WebAPI 2 Authorize Roles with MSAL - asp.net-web-api

I'm in throws of moving our security architecture from ASP.NET Core Identity to Azure AD V2 with MSAL.js. We used a lot of Roles with the ASP.NET Core Identity implementation and the information was managed in the database using the web application. The pattern I'm abandoning is similar to this one.
https://www.dotnetcurry.com/aspnet-core/role-based-security
Azure AD with MSAL is working. The tokens are being created and passed and the local Web API Endpoints decorated with the generic [Authorize] attribute are being honored as you would expect. Web API Endpoints decorated with [Authorize(Roles= "Fee, Foo, Fi, Fum")] are throwing a 401 unauthorized error.
I'm not sure where to go from here. Do I write a CustomAuthorize attribute override for Web API and go back to the database and grab the roles. (probably match the DB defined roles to the user based on email address)
OR
Is there a way to implement roles natively with Azure AD V2?
I'm not sure whats the best course of action from here. Documentation and Code samples seem limited. It would sure be nice to just throw a AD User in a Group and have the Group be respected as a Role in the Web API. On the other hand, It's nice to have Role delegation handled within the confines of the Web Application.
Any advice, experience or interest would be greatly appreciated.
Answer
Follow up to my question. #Marc , You're correct, after looking at the token the Roles are not present. Adding Roles to the token seems pretty straight forward. You need to Patch the graph schema to include them, Configure the roles and assign them to users as needed thru AAD.
Or that's how it looks at first glance. After digging a deeper, it requires a P1 or P2 Enterprise license which only costs an additional 6$ per month per user. This will literally double the cost of hosting email in the cloud for us.
Alternatively I wrote a CustomAuthAttribute for WebAPI and tied User & Roles together on the server backend. Roles can still be managed via the web application and users can still login using Active Directory Credentials.

I recall that the id token returned in implicit flow (the one you use with JS) does not include app roles (or groups). I cannot find any docs confirming that but see others who got around the issue (so the issue must be there) by using Graph to get the roles (or groups).
You can capture the token you receive from AAD and view it using https://jwt.ms to see whether roles are included in it.

Related

How to log in to arbitrary webpage that uses OKTA for auth?

I work for a large company (50K+). Some orgs within the company use OKTA for auth on their servers.
I have a valid user login (via OKTA) for the servers, and can log in through a browser without any issues, but want to access this site programatically.
How can I log into these websites using my OKTA credentials?
I've found this doc: https://developer.okta.com/docs/reference/api/oidc/#authorize
that details how to use an OKTA endpoint, but it requires some info that I do not have. Namely, nonce, state, and client_id. I have no clue how to get this info.
I've found another endpoint that allows a similar login method, but only requires username and password (I forget the doc that referenced this):
https://<company>.okta.com/api/v1/authn
I am able to successfully authenticate with OKTA using this endpoint, and receive a session_token. Can I take this session_token and apply it to my arbitrary webpage somehow? I can not find any documentation that says so.
At first glance it appears that many of the API endpoints for OKTA require intimate knowledge of the hosted application (and/or are not meant to be accessed programmatically).
Is it possible to log into an arbitrary webpage that uses OKTA for authentication, with only knowledge that an end user would have (username/password/optional MFA)?
Hi not sure you found the answer yet. from your descriptions i think yours is web app, which is supposed to use authentication code flow. else, you can ask your web developers what authentication flow they use and follow the auth process accordingly.
you need to retrieve id token & access token for authentication.

IdP initiated flow - Identify okta account

I have an MVC application (.Net Framework 4.5) which is been there for the last three years and using Forms Authentication mechanism. This application provides different accounts like Personal, freebie, Enterprise etc. For an enterprise account, we are handling everything in the same application. I.e. Suppose an enterprise called “xyz” created an enterprise account with the application, then we are providing a custom URL like “https://application/xyz/login” and from the URL we are identifying that enterprise. I don’t know the exact reason why they implemented like this as I have seen applications that are having enterprise accounts are created as subdomains (e.g. https://xyz.okta.com). Now the client asked to integrate Okta into this application.
So I looked into Okta and found SAML is the right way to do and ends up in KentorIT Authservices. Initially, I was able to integrate this with a sample MVC application and the authentication part was working fine. With some basic idea about SSO, I have started integrating kentor authsevices into my application. The challenges I found in this implementation are:
1) For Enterprise accounts, Okta configuration settings are different for each enterprise and with my current application implementation, it is not possible to set it in from the web.config. So I have tried to set it from code and I was able to integrate those settings by replacing Configuration.Options.FromConfiguration;. I’m planning to store all configuration related things(Single sign-on URL, Audience URI,Identity Provider Issuer" etc.) in the database so that I can get the information whenever I wanted and I’m assuming that “Identity Provider Issuer Id is unique for each Okta account. In an IdP initiated flow, when the user tries to access the application it will redirect to AuthServices\Acs action method and from that, I’m trying to read the configuration settings. From the request is there any way I can identify from which Okta account call came(like Identity Provider Issuer)? Currently, I set the "Identity Provider Issuer" value (and I think which should be unique for okta account) to the Default RelayState field under General SAML settings tab and I was able to retrieve it from AuthServices\Acs action methods. Does it seem to be a good idea?  Please advice.
2) The Enterprise accounts are limited based on the number of licenses (say 50). Suppose if the Enterprise Okta admin intentionally added 55 users all those users can successfully authenticate the application based on the default settings. Is there any way I can handle this scenario. Do I need to keep a record of the list of users that came under a particular enterprise account?
3) From the documents I understand that Kentor authentication service is only for authentication and authorization part has to be done from the application itself. The current application implementation consists of a custom authorization attribute which checks for user permissions that are stored in the database. That should be there as it is and we have to do the authorization based on database permissions. Right?
Expecting your valuable suggestions and please correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks in advance.
Don't use the RelayState for sensitive data unless you cryptographically sign it. It is not protected by any signature when using the POST binding, so the user may manipulate it. To get the issuing idp, check the issuer field of any claim generated by AuthServices instead.
Yes.
Yes, that's the whole idea with Kentor.AuthServies: To plug SAML2 authentication into the security model of .NET to allow you to use any current/traditional Authorization setup.

