Azure Active Directory as simply user/role validation service - azure-active-directory

Our current process is BizTalk expose a web service for vendor to call in, where the request header contains pre-assigned user name and password. Upon receiving service call, BizTalk validates the credential against the database, extract and attach some metadata from db record to the inbound message (e.g. city, vendor level etc)
Question,
can we replace this process with Azure Active Directory? Heard it does provide a restful API, but get confused everytime reading the documentation when talk about JWT token... Does it have a straight forward restful endpoint to call to validate and extract user information?
can we customize the metadata within the AAD user?
Thanks for the help!!

1 - sure you can. There is no endpoint to perform validation, but it's easy to validate incoming tokens - we offer components that automate it. See https://github.com/AzureADSamples/NativeClient-DotNet for an example. The same location on guthub has lots of other samples demonstrating different scenarios.
2 - I am not certain I understand what you mean with metadata here. If you are referring to the info you can specify about the user: you can customize the user scheme. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn720459.aspx

Related

Salesforce Server-to-Server integration without any user involved

I am working on a integration with Salesforce using REST APIs and, as part of the project, I need to send updates to Salesforce and these updates are not user triggered, they are system triggered.
Because of that, what I expect to see on Salesforce Field History is not a user name but the name of our Connected App (the app that made the update).
What I see today is the user name because the way the integration was made initially using OAuth Authorization Code flow.
To change that part of the project, I followed the link (OAuth 2.0 JWT Bearer Flow for Server-to-Server Integration): https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.remoteaccess_oauth_flows.htm&type=5
Making that, I was expeting to generate a token for a System, not for a User, but that's not what happened: when I used the token generate from the JWT Bearer Flow and ran the update, the Field History still shows the user name.
What could I do then?
Which are the options in Salesforce to achieve the behavior I'm expecting?
The most important, in my opinion, is to have a Token for our system, not for a user.
Thanks!
Everybody is an user in Salesforce. Even if you access unauthenticated pages (some contact us form? case or lead capture) - it gets tracked under special Guest User.
It sounds stupid but gives you unified interface to control permissions (Profiles/Permission sets). You want guests to access only FAQ articles and make cases? Sure thing, do it in profile, don't get paranoid about people trying to guess right URLs. You think an app was hacked? You can terminate the session just like any other "user". Want to allow login only in certain hours and from certain IP? Sure.
An app connecting with JWT will still need username (main difference being it's "just" certificate for signing the request instead of password).
Your best bet is to create dedicated "Mr System", "SystemX integration" account. It sounds like waste of license but in the long run saves you questions "why did you edit my account at 1 am" and you could even use it as backup account if you use SSO and it ever fails...

Shibboleth custom password flow

I need to set up Shibboleth IdP to validate user name and password against a custom application.
Our application exposes a REST API to which one can pass a user's credentials and either returns a 401 on failure or a JSON object with some user metadata on success.
I was able to achieve this in SimpleSamlPHP IdP with a 30-line class, but having to switch to Shibboleth, I am having a hard time finding directions to do the same there.
Reading through the documentation the suggested solution seems to be to create a custom back end for the password login flow but the Wiki does not explain in detail how to do this.
Can somebody point me out to some tutorials or sample code on which files need to be created or changed in order to do this (even basic examples of checking against a credential file or database would be fine)?
You are looking for an [External Authentication Flow] (https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/IDP30/ExternalAuthnConfiguration)
For an example, see the shib-cas-authn3 project (https://github.com/Unicon/shib-cas-authn3). It uses the CAS Server to authenticate the users. It then creates an IdP session from information retrieved from CAS.

