I've read a lot of posts on here and in other places but I can't quite figure out what I should be doing to secure my API properly.
I've developed an anonymous questionnaire angularjs 1.* app that calls an asp.net core 2.0 web api. Users never authenticate and may, should they wish to, add their email address at the end of the process.
FYI, it's a CQRS backend and is hosted on an Azure VM.
I initially thought I would be able to use a service like Auth0 to create a token for a temporary user that contained both a unique ID for the person completing the questionnaire (like a sessionId) and the unique ID for the questionnaire being created (these are generated at the beginning of the process). However, I'm not sure this is right and I can't figure out how to do that and also verify it on the server (would I write a custom authorisation handler or similar)!
I also planned to use an API key (generated by Auth0) and validate that on each call. This seems easy enough although I'm not sure how I would secure the API key as it would be held in the client JavaScript.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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Im searching solution about authentication.
I found IdentityServer and Im trying understand how it works.
In my case I need to check user exist in another app.
I have old project created in asp.net web froms and this project have a users collection stored in db.
Now I must create client who will be call to WebApi and in this WebApi I need to authenticate user. I want to do this using IdentityServer4. Can I in IdentityServer call to my old application or db this application and check user by custom method?
In future I want connect another application to IdentityServer and this new application should have users in IdentityServer, so I will be have two places where I will have users for two application. I need to be sure I can check user exist in this two ways.
When request will be form new app IdentityServer should check user in his db and if request is from client who will be call to old app should check this user in external app(db).
Example call:
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I dont know I good understand idea of IdentityServer, but generaly I think this is not good solution for my case...For now I understand I can store users in database but only with Asp.Identity in IdentityServer.
What do you think about this case ?
In future I want connect another application to IdentityServer and this new application should have users in IdentityServer, so I will be have two places where I will have users for two application. I need to be sure I can check user exist in this two ways.
When request will be from new app, IdentityServer should check user in his db and if request is from client who will be call to old app, should check this user in external app(db).
The short answer is that IdentityServer4 is just an implementation of the OpenID Connect protocol and the persistence and authentication of users is entirely customisable so you're free to implement that any way you like.
As for where to keep your users - that will depend on your problem domain and business rules but I'd probably try and avoid using multiple DBs if possible and instead migrate existing users from legacy applications to your identity service's own store and take care to only bring over identity and authentication information and not access control/authorization information. i.e. keep the authorization logic in your client applications and APIs.
I'm struggling with the correct way to secure a multi-tenant Web API with Identity Server. Let me explain.
We have a multi-tenant Web API that serves a ASP.NET MVC application.
Each new customer is assigned a new TenantId.
A customer can have multiple subscriptions of the application. Its
the same as saying that the app manages multiple databases per
customer (that he can access from the same base URL).
Each user belongs to a single customer (tenant) and will have access
to all that customer's subscriptions.
The API is set in a way that every endpoint includes both the tenant id and the subscription id so it can know from which subscription/database it should get the data.:
<server>/tentantId/subscriptionId/(...)
Now imagine that I have another external app (say a console app), using the client credentials flow, that is trying to access some API resource "on behalf" of a customer, meaning that will use a specific tenantId/subscriptionId pair:
<server>/1000/1/products
Every time a call hits one of the API endpoints I need to validate that this specific client app can access that tenant/subscription.
It would make a lot of sense if the Identity Server could perform that check automatically as part of the authorization flow.
If we added some way for the customer to register (consent) a specific client app to access the Web API on it's subscriptions, may be we could also set the Identity Server to know that in the form of scopes or at least include that information in the claims so that we could perform the permission check by inspecting the token instead of calling an external component.
Is this even possible?
Should I try to use scopes? Claims?
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Your question is confusing when you talk about multi-tenancy. Isn't an API multi-tenant by default? The way I see it, it's a resource that can be accessed by multiple users / clients.
If I understand correctly, all you want is to access the API through the MVC app on behalf of a user. In other words: a hybrid flow with API access.
Instead of putting the userid in the path, use the id from the sub claim. Which lets the API distinguish between calls on behalf of clients and calls on behalf of users.
The resource should take care of authorization. Depending on the type of authorization you can use claims. If a subscription needs to be checked then this should be done by the API, using the sub claim to distinguish the user.
Scopes on the other hand are meant to define the resource. With the scope "api1" I can access the Api1 resource (api). But it says nothing about authorization.
IdentityServer provides Authentication as a Service.
