I have a Silverlight application from which I have to call a ASHX file, something like this GetFile.ashx?orderId=4
The problem is that I want to allow this call to be made only through the application, and thus I thought of using some sort of authentication (sending the username+pass from silverlight) when calling the ashx file. I don't want to add them in the query string. Any other suggestions?
Thank you
The easy answer is to turn on ASP.Net authorization by whatever means are suitable for you.
If your users log in through an AuthenticationService in the Silverlight client, or through an ASP.Net page, you will be able to access the CurrentUser object from the HttpContext in your handler and from there do whatever checks you want.
The following link should get you started on finding more info if you need MSDN
Related
I am creating an AdminUI for my users where I set all the permission. As part of the requirements, every time that a user logins on my IdentityServer I need to set some default permissions, but those are handle on my Admin application. Which is the best way to raise an event to let that application that a user was created on the IdentityServer?
The simplest is i think to create a simple WebApi in IdentityServer that returns the latest users and then let the other application poll this API every X seconds. In that way the system is cleanly decoupled. Perhaps expose the data as a a RSS XML document or a JSON list of items.
There is a built in eventing model in IdentityServer that you could use and push notifications to the Admin application. But push is a bit more complicated to get right, especially how to deal with all the failre/error cases.
I's suggest to add a custom event sink to process UserLoginSuccessEvent or any other event you need, here is list of all builtin events. Find their code here.
In the custom sink as suggested in the other answer you can call an API on admin app to inform it about changes.
Here is a sample for custom sink.
I think to keep two applications decoupled you better to setup a service-bus for simple implementation a sub/pub mechanism. when any user complete registration(or any other actions),then as mentioned in another answer handle the events and add message. admin UI should subscribed before to receive these messages with some information to create a user related data.
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.
I'm looking for information on how to implement secure pages using ExtJS 4. By secure pages I mean the user will log into our website using Siteminder (SSO) and so we will have the user's identity. Then we would determine what roles the user would have by making a database/LDAP call and only render those views/components that the user has access to.
Several questions come to mind:
1.) Of course I would expect we would do the authorization check prior to rendering the pages on the server-side, so how do you do this prior to firing Ext.onReady()? I need to have the ExtJS wait for the response from the server?
2.) What is the best way to organize a page's components where the case may be someone could see a particular component and another person cannot?
3.) How do I deliver the resulting page (i.e., the pieces the user has access to) to the client?
TIA!
If you're working from a Java background and are comfortable using Spring, I wrote up an approach using Spring Security here. This will allow you to plug-in any authentication mechanism you want. The main difference is that instead of using an index.html to bootstrap the application, I have a JSP so that the Spring Servlet Filter will fire for authentication. The Ext JS app blocks until the user is authenticated and the user's roles/permissions are provided.
Use a server side technology to pre-process authorization by putting your JS App launch script into a JSP/GSP. What this does is forces server side components to kick off first and then render the HTML/JS/CSS to the client. For full RIA app use index.gsp(or jsp) and the your URL stays "domain/contextroot" .
You can interrogate access privs to content via ajax request to server or alternatively you could set JS variables via again JSP technology that is processed first before the rest of the client response is returned.
< g:javascript>
//global env var definition
var env = "${System.getProperty(Environment.KEY)}";
< /g:javascript>
Both of these are not 100% safe as client side code can be altered. The real security enforcement must be handled on server side when data is submitted for processing.
'3. Easy way would be to hide/show views etc based on 2. above. There are also some experimentation out there with modularizing the client side MVC application by lazy(manually) initializing controllers that may or may not be needed.
Hope this helps.
DB :)
I am currently experimenting with the following solution. Although it will only work for apps with a rather simple set of users, it could be of some help to you.
To begin with, user authentication is done without extjs, using a simple HTML/CSS page. Once the user logs in, its details (user id, role) are saved into the PHP session. And then the page redirects to one of two extjs apps.
One app for normal users (I'll call them clients), these are people who's client side JS does not include any admin functionality. The other app is for admins.
Both apps have their classes inherit from base classes. So we have, for example, base.mainMenu from which both admin.mainMenu and clients.mainMenu inherit. The only difference in the app.js script is the controllers loaded, and per extJS 4 dynamic loading module, only the related views are loaded (ie, seen on the client side). In my case, all pages load dynamically anyway, so my users can only dynamically load pages in their mainmenu.