Single Page Application login with Spring and AngularJS

I'am creating application which can be used by unknown and logged in users. Only difference is that logged in user can use some additional functions like saving its content in database.
All communication is based on ajax calls, so what I need is to deny access to some controller functions (end points) in backend for unknown users and on the client side I need to know that it is in logged in state to set this extra functions active. Only one page, login form should be in dialog. I'm little bit confused, because standard Spring Security aproach doesn't fit this case. I was reading this tutorial but I cant't fully understand it.
First: What Principal object does? They send credentials to this endpoint on submit with login() function but where is handled password check? What if I have my users in database?
Second Is it possible to write this configuration in XML style? I guess that it can be done with <intercept-url/> in spring-security.xml file.
Principal Object
The Principal Object is used to be able to get basic information about a user that is attempting to login when using automatic server authentication (i.e. LDAP). However, you will only be able to get a username from the principal object. With a server JBoss/WildFly, for example, you can link the server to Active Directory to allow Microsoft Windows to authenticate users.
Simple Solution
First, Spring Security will add additional complexity to your application where it doesn't sound like you are trying to do that. Instead, use a simple Servlet Filter. If you are using LDAP on a JBoss/WildFly sever, you can make a POST to j_security_check and the server will send the request to the filter if correct credentials are provided. Inside the filter, you may use the getName() function of the Principal object to get the username so that you may store it in the user's session. However, if you are not using LDAP, you may make a simple POST to a Java Servlet or Spring Controller (with an #RequestMapping) to attempt to login the user and store the user's information in the session.
At this point, you can filter out what URLs you will allow users to see. For example, the URL that contains /administrator/some/other/stuff.jsp could be restricted if the URL contains the word "administrator" in the first directory of the URL.

What's the simplest way to get user Groups from WAAD?

I've got AngularJS and Web.API WAAD authentication up and running. For client side I use great library ADAL.JS. For backend I use Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth. This part went quite smooth.
Now I want to implement authorization based on roles (which will be mapped to WAAD groups). Groups are not included in authentication token so I must ask Azure Graph API for them. I saw various ways to do it, using custom claims providers, adding web services to project, etc. Some examples already providing mapping between groups and roles to use in [Authorize] attribute.
But what is just the simplest example of how to get a list of group ids/names from WAAD providing User ID or username, when I'm already authenticated?
Also, is there any way to get this data in JS to use in Angular frontend, or should I create an API service which Angular should call for roles info?
In the non-JS case, the simplest way of getting groups in the token is by opting in. Download your application’s manifest, locate the “groupMembershipClaims” entry, change its value to “SecurityGroup” or “All”, upload back the manifest.
However note that this won't work for your scenario, because it uses the implicit grant - here the token is returned in an URI fragment, hence a big token would risk blowing past the URL length limits of the browser.
You can always request groups to the Graph and make it available to your frontend via custom action on your API, but from what you wrote you are already familiar with that. Let me discuss the matter here - if there's a simpler route to make this work in SPAs, I'll get back to this thread.
HTH
V.
Update: I verified and in the implicit grant case you will receive groups always via the overage claim. Please refer to https://github.com/AzureADSamples/WebApp-GroupClaims-DotNet/tree/master/WebApp-GroupClaims-DotNet - it will show you how to process the overage claim to retrieve groups. All you need to do is apply the same guidance to a web API instead, and if you need to make the info available to the client expose one or more actions doing so.

DocumentDb User Data Segregation

I'm testing out the recently released DocumentDb and can't find any documentation indicating best practice on how to perform user data segregation.
I imagine the rough design would be:
Authenticate the user and create new/obtain existing user id
On document insert inject the user id into the document
On read of document/collection of documents query where document user id = current user id
I'm creating an AngularJs application and currently use an Azure Sql Database combined with Azure Mobile Services.
Mobile services handles the user authentication and also the server side user data segregation by the use of data script javascript functions:
e.g.
function insert(item, user, request) {
item.userId = user.userId;
request.execute();
}
Any suggestions on what would be the technique for secure user data segregation from AngularJS using DocumentDB?
Your approach sounds reasonable to me - assuming the logic mentioned in your rough design takes place in your backend service.
Generally, I'd treat DocumentDB similarly as you would treat any other datastore. Your client (AngularJS) makes calls to your backend service, rather than making calls directly to your datastore. Your backend validates the client's request (i.e. assert that the user is authenticated and may touch a particular piece of data) before delegating any work to your datastore.
If direct database access from the client is desired - you can check out DocumentDB's users and permissions. For implementing multi-tenancy for your application, you can create users in DocumentDB which corresponds to your actual users or the tenants of your application. You can then create permissions for a given user which correspond to the access control over various collections, documents, attachments etc. On your client, you can connect to the database using the User's resource key rather than your DocumetnDB's administrator keys.
Check out this blog post on DocumentDB users / permissions: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cloud_solution_architect/archive/2014/12/09/permissions-in-azure-documentdb.aspx

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