How to use ADFS 2.0 with asp mvc 4 - active-directory

I am writing a MVC 4 web app and want to use the new WIF and ADFS to Authenticate users. I also want to provide a profile page for users to "self serve" changes like phone number or maiden name.
I am looking for resources/tutorials (a good book) to show me how to wire it all up.
Users will be stored in active directory so I'm guessing that I should use the ADMembershipProvider for some of this. I believe there is a profile store attached to ADFS (or I can set one up) and I want to know if its good practice to interact with it directly or is the an API that with let me add claims etc.
Finally, how does all this fit into the new WebSecurity stuff?

You asked for books on the subject of ADFS. You could try the patterns and practices book A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control.

In terms of the ADMembershipProvider, you don't need it.
ADFS under the hood handles the AD integration, You configure claims rules which determine which attributes ADFS extracts out of AD.
Update
In terms of editing the user in AD, this is an Identity Manager scenario. ADFS is a STS so it doesn't handle this. You need to do this directly e.g. Howto: (Almost) Everything In Active Directory via C#. Be aware that you need an AD login that enables write access to do this. This is a different credential set to the set that allows you to login to ADFS.
ADFS just provides the login screen. Out the box you don't get any self-service functionality. You need to customise the ADFS screen yourself e.g. AD FS 2.0 Sign-In Pages Customization Overview.

Related

Automatically deploy an Enterprise Application on AzureAD

I have a React Application that uses Microsoft AD to authenticate users.
As a first step, and according to Microsoft Documentation, we need to register the application with the Microsoft identity platform.
This is inline with Microsoft Identity Platform Documentation, in this diagram we can see that for ALL types of applications (SPA, Web App, etc), we always need to configure an application in AzureAD:
This process is "cumbersome", and i'm trying to remove it by having the application installed automatically.
Several third-parties do this, such as Zapier, SpecFlow, etc.
Basically, they have a process where:
User logs in on Zapier
User is redirected to Azure AD sign-in page
User is authenticated and authorized
AzureAD shows the Consent Page
User consents
Application is installed on user's AzureAD
I've been reading and searching in Microsoft's Documentation, and i cannot find a single document that shows or even mentions this type of flow.
BUT, i know that this is possible, as there are several third parties that are doing exactly this, as Zapier, for example.
Can anyone point me in the right direction, there must exist some Microsoft document that explains how this process is done!
Apologies if this should be a comment, not an answer. I do not have enough SO reputation to write comments.
Zapier is published to the Azure Active Directory application gallery (1c76d9b0-0826-4b19-8706-29572657af1e). You can do this as well:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/manage-apps/v2-howto-app-gallery-listing
If an application already exists in the gallery, it does not need to be "registered" in the user's tenant, as the registration definition is defined in the gallery.
Once an app is in the gallery, users can use it only if their tenant's administrators allow this, per the settings on this page:
Enterprise applications | User settings
https://entra.microsoft.com/#view/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/StartboardApplicationsMenuBlade/~/UserSettings
From the user's end, there are other governance controls that may impact the user's ability to use your app, but I think "register your app in the gallery" is probably what you're asking for.