The admin app blocks certain features using a global JS variable that includes the user's role. So for example, the hiding of an 'edit' button from moderators (an admin group with less rights) is done once the view is loaded (in practice this is actually done by not loading a plugin that allows editing on the view).
To wrap it all up, any call to the server checks whether the session user has rights for the requested operation, so regardless of client side scripts, server operation can only be performed by people with the appropriate rights.
To summarise, you have 3 different strategies that you can mix-and-match:
Loading different apps for different users. If your classes all inherent from base classes, this is easier than maintaining 2 or more completely different apps.
Using a global JS variable to disable/enable certain features for certain users. This is only good if you don't have a problem with the client side loading features that are then disabled (but still seen by debuggers).
Regardless of anything, all server-side calls are checked against session variable.
check out Role-based access control. I use Yii's database-based RBAC, and have a php script that returns the rbac rules in json format when ext starts up
on the client, the best bet is to simply hide or disable functionality that is not allowed.
on the server, you should throw a 403 http error if the user is not allowed to perform a function. handle ajax exceptions in ext and check for 403s.
I'm trying to figure out CakePHP cookies and meet my slightly unusual authentication requirements.
I have a CakePHP-based data collection system that is now being integrated with a reporting system built with COTS software. The reporting system needs to be access controlled and unless I want to duplicate all user accounts in both systems I need the reporting system to be able to find out if the user is authenticated in my CakePHP system.
The reporting system permits me to load a Java class and execute a function when the client's report request first arrives. So my idea was to
Inspect the incoming report request and extract the cookie used by my CakePHP site for authentication / session identification
Send a request from the Java function to a 'reportauth' action within the CakePHP site with this cookie attached
The reportauth action within CakePHP then checks if the user is logged in to the CakePHP site and returns an encrypted response to the Java function identifying the user's role
I can get the cookie, send it in a request, and separately I can share encrypted information between PHP and Java.
However, when I use a 'fresh' cookie (the cookie that my browser repeatedly sends with requests to the CakePHP site after a new login) in my Java request the response says the user is not logged-in. If I then reload the site in my browser I have been logged-out. I suspect that there may be some extra information in the cookie about user-agent (?) that causes the Java-sourced request to be thrown out and that session destroyed for safety, but I don't know the system well enough. I think I might be seeing CakePHP protecting against session hijacking (which, ordinarily, would make me happy).
Can anyone tell me if there is a way around this issue? Preferably one that doesn't involve custom auth components in CakePHP as the data collection site is already live and my reporting deadline is not far away.
Any help much appreciated.
One workaround:
Get CakePHP to store a random token in a separate cookie, and as a field in the user table.
Then get the Java application to grab the token, and send it to the cakephp application to get the user's details.
Alternatively, have it authenticate with the CakePHP app itself, and pass in the session id to have cake use the right session. Note, setting with that function needs to be done before session_start() is called.
I have been struggling all day with an issue. I am sure there must be some easy solution that lots have already implemented as it looks to me as a basic setup.
I am building an app with GWT and appengine using requestfactory. This app has some "pages" (they are actually MVP views) that everybody should have access to. It's like the home page and a couple of views where the service we provide is described. Then if you want to use the service you have to login (with google accounts and all that). Only being logged in you have access to the rest of the views (pages) in the app. The question is, how to handle this?, the fact that some pages and some requestfactory calls are public and some other have to be available to those that have logged in?
I have already discarded the auth-constraints tags in web.xml because they work with all or nothing.
The next alternative was to use servlet filters (as the expenses demo does). That could work, but only if the "open" or not secured pages didn't need to access any data from appengine datastore (and I don't want to close that door, maybe in the future I want to show status or number of users, etc etc). The reason for this is that with request factory you only have one servlet so if you put a filter you shut down all comunication with appengine if the user is not logged in.
I was thinking of implementing this filter, with requesfactory for all the stuff once the user is logged in and also implement some RPC services for the data i might want to display in the "home or information pages" that i might need to retrieve from the datastore. However it looks a bit overkill for me.
Another alternative is to implement a check that the user is logged in all the request factory service methods that i want to protect. But that doesn't look to elegant either...
Anyone had the same problem? any ideas?
I'd appreciate any help on this.
Thanks,
You say that the auth constraints are "all or nothing", but that's not true - they're per-url. See here for details. Also, your connection of servlet filters and datastore access is a non-sequitir - the two have nothing to do with each other.