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.
Related
I am trying to build an app where users can sign in using their work Microsoft account through open id connect. All of the documentation on Microsoft seems to suggest that for React/SPA apps you should use the MSAL library to authenticate users but this seems to cache the access tokens directly in the brower through session storage. To my knowledge this is bad practise and a backend for frontend approach should be used for this scenario instead where the access token is stored in a HTTP secure cookie.
Does anyone know how to do a backend for frontend type approach using Azure Active Directory? Is there support for this using Microsoft Api's or do I have to just write the code from scratch?
Thanks for any help
You need to use a server side solution to issue application level secure cookies. It is not specific to Azure AD.
The Duende BFF solution is .NET based, and uses the web host, eg https://www.example.com, to issue cookies. See this code example and the docs.
It is also possible to issue cookies via a utility API that runs in a sibling domain of the SPA, eg https://api.example.com. This is a little more complex, but provides options such as deploying the SPA to a content delivery network - see this code example.
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 webapp, the Front-end is implemented in AngularJS which talks to back-end server by invoking REST API. The back-end is Java REST Server implemented using reslet framework deployed in Jetty.
Currently, when a user logs into a web app, a REST API is invoked which then goes to the Java REST server. The server then authenticates the user.
I want to implement SSO using SAML. So when a corporate user tries to login to the app, the user must be redirected to ADFS. If the user is successfully authenticated he must be allowed to login to the app.
I want to know how do I start? I have seen sam2-js library, however it seems to be for NodeJS based server. I am not quite sure if it can be used with AngularJS on frontend.
SSO with SAML involves browser redirects so the flow is between angular and ADFS.
There's no Java backend.
So Jetty is irrelevant.
SSO has nothing to do with REST. They are two different flows handled in two different ways.
SAML is not a suitable SSO protocol for angular. That's why you can't find any examples.
You need to use OpenID Connect with ADFS 4.0. ADAL is the way to go.
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.
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.