Linking External Identity Users With Existing Users

I'm adding an external identity provider, Azure multi-tenant, as a login option. I have local accounts right now and they know nothing about Azure AD users.
I want to create an Azure Enterprise App that other tenants can use to set up SSO using OpenID Connect. Also I want the app to support User Provisioning by setting up a SCIM API.
I can't really find any documents on how to handle linking Azure AD users with the existing accounts in my IDP. I've seen examples where users can login using their local account, authenticate with Azure, and then their local account is updated to have the Azure AD User ID. This approach still seems pretty manual. Another thought was to have a step in the login journey, where if no local account has the Azure AD User ID then find a local account with the same email. I don't like this approach either since the emails might not always match. Is there an approach where an admin can automatically link all accounts with a sync or upload?
SYSTEMS
First it's worth clarifying roles:
Role
Details
Authorization Server (AS)
Your UIs and APIs receive tokens from this. It is where accounts and linked accounts are stored. It is where you use SCIM to update account records. It is where you apply account linking logic.
Identity Provider (IDP)
There can be multiple of these. When your apps call the AS it manages connections to them, and exchanges IDP tokens for AS tokens that are returned to apps. It is not usual to use SCIM against an IDP.
You are using IdentityServer as the AS so your UIs and APIs will continue to use IdentityServer tokens and remain simple. Meanwhile Azure AD will become an alternative IDP. So on the data side of things your architecture is in a good place.
AUTHENTICATION ACTIONS
I would aim to solve your problems via custom authentication actions, and to design this in a vendor agnostic way. Not all providers support these concepts, but IdentityServer has some pretty good extensibility features, so hopefully it has what you need.
A bit of code, configuration and technical investigations in IdentityServer feel like the correct direction, with no complexity added to your applications. I will describe techniques in terms of Curity (where I work), but the same principles can apply to any system.
USERNAME AUTHENTICATOR
A great way to deal with user specific differences is to make the initial screen prompt only for an email. See this example for how that looks. Later, when authentication has completed, you could set a cookie so that this screen is not shown on subsequent logins.
Then, before asking for credentials, apply some scripted logic, eg to look up existing account attributes, and decide how the user should authenticate. You might decide to route unknown users to Azure AD or do something based on business partner email suffixes.
DATA UPDATES
Something simple that might work in advance of adding Azure AD support is to assign all users a Tenant ID, and perhaps existing users get a Tenant ID of 1. Only those users are allowed to sign in with Identity Server - all others have to use Azure AD.
SCRIPTED LOGIC AND ACCOUNT LINKING
For a worked example of how this looks, see this Account Linking with Facebook tutorial. In this example the objective is to update the main account with a new linked account. This account linking doc may give you some additional ideas for your scenario. It should be possible to run custom logic before triggering authentication or once your have the Azure IDP attributes.
INVOLVE THE USER IF NEEDED
It may also be useful to present a custom screen to ask the user if they have an existing account when they first login via Azure AD. If not then an Azure AD login can create the primary account in IdentityServer data in addition to a linked account.
USERS AND PARTNERS
How users onboard is interesting, and discussed in this detailed article. I always start by getting a feel for the type of assets involved:
Type
Description
Personal Assets
You allow any user to sign up and they only have access to their own assets
Corporate Assets
Users are provisioned by an administrator, eg a banker is granted access to financial data according to business rules
In your case it feels like users are from the second category, so to enable a user to fully sign up you need data from the partner, either fed in manually or by getting them to call your API, before you can assign the user the correct tenant ID. This might eventually result in TenantID=23, but there is nothing to stop you initially allowing users to onboard and placing them in a default TenantID=0 bucket.
Ultimately this all comes down to data, claims and API authorization. Eg APIs could return certain data to TenantID=0 users but only return privileged data to users whose tenant ID has been asserted by an administrator. Not sure if these thoughts of mine match your scenario but hopefully they provide a useful hint or two.
SUMMARY
Reliable account linking is tricky, but it should be solvable via the building blocks of the Authorization Server, using the above techniques. The end result should be deterministic user data, with no duplicate users.

Listing registered users from IdentityServer in another application

I have a requirement to create an admin UI where I need to list all users registered on IdentityServer to start assigning permissions and roles. This application internally uses PolicyServer, but as a superadmin user, I would need to see all users registered on IdentityServer. Here IdentityServer is responsible for authentication and the other application that uses PolicyServer is responsible for the authorization.
Which is the correct way to proceed:
1- This admin UI application should be connected to the same database that IdentityServer uses to get all the users?
2 Or should I need to extend IdentityServer on this way?:
http://docs.identityserver.io/en/latest/topics/add_apis.html
I followed this issue here:
IdentityServer/IdentityServer3#2607
but still, it is not clear for me how to proceed on the question above.
Well, the users database is usually provided by ASP.NET Identity, not so Identity Server.
I had the same issue and I went on to develop the admin Web app in the same host as Identity Server, thus using the database connection to get to the users (and the API resources, clients, etc.).
I argue that this is the simplest way to achieve what you want. And still allows you to provide a complete API on your Identity Server for external apps. I also did that (for scenarios where client apps are allowed to view/edit the user profile, for example). The API was built using plain ASP.NET Core MVC.

