Based on the code sample mentioned at URL: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/active-directory-dotnet-webapp-wsfederation , I implemented an application that uses WS-Federation (ASP.Net WS-Federation OWIN middleware) to authenticate users from an Azure AD tenant. Now I am looking for an approach to query the Graph API later in my application to fetch additional claims information required from application point of view.
Here in this scenario, I would like to know whether it is possible to query the Graph API or not. Do I need to update the existing WS-Federation protocol to OpenId Connect.
Can anyone help me to provide their guidance here.
The ideal would be to move to OpenId Connect, which would allow you to take care of both sign in and API in a single setup and flow.
If you want to stick with your current ws-fed setup, you can layer oauth2 on top of your implementation and retrieve the access token you need any time after the sign in. We have a sample showing exactly that, see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/samples/active-directory-dotnet-webapp-webapi-oauth2-useridentity/
Related
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.
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.
We are looking to publish an API in an Azure B2C model where customers will use our app to access API's published using Docker Swarm based Azure Container Services. Our assumption here is that this model will require Azure B2C AD as opposed to Azure AD.
All API calls will have an OAuth token issued from B2C AD.
We want to know what is the best approach to validate the token centrally before it reaches the microservices on Azure Container Service. We were using API Gateway to route the API calls to the correct microservice while also using the WAF capability in the API Gateway. However, we realize that the API Gateway does not provide a way to verify the OAuth token before it forwards the request to the microservices.
Also please note, as per the suggestions in Microsoft Documentation we have two tenants with one tenant running all services such as database and microservice and the second tenant hosting the Azure B2C AD.
Can you please suggest the best option to implement the OAuth Verification without having to implement this in each microservice.
One thing you could do is put Azure API Management Service between your clients and services, there you'd have an option to use validate-jwt policy to inspect tokens and authorize calls.
The following is a quick overview of the steps:
Register an application (backend-app) in Azure AD to represent the API.
Register another application (client-app) in Azure AD to represent a client application that needs to call the API.
In Azure AD, grant permissions to allow the client-app to call the backend-app.
Configure the Developer Console to call the API using OAuth 2.0 user authorization.
Add the validate-jwt policy to validate the OAuth token for every incoming request.
Please refer to the following document for steps in detail.
Sorry I am still very confused, read everywhere telling me oath is a authorisation protocol but it appears using the azure ad oauth code grant, it does promote a login screen to authenticate against the directory, so is it not an authentication process? what is the relationship between the open id connect? thanks!!
the OAuth2.0 protocol has several flows that an identity provider (in your case Azure AD) may implement to support auth.
The Auth Code flow is in fact one of these used by apps to get access tokens for some api. The flow is quite simple, an app redirects the user to the identity providers /authorize endpoint. At this point the user enters their credentials, and the site redirects back to your application with an authorization code and can also issue an ID Token that represents a user (This is the OpenID Connect part). The app takes this code, and POSTs it to the /token endpoint and will be issued an access token and refresh token. With the access token, your app can access whatever api you've requested access for.
For Azure AD specifically, Microsoft has built libraries that handle all these flows and token caching so most of the complexity is abstracted away. There's some simple code samples that you can checkout that you may find helpful. The authentication protocols and scenarios doc for Azure AD may also be really helpful for conceptual information.
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.