I have my own identity authority set up using the Identity Server.
I'm running a native windows application and currently I'm using IdentityModel's OidcClient library to connect on the authority and obtain the token.
I want to add support for Azure AD and since I haven't been able to set-up the application on the Azure AD to use HybridWithProofKey flow, and found this MSAL I've decided to give it a shot.
In MSAL there is a PublicClientApplication class with accepts the string authority in its constructor (source)
When passing my URL in this constructor I imagined it would use the discovery service and found the correct endpoints and to its job. But to my suprise this dont work.
I get following error message:
AADSTS50049: Unknown or invalid instance.
Search on github MSAL for AADSTS50049 returned zero results. I've cloned the project and started with debugging.
I've figured out that the request is sent to my authority url but instead there is a GET request on the
GET https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/discovery/instance?api-version=1.0&authorization_endpoint=https%3A%2F%2Fmyidentityserverhostname%2Fidentityserver%2Foauth2%2Fv2.0%2Fauthorize HTTP/1.1
This request is done in this source and it returns the error above.
So, is MSAL intended to use with non azure authorities?
No. It's a proprietary client library for their proprietary backend.
Yes it can,
You need to use the Azure B2C library, it can be configured with other identity provideer, like facebook, google, linked in etc.
There is also an option to utilise a custom IDP, if it conforms to openId
See here.
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=854174
Using MSAL.NET with a non-MS OpenID Connect provider is unnecessary, as Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity provides sufficient support for social logins and other OIDC providers.
Also vendors of custom OpenID Connect servers provide own extensions (see IdentityServer docs and OpenIdDict samples).
As per this official example, MSAL is not required if you're only signing users in. They claim:
MSAL is used for fetching access for accessing protected APIs
BTW, if you're interested in MSAL.JS, then it's a completely different story – https://stackoverflow.com/a/73618966/968003.
Related
I'm working on an SPA which depends on an instance of Identity Server for authenticating users. I need a solution that manages my tokens locally, but Duende (the owners of Identity Server) lean towards a Backend For Frontend (BFF) pattern over Javascript libraries. This isn't going to work for us. Since the original oidc-client that was written by the authors of Identity Server is no longer maintained I've been looking at Javascript alternatives. The most likely candidate would seem to be Microsoft's MSAL.js which is built for Azure AD, but supposedly supports OIDC standards.
From what I can tell, MSAL.js forces you down an offline_access path using refresh tokens to renew security tokens. Even if I don't expressly require an offline_access scope the library appends one anyway! But my use case doesn't require refresh tokens. Instead I want my client to keep the session on the identity provider fresh using OIDC session mamnagement standards (via the check_session_iframe endpoint exposed by the provider's well-known JSON).
I have found that if I ignore the offline_access scope requested by the MSAL.js library so my identity provider only issues and ID token and an access token then MSAL continues to work just fine. It even has an ssoSilent option for explicitly renewing the tokens via a connect/authorize request in a hidden iframe. But as far as I can tell I can't have the library keeping that session fresh via an iframe like the old oidc-client used to.
So given that session management is part of the OIDC specification, and MSAL is supposed to be an OIDC-compliant library, am I missing something here?
Unfortunately, at this time MSAL.js does not have an API that integrates with the checksession endpoint. If you would like to see this added, you are welcome to open a PR on our Github.
I have been looking into using an identity provider (IDP) to provide user authentication for a Windows Forms client. The user credentials will be hosted by Auth0. After creating a trial account with Auth0 I have downloaded a sample C# Windows Forms client application that can be used to authenticate to the Auth0 IDP using OpenID Connect ("OIDC"). The WinForms sample application pops up a web browser component, displays the Auth0 login screen, I login to the Auth0 IDP (having setup some test credentials in Auth0) and the WinForms application then is sent an authentication token. All well and good, and if I try to login a second time I no longer need to enter my credentials.
However... the company that I will be fetching authentication data from in production would like to use SAML. Is there any way to do this? Based on what I have read, SAML needs a "Service Provider" that will receive credentials from the IDP. The Service Provider is (typically?) a web site. That does not seem to match very well with what I am trying to do (authenticate a windows client). Is there any way of using SAML to do essentially what I have done using OIDC (fetch authentication information for a user from an IDP)? Would I need to develop a separate Service Provider component for this?
Sounds like what you've done so far is fine architecturally:
A modern desktop app following OIDC standards
This puts you in a good position architecturally, where:
Your app gets tokens from Auth0 using OIDC
Auth0 can reach out and do federated authentication with other standards based identity providers, which could be SAML, OIDC, WS-Federation or anything else
This can be done without changing any code in your app - and your app does not need to understand SAML
Feels like you need to set up a federated connection from Auth0 to the SAML Service Provider, and most commonly this involves these steps:
You give the partner your Entity Id and Response URL, to post tokens to
They give you am Entity Id, Public Key Certificate and request URL
You configure rules around account linking, so that users can be matched between their system and yours
There are prerequisites though, and the external identity provider needs to be SAML 2.0 compliant. My Federated Logins Article may help you to understand the general concepts, though I do not drill into SAML details here.
I am working on a project where we are planning to use SAML 2.0 to send authentication requests to OpenLDAP. Can someone please tell me if its supported or not? I am not able to get the clear answer via Google.