It is your apps' duty to provide the actual Authorization.
I'm trying to implement IdentityServer3 into my architectural mix. I like the idea of registering Clients, Users, and Scopes. What I do not like is using IdentityServer3's built in login and registration forms.
I have 4 different apps that need to use my IdentityServer3 implementation (aka TokenServer). These 4 apps are AngularJs apps. I have various C# .Net WebAPI services supplying data to these 4 apps. Right now each of these 4 apps have their own authentication and registration process. I need to consolidate authentication piece using IdentityServer3.
Each of these 4 apps have different account registration/authentication needs. There's a mix bag of 3rd party authentication (Facebook, Google) as well as traditional forms authentication against an account the user has registered with.
So, I cannot have any of my AngularJs apps use the default Login/Registration forms that come with IdentityServer3. I've spent a lot of time now trying to find a way to turn off the default views and just wire each of my AngularJs apps to my TokenServer. I simply want to POST login credentials to the /token endpoint and return a token that can be used in subsequent calls to my WebAPI. I want to replace the authentication process I have for each app with IdentityServer3 without changing the existing login/registration UIs.
I cannot find a sample app or even documentation that shows how to do this. Is it even possible to 'turn off' every one of IdentityServer3's UI views and use my AngularJs client's login and registration forms?
Please point me in the right direction. Thanks for your time.
It seems you want to use the OAuth 2.0 resource owner flow - which means - your app posts credentials to the token endpoint and gets back an access token. That is totally possible - you will miss out on some features like federation and SSO. But these are the known constraints of this flow.
If you want to use a redirect based flow (which gives you SSO and e.g. Google logins etc) - you need to redirect. You can replace any of the IdentityServer views with your own. The documentation and samples have plenty of information how to do that.
https://identityserver.github.io/Documentation/docsv2/advanced/customizingViews.html
https://github.com/IdentityServer/IdentityServer3.Samples/tree/master/source/CustomViewService
I'm building an API based application, which uses Laravel as the backend and AngularJS for the front-end.
User Authentication between the front-end and the API is relatively straightforward, using JSON web-tokens (JWT). This tutorial was especially helpful
But much of my front end app is not user-authenticated, it simply needs to be protected by an API key.
I would like to continue using the JWT approach if possible, but i can't find a single package or guide for securing a front-end application with a simple API key (with no initial user login). I don't want to re-invent the wheel, there must be existing solutions for this common problem..
Does anyone have any experience securing and API based AngularJS frount end for use with a custom API? Are there any packages which exist to do this?
NOTE: I have investigated Auth0, which is great, but it is has several problems (the cost, no free support for a custom user DB, no built-in support for a simple API-key)
Thanks
The best way I can think of to handle this is to create a new Laravel user for your angular site.
You will also need a proxy script which contains the site's user credentials. It would reach out to Laravel with
those credentials and return the JWT. Then you just call this proxy script from Angular to get your token. The purpose
of the proxy script being a good way to hide those credentials from users.
This way, you don't need to change anything in your API as it's really just a new user accessing the site. If or when
the user needs to elevate his credentials by signing in as himself, you can also continue to use the proxy script and
have it replace those default site credentials with the user credentials before grabbing the JWT from Laravel.
I have been trying to determine a good strategy for authentication between a single WPF application of which calls to Web API services.
The client WPF app should be the only application to ever call the Web API.
I think I do have some unique requirements I must abide by. For example, The boss does not want to use ssl in any way; he is paranoid of users may having to deal with certificates.
Like I said, the client application is the only client using the Web API. The API just calls a list of stored procedures on a separate server.
Currently, we have a user membership database that does not align with any membership db standard, but we currently have over 200,000 members. One of the stored procedures currently authenticates the user with the membership db. The client application requires valid users to sign in to the application at start-up, however, we are wanting to secure all of the Web API requests sent from client to prevent non-valid requests being made to the server and so to prevent.
We are concerned about using the individual accounts or local authentication to essentially authenticate every web API request because of the added cost.
I have been thinking that what we are really needed to do is pretty much authenticate that it is our software client(WPF application) making the request and this authentication could open up all the controllers and actions for requests made by the client rather than the user. The user and its authentication is somewhat separate and is in place to prevent unauthorized users on a particular machines install of the application.
So you must have a valid user account to use the application.
Any suggestion would be great. I am just asking to get pointed in the right direction. I am really new to security so all suggestion will be valuable to me.
Thanks.