How can i sync users calendars using MS Graph api and Azure

I'm building a service where each user has a calendar, I want to sync users 365 calendar events into their calendar, the tricky part seems to be, that this should be done repeatable by background job on the server, to keep them in sync.
I feel like I've read a bible of documentation from Microsoft, but still gotten nowhere. I eventually stumbled upon this article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-v2-protocols-oauth-client-creds which allows a server to query the graph api, on behalf of users. This is exactly what I want.
Having created a Azure account, and Active Directory service, I found that only users within the tenant can use this, which makes it rather useless, requiring to add users manually from azure panel.
AADSTS50020: User account 'm#****.com' from identity provider 'live.com' does not exist in tenant 'Default Directory' and cannot access the application 'c0193dea-5145-430a-9c90-325f1229a1fc' in that tenant. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first. Sign out and sign in again with a different Azure Active Directory user account.
So I'm back at square one, how can I achieve what I described?
I'm not looking for a code implementation, merely a description of how to navigate the monstrosity of Microsoft.
Thank you
Update: Accordingly to Marc link. I tried to flick the multi tenant option, and change the endpoint to use common instead of tenant id. Sadly i'm still getting the same error.
You cannot sign-in to AAD with a non-AAD account using the v1 Endpoint. If you want to use a consumer Microsoft Account (#outlook.com, #hotmail.com, #live.com) then you need to use the Converged Auth model provided by the v2 Endpoint.
I have a walkthrough for the v2 Endpoint that you might find helpful: Microsoft v2 Endpoint Primer. It is similar to the v1 Endpoint but you'll need to register via https://apps.dev.microsoft.com rather than the Azure Portal. Also, v2 apps use Scopes instead of Resources and are multi-tenant out of the box.
This is a broad a question for Stack Overflow. That said, you're incorrect about Azure AD. It is absolutely not limited to a single-tenant. You do however need to register it as a multi-tenant application:
How to sign in any Azure Active Directory (AD) user using the multi-tenant application pattern

Active Directory and User Management

I'm very new to LDAP and Active Directory and I'm probably understanding something completely wrong.
I know ASP.NET Identity and forms authentication (however, I'm also quite new to that) and my question is actually if it is possible to use certain features you can use with forms authentication (explanation further below) with Active Directory.
I'm building an MVC web application and I'd like to authenticate my users against Active Directory. That would be possible with ADFS. The template you get when using ASP.NET Identity in VS2013 uses passive authentication. Is it however possible to not do this redirect to the Active Directory domain but create a custom login page for the user?
Is it also possible to do user management with Active Directory like that is possible with forms authentication? I was thinking about:
A page where the user can register himself
Ability for the user to change his password (I know this is possible with ADFS, but the user may not be logged in. I want him to do this when he's logged in, with a self-made page.)
Logging in on a new computer should ask for a code specified in an email
Set up password policy in the application
... (Other things that I might have forgotten)
When these things aren't implicitly possible with Active Directory, please advise on how to configure the application to acquire this functionality (when possible with Active Directory).
Thank you very much in advance for helping me!
EDIT 1:
To leave my question not too open, I maybe better just start with that custom login page. When I understand it well, the normal flow when using ADFS to authenticate your users against is:
A user tries to access a web page of an application for which he needs to be authenticated
(Passive) redirect to a login page provided by ADFS -> user enter his AD credentials
ADFS returns token
Token is sent to the web application (that ADFS trusts)
When the web application thinks everything is ok, it stores an authentication cookie in the user's browser (I guess), and the user can access the web page
What I would like:
A user tries to access a web page of an application for which he needs to be authenticated
Redirect to a login page of that same web application where the user can enter his credentials
The entered credentials are sent to ADFS (I guess) and it returns something (a token?) with information about whether the login succeeded or not (This step could be preceded by a call to some (self-made) service (a Web API application) that multiple client applications could use for their authentication against the same directory)
When the login succeeded, the web application stores a cookie in the user's browser and the user is able to access the page
I don't know if that makes sense? I'm just wondering how companies that use Active Directory to store user information can still have a custom login page, registration page and other user management stuff. (Or don't they use AD but do they just have their own databases?)
Normally if you want a custom login page you use an ADFS active profile implementation (e.g. WCF) to do the authentication.
User provisioning is not part of ADFS. To do this you need an Identity Manager e.g. PingFederate, OpenIDM.
If you are using ADFS 2.0 or 2.1, you can customize the pages (because they run on IIS) and add these features or redirect to a separate website which does.
Most of what you want is OOTB AD functionality. Refer: Everything in Active Directory via C#.NET 3.5 (Using System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement).
Password policy can be extremely complex. I don't know of any API's that explicitly do this.
If you are using ADFS 3.0, these is no ISS so you are pretty much out of luck.
It's not really an answer to my question here, but if someone is interested in what I eventually did: you can read it (very briefly) here.

Resources