SAML and LDAP are completely different things. SAML is mostly used for Web-based SSO. The identity provider (IdP) part of the access manager software/system you're using (i.e., the one that implements SAML authentication authority) may use a back-end LDAP server (e.g., OpenLDAP) for authenticating users.
I'm tried to build a new rich application and i'm having some problems designing the authentication process.
I've only two requirements :
An API needs to be available
An ADFS needs to be used to authentication
My first thoughts was to build the API and to use Angular.js for the frontend. However, I can't see how the authentication should work.
My API needs to be available though scripts. As far as I saw, the ADFS authentication always display t the webpage for the authentication process.
API are usually secured with OAuth2. We used an client id and a client secret to generate a token. But I can't have this behavior with an ADFS.
The only solution I see is to provide two authentications behavior with my application. One with the ADFS for the web access and in the web interface, add a possibility to generate a client id and a client secret associated with an user account that could be used for the API to the headless authentication.
Someone has already faced this kind of scenario?
Thanks a lot!
I assume the 'ADFS needs to be used for authentication' really means 'users should be able to use their Active Directory domain credentials to authenticate'.
If that is the case, you should take a look at Thinktecture IdentityServer. It's an OAuth2 authorization server that you can use with a Active Directory identity provider.
P.S. ADFS 3.0 that comes with Windows 2012R2 only supports the authorization code grant, which is not suitable for JavaScript apps.
I am building a cross-platform mobile app that interacts with a RESTful API, and I want to use OpenID Connect to authenticate my users. I will be building my own OpenID Connect provider server.
OpenID.net claims that:
OpenID Connect allows for clients of all types, including browser-based JavaScript and native mobile apps, to launch sign-in flows and receive verifiable assertions about the identity of signed-in users.
However, I can't find any documentation explaining how to actually authenticate for a mobile app client.
This StackExchange answer makes it clear that OpenID Connect does not support the "resource owner password-based grant" flow or the "client credentials" flow.
That just leaves the "authorization code" flow (normally used by server-side apps) and the "implicit grant" flow (normally used by client-side apps). Both of these seem to rely on redirecting the user to the provider's authorisation endpoint, and having the provider redirect back to the client URL. I don't see how this can apply to a mobile app.
Can anyone explain to me (or even better, point me at a tutorial or some example code) which explains how to do this?
Update
To clarify: OpenID Connect relies on the client redirecting the user to the Authorization Endpoint, and then the provider redirecting the user back to the client. In the case where the client isn't a web app, how can this work?
Mobile apps, at least on iOS and Android, can register custom URL schemes so that a redirect from a browser can send the user back to your app along with some query parameters.
So, you can use these flows in a native mobile app, but it involves sending the user to a web browser (either an external browser app or a web view built into your application) in order for them to authenticate with the OP.
A complete article presenting how to implement the "Authorization Code Grant" flow securely on a native mobile app is available here : Building an OpenID Connect flow for mobile. It is based on latest IETF OAuth 2.0 Security Best Current Practice.
Please also note that the use of the "Implicit Grant" flow is now highly discouraged.
I think that the Hybrid flow from the OpenID Connect spec is probably the one which you want to use. OpenID Connect Core Spec.
This does rely upon having a configured return URI, but as James says you would use a custom URI scheme to enable the mobile OS to redirect after login to your own app. Your app would then have an access code which it can use to obtain access tokens as needed (assuming that you are using Oauth2 to protect your back-end API services which the mobile app uses).
There is a vulnerability which would allow a malicious app to hijack your URI scheme and grab the tokens, There is a draft spec to overcome that Proof Key for Code Exchange by OAuth Public Clients which is worth considering implementing.
Using an app scheme URL is the correct answer as noted above. I wanted to add additional clarification since some responses above include links to an article that makes incomplete assertions about a compliant SSO design, and make it unnecessarily complicated for a simple SSO use case. I think google's model is secure and so I might model OIDC interactions with a homegrown IDP after how theirs works.
https://medium.com/klaxit-techblog/openid-connect-for-mobile-apps-fcce3ec3472
The design in this article linked above, as depicted in the diagram on the article, does not work for google's oAuth/OIDC implementation on Android. There are two reasons for this:
Google will not vend any client_secret for an oAuth client that is typed "Android"
Suppose I switch to "Web" application which does have a secret: Google will not allow a redirect_uri other than 'http' or 'https' for an oAuth client that is typed "Web"
Instead, google officially recommends letting the typical mobile flow (and you should also be using PKCE) drop an ID Token on the client, who can then exchange it for a session with the App server:
https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/android/backend-auth
This is secure because your IDP should be signing the JWT ID Token with a private key so it can be validated by your system's apps/services and used to assert validated (unexpired) identity intended for a particular OIDC client & audience.
** Do not pass ID Token as authorization on every request, but rather exchange it once with your backend for a secure session context as managed by your application.
Check out MITREid project on github:
MITREid Connect
This project contains an OpenID Connect reference implementation in
Java on the Spring platform, including a functioning server library,
deployable server package, client (RP) library, and general utility
libraries. The server can be used as an OpenID Connect Identity
Provider as well as a general-purpose OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server.