr_first_name) naming convention and either adding all languages to just the profile IdentityResource or creating separate resources per language.
Your best bet is to set up a project using the IdentityServer4 QuickstartUI example and review that code to better understand how it all works. As of version 4, Identity Server is only focused on the sign-in / sign-out process and the various flows around authentication. They also provide a basic EF-driven persistence model, and they also support the ASP.NET Core Identity persistence model (also EF-driven), but both of those are not meant to be production-ready code.
Basically, persistence of user details is considered your responsibility. That being said, the cookies used for ASP.NET Core authentication greatly restricts how much data you can/should store as claims. The best model is to keep "real" identity provider (IDP) claims as claims, don't add new claims to that list, copy what you need into some other separate user-data table you manage completely, and use the unique claims identifier (almost always "subject id") as the key to your user data. This also makes it easier to migrate a user to another IDP (for example, you'll know user details for "Bob" but he can re-associate his user data away from his Facebook OIDC auth to his Google auth).
Basic persistence isn't too difficult (it's only 12 or 13 SQL statements) but it's a lot more than will fit in a Stackoverflow answer. I blogged about a non-EF approach here -- also not production-ready code (for example, it has ad-hoc SQL to keep things simple), but it should get you started.
Our application (referred to as "XYZ_App" below) is a multi-tenant SaaS application. We are in the process of making it available for Microsoft AppSource as a multi-tenanted "Web app / API" (referred to as "AppSourceXYZ_App" below).
We started our OpenID Connect implementation with endpoints pointing to “common” as per stated in the documentation when multi-tenancy is desired/required.
In XYZ_App, we added information in the system to know what AAD instance each XYZ_App tenant is associated with (using the GUID Microsoft assigned to this AAD instance, we are NOT using the "rename-safe.onmicrosoft.com" representation).
When using the “common” endpoints, we had to manually validate the issuer from the JWT to make sure it was the expected one: a user could access XYZ_App requesting access to XYZ_App’s tenant associated with contoso.onmicrosoft.com, get directed to “login.microsoftonline.com/common” to authenticate and then decide to authenticate with a user from another AAD instance (referred to as "anotherAADInstance.onmicrosoft.com" below). In this scenario, even though a user could successfully authenticate on anotherAADInstance.onmicrosoft.com, XYZ_App’s redirect URI must make sure the JWT issuer is the one from contoso.onmicrosoft.com. I’ll refer to this setup as Scenario_1.
With that scenario in mind, we thought about NOT using “common” and customize the requests going to login.microsoftonline.com on the fly; attempting to “jail” requests to be forced to authenticate against a specific AAD instance. We would still need to perform our validation in the redirect URI to make sure the issuer is the appropriate one, but we thought this approach might make our lives easier. I’ll refer to this setup as Scenario_2.
Do you envision Scenario_2 is viable in the long run or is it too short-sighted ? Based on my current knowledge of OpenID Connect, one limitation I can see with Scenario_2 is that it would become problematic to support “broker accounts” into our app.
Explanation of “broker accounts”: in our industry, some external users are allowed access to the system. Let’s say I have a company called “BrokerCo” (with their own brokerco.onmicrosoft.com AAD instance) who has 2 employees: Broker1 and Broker2. BOTH anotherAADInstance and contoso hired Broker1 and Broker2 to get broker services to perform tasks in XYZ_App; requiring XYZApp to grant them access. What is the ideal way for authentication from an OpenID Connect standpoint ? If XYZ_App were to use “login.microsoftonline.com/common” for authentication (like in Scenario_1; as opposed to “jailed” access like in Scenario_2), Broker1 and Broker2 could authenticate with brokerco.onmicrosoft.com (no AAD "External users" for anotherAADInstance nor contoso), but they would then get to redirect URI with an issuer that is different than what XYZ_App’s anotherAADInstance and contoso tenants are configured for... I feel like I’m back to square 1...
Do you have suggestions or pointers to solve this issue ?
Background context:
While playing with OpenID Connect issuers, I got the following error message:
AADSTS50020: User account 'testuser#anotherAADInstance.onmicrosoft.com' from identity provider 'https://sts.windows.net/XXXXXXXX-fake-GUID-9bZZ-XXXXxxxxXXXX/' does not exist in tenant 'XYZ Publisher' and cannot access the application 'YYYYYYYY-fake0-GUID-YYYYyyyyYYYY' in that tenant. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first. Sign out and sign in again with a different Azure Active Directory user account.
Thanks in advance !
Your question has multiple layers, trying to address most of them:
AppSource is about trial experiences for new users: this mean that any corporate account around the globe can potentially be an user of your SaaS application - or at least to the trial experience of your application, therefore the first thing you need to think when integrating with AppSource is how easy it has to be for a potential user to experience your app for the first time.
With that in mind, AppSource recommends that the trial of application is build on such a way that allows any user from any organization to sign-in, and therefore a multi-tenant approach for your application is the recommended setup for any application.
The single-tenant approach requires more control on your side, and for a trial experience - it means that the user cannot try your application right away because the operation you have to do on your single-tenant application is to add the user to an Azure Active Directory tenant as a guest user. This guest account will need then to wait receiving an email to accept the invitation to join to this tenant you are adding the user to then sign-in to your application.
Therefore your scenario 1 is the best scenario thinking on a trial experience in general, and also in general require less management (as you'd not need to create/ manage each individual account that needs to access your application as guest users of your Azure AD instance).
However some concerns you listed - that this scenario bringing are valid: Because you are accepting the common endpoint, you are saying basically that any user can sign-in to any tenant to your application, and this may not be desirable. In addition, the scenario you listed that a user can generate a token for any application is also valid, however, you can add additional checks to make this more secure and that any token generated by another authentication is blocked:
You can validate the 'audience' claim to guarantee that the token was issued to your application
You can eventually check the 'tid'/'iss' claims against of a list of tenant Ids in your database to see if that the user's organization is a valid organization in your application -- this would be valid for non-trial users/ organizations.
More information in this article.
About scenario '2' and broker accounts:
This scenario could be interpreted in two different ways:
Broker accounts are guest accounts of a customers' Azure AD tenant
Broker accounts are third party accounts but are not actually added as a user of anotherAADInstance or contoso AD
If your case is '1' then you're right: if your application needs to authenticate guest users that belong to another Azure AD tenant, then common endpoint could not be used directly.
If your case is '2' then what you'd need to do is to continue using the common endpoint and somewhat after the user is authenticated ask them to choose the company. I am describing this on generic terms without fully understanding this scenario. Perhaps this is not simple as you want the remote company to control this and not the user - so some additional complexities may need to be handled here.
A note is that if your scenario is scenario 1. - in theory - you can still use an hybrid approach, where you'd ask user to type the username inside the application and the company that they want to sign-in, then check if you need to validate the user against common or tenant-id endpoint, preparing the request and then sending a login_hint argument when authenticating. More information here