One of our clients requested that we integrate our system with ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) while another requested that we integrate with Okta. They want the experience to go something like this: the end users opens up the Windows app (on their domain joined computer) and is able to use it right away with implicit authentication from one of those identity providers. No extra clicking or registration. I am willing to create multiple copies of the application integrated into these different identity providers if necessary.
Our current setup uses Node/Express as a backend (hosted on amazon web services) and all traffic is sent through this API. Our client interface is a wpf Windows application. This seems to be a less common setup. Currently, the user must sign up with an email and password, and must log in using that same email and password to start using the application.
There are 3 parts to this question that I'm super confused about (I'm an intern with limited knowledge, so please explain like I'm 5 if possible). On the other hand, I believe I have a solid understanding of how Single Sign On conceptually works (with us being the service provider and ADFS/Okta being the identity provider). Even if you can answer parts of these questions, I would be super grateful!
What (if anything) do I have to do to our API backend? I'm assuming everything just needs to be done through the windows client right? But then I saw a passport saml package but I'm unsure if I need it to complete this task.
What do I have to do to our frontend? I've tried one of auth0's sample windows application but it seems like everything is still going through a login screen. At least for any social media connection. We'd like to ideally do this without a login screen and hopefully without proprietary software like Auth0 (since we manage our own user database already). We just want something so that at startup of our wpf application, the application queries for user's information (through ADFS or Okta) and then all behind the scenes, the user is logged in automatically. Any pointers here?
What I do have to do on the 'main' active directory Windows server side (this would be on a client's enterprise network)? I've seen hints of setting up callback urls, certificates, metadata, and something, but I'm unsure of what all of that is. Lots of questions just reference that but don't explain what or why it's needed?
Lastly, I apologize if any of the questions are vague, I have tried to do research, but it just seems like all the pieces are either too advanced or just don't apply to my setup. Thank you for your time!
ADFS etc. rely on federation protocols like WS-Fed and SAML 2.0 and so the IDP behavior is determined by the protocol.
There is no browser based functionality to just log you in.
You will always be taken to an IDP login screen. Once you have authenticated, other applications on the same IDP won't require authentication. They can seamlessly log you in based on cookies.
You can't query for user info. until you know who the user is.
On the ADFS side, you can manually configure a RP (your app).
Related
I'm creating the user authentication in a web application, and I want to use Identity Server for resource protection.
The sample code and documentation shows how the user logs into Identity Server after creating an account for it. That is to say, they log in with their own Identity Server account. The quickstart even provides a UI.
But I don't want users of my application to have to log in to Identity Server, an external website. I want them to only have to log in to the web application.
So how to proceed? It just doesn't seem at all clear from the documentation how you're supposed to handle this scenario, which I would have thought would be the most common.
Do I just use a pre-defined API scope and user for token validation, holding for all the website's users? That doesn't seem to be very secure given that any user of the website or anyone with the client name and secret would have a valid token. Not sure what the point is in having the security if it's that easily worked around.
Or do I interact with my Identity Server instance somehow after the user is registered in the web application, and store the new user in a database? I can't find any mention of this in the documentation . It all seems to be very muddled to be honest.
Please could anybody shed light on some of this? What is the "standard" approach here? To have the user sign in to the external Identity Server website? That seems a great way to annoy your users.
If you only have one application and you don't intend to add more applications that needs to share users, then you should look at ASP.NET Core Identity
The whole point with OpenID-Connect/IdentityServer is to delegate the managing and handling of users/passwords (authentication) to a central entity. So individual applications don't need to deal with that complexity. IdentityServer is useful when you have multiple applications or if you have more complex integration needs. It is also perfect if you need to customize it to your own needs. If you don't need the customization part you can also outsource it to someone else like Auth0 that give you an IdentityServer like experience as a service.
I have a public-facing application that uses ASP.NET Core Identity to store first-party logins, and no intention of using third-party IdPs like Facebook or Google. I want to build the front-end in React, and the application comprises an API fronting a couple of back-end services to which I'll need to forward JWTs for authorisation.
The plan so far is to use Identity Server 4 as the IdP for the project, backing it into the ASP.NET Core Identity data stores.
Current guidance is to use Authorization Code Flow with PKCE, which would require redirection to the IdP, two sets of styling etc.
In this scenario, where there is no possibility of a third-party IdP, is Resource Owner Password Grant still highly discouraged? On the face of it, it gives a neater experience:
User populates React-based login page
XHR POST to IdP with credentials (modulo an MFA challenge)
IdP returns an access token, React app subsequently uses that for future requests to the API
What issues will I introduce by pursuing the ROPC grant in this specific situation, vs accepting the need and duplication involved in a redirect-based flow to the IdP?
AMOUNT OF WORK
This is one of the big issues. As well as a login screen you'll have to make sure other areas such as Forget Password also work. If you build a second app you'll need to make it work there also.
EXTENSIBILITY
This article summarises problem areas. One of these is no scope to ever extend login solutions.
SECURITY
Token refresh does not (usually) work with ROPG, which leads to long lived access tokens and other complexity. Also, with OAuth it is recommended that the app never sees credentials.
From a security viewpoint it looks more modern to redirect the user - all the big providers do it - eg Google, Microsoft.
BRIDGING SOLUTION
As you say, if the password is private to your app it may not be the worst thing in the world. Capturing a user's Google password in your app would be a bad thing though.
ROPG has its uses but does not have much of a future - it is deprecated in OAuth 2.1 and providers will be getting rid of it. So I would also recommend what LalitaCode suggests ..
You can create a React based Identity Server login page for Authorization Code flow with PKCE instead of using MVC UI if you want. It is just extra work and complicated. I would recommend you just style the Identity Server MVC UI to look exactly like your frontend SPA. This is the simplest way and the path I took when I did a project with Identity Server(with Angular as front end).
We want to build a central authority to do authentication and authorization for our various applications (.net). We see IdentityServer4 is open source and free, while Auth0 cost money. Does anyone use both of these? Can anyone provide suggestion which one to choose and why?
IdentityServer is a library that implements various authentication (not authorization!) protocols and let's you consolidate access control into a single system. You can host it in a typical ASP.NET webapp, console app or anything else, as long as the HTTP endpoints are available. It also lets you store the user data anywhere you want, whether in-memory, databases, flat files, the asp.net core membership system, or anywhere else.
Auth0 is a company that provides a managed service that handles authentication for you. They run the infrastructure and provide access through their website and APIs. It's similar to having someone run IdentityServer4 for you and there are several competitors like Okta for Devs, AWS Cognito, Azure AD B2C, Google Cloud Identity/Firebase, and more.
Choose IdentityServer if:
You want free open-source software.
You have the time and effort to run it yourself.
You want to control the backing data store (SQL database, Redis, JSON file, etc).
You want to manage all the data yourself due to regulations, privacy, etc.
You need complete control and flexibility around what happens during authentication (for example, merging user accounts in your database when someone signs in). It's all just C# code so you can do whatever you want.
Choose Auth0 if:
You want to save time and effort on implementation and operation.
Price is not an issue (as it can get expensive for some features).
The limited customizations offered by Auth0 are enough for your app.
You want the other features they offer like password-breach monitoring.
You don't want to manage user data, or don't mind having it stored by them.
Update as of Oct 2020 - IdentityServer is now a product from Duende Software with a new commercial open-source license to sustain development. There are other alternatives like OpenIddict that are still free.
Identity Server means building a server application to handle authentication and authorization, which can replicate what Auth0 does for OpenIdConnect (OIDC) there will be a few things to implement even if you use IdentityServer4. You will need to build that first, then integrate your application.
Auth0 allows you to integrate immediately with OIDC with additional & enterprise features.
Both of them implement federated protocols i.e. WS-Fed, SAML and OpenID Connect.
In order to use them your apps. need the appropriate client-side stack.
If they don't have this, you can't use the products.
The only alternative is pass-through, i.e. Auth0.
Or look at ADFS which has pass-through via the ADFS WAP.
If you do have the stacks, both will do the job.
idsrv4 does not have a user management portal e.g. create user, add group to users OOTB.
Auth0 does.
idsrv4 essentially adds features by code. Auth0 has config. via wizard.
idsrv4 is open source so you can customise to your heart's content. I find it really useful to bridge systems.
Azure AD is another option.
I have a product ecosystem consisting of multiple products i.e: An angular app, a website and a hybrid app all powered by node back end.
So, now I want to add a single authentication and authorization to the whole ecosystem also it needs to be modular and scalable.
Plus I'm following a 3-tier architecture i.e: [APPLICATION] --> [API] --> [DB], only the API layer having access to the DB.
Now I also want the Authentication and Authorization to be another app in the ecosystem that can be plugged into other apps and used without much setup.
Also since It's(Authentication and Authorization module) another application I don't want it to access the DB directly, I want it to make API calls that do it, plus it shouldn't use third party auth schemes like auth0.
Important thing being none of the applications other than the Authentication and Authorization module should have any auth related logic in them.
Basically this should be the module than when plugged in allows Authentication and Authorization and integrates seamlessly.
Is this setup possible? If so how do i go about it? If not how is Authentication and Authorization achieved in other such production grade ecosystems?
Thanks in advance!
Authentication can definitely be thought of as a module; just a widget with a database backend that takes in credentials and spits outs error messages or authorization tokens. Authorization, however, is a bit more complicated; once you have received those authorization tokens, you need to decide what they mean.
Without knowing anything about your applications, I would say that you would need to create a mapping of privileges to user accounts for each application. This is trivial if you just want to restrict users from accessing each other's content, but gets harder if you want to give some users more (or less) power than others. If that is the case, than I'd suggest you use some form of role-based access control. You can find some more discussion on how to handle authorization here.
I'm a complete newbie on the concepts of web security and I was having a pre-conceived notion that securing the application is incredibly hard.
Looking at a video on Apache shiro, I have a feeling that the complexity of security has all been abstracted in form of a nice, simple, unified API.
I'm trying to write a security layer which will be responsible for Authorization and SSO for my underlying SOAP based webservices.
The permissions will all be sourced from LDAP (OpenDS) which will be maintained on my side (ie not external), as they reflect the bunch of functionality available on my system.
I have a requirement that clients can have their user management in Active Directory (external) and once they log-in to AD (probably their windows login), they should automatically be authenticated to be able to consume my services.
Then I will check whether the user has got the right authorization to consume a specific service.
This effectively means, Authentication is done externally but authorisation is done internally as far as my boundaries are concerned. But my security layer has to understand that the user has been authenticated and know who the user is.
Is this achievable in Shiro? Any pointers would be of great help.