Using o-auth to authentify users on my API

I've got a project made of two websites:
The front : A Laravel website without database and logic (just showing static pages and my javascript)
The API : A project using Lumen/Dingo API with my endpoints, my database, my logic and my models
I want to allow my front to ask data to my API depending the user.
Ex. I want to log the user, retrieve his friends, add some post to his
account, etc. (from the Javascript)
What is the best solution?
Using an identification per user (using o-auth or JWT)
Allow my front project to ask to my API then each javascript call needs to use my front without knowing my API) (In this solution I need to create routes similars to my API's routes)
Identification per user is always a better solution as the claims can be decided per user, also in future when it is required to provide permissions to access API based on claims or roles, it becomes easy to give information using the claims and amount of access you can give to a specific user.
So the way it will work is:
There will be identity server which will be containing the list of users in the system, and also the clams and scopes per user.
The API project will trust the identity server, that means any token provided by the identity server can get verified.
Based on the token per user your API app can decide how much information you want to give to the user.
That way in future you can have methods based on roles, claims and users will be provided with only the information that they have access to.

Combining Azure AD (b2c) custom ClaimsIdentity

I have an ASP.NET 5 (RC1) application for which I am trying to set up authentication and authorization. However I am confused and overwhelmed by all the varying authentication and authorization information online in as it pertains to this platform. Much of it seems either hopelessly out of date or simply doesn't seem to apply in this particular usage scenario. Right now, I'm not even sure what the right 'terminology' to use for the question I am trying to ask, but I digress.
What I am trying to accomplish is a system whereby users are authenticated/authorized via Azure AD (B2C?), with additional user profile information stored in a database. However, the user context in the controllers is accessed in a consistent way using what I presume would be a custom ClaimsPrincipal/ClaimsIdentity? I would imagine this should be as simple as adding an 'authorize' attribute or something similar and accessing the ClaimsPrinciple.Current.Claims.
I have used ASP.NET Identity in the past, but many of the examples I have found aren't using that. Most are simply using the UseOpenIdConnectAuthentication middle-ware. I see that ASP.NET Identity is still available but I'm not sure it applies in this scenario. I also found a couple posts on here suggesting using a custom ClaimsIdentity to accomplish this, but I am having trouble finding useful up to date examples. BTW, I realize that much of this "profile" information can be stored as custom attributes in azure ad but the way some of the information is used within the application prohibits all of it from being in azure (i.e. EF linq joins and such).
Please, tell me if I am even close on some of this. I know this is a fairly new platform and the information is sparse, but certainly I'm not the only one asking these questions.
Just calling out an excellent article Identity management for multitenant applications in Microsoft Azure.
A lot of your questions are answered there.
e.g. you can augment the claim in the OWIN middleware AuthenticationValidated event.
ASP.NET Identity is claims-based in that the attributes are delivered as claims but authentication is on the DB, not via external IDP like Azure AD.
B2C is a special case in Azure AD - used for many (millions!) external users who can self-register and self-manage e.g. SSPR.
B2C uses a separate tenant to the normal Azure AD one and the users have no access to things like O365 or any SaaS applications.

Azure ACS - Best Practice Implementation

We are building an ASP.NET MCV 3 application from scratch running on Windows Azure. About Authentication and Authorization layer we are thinking to use the Access Control Service. I went through some articles about ACS where I got the basic idea but I still have some doubts on it.
My understanding is that using the ACS we outsource the Authentication process to one or more Identity Providers (IP), basically we trust another system (i.e. Microsoft Live ID) to authenticate our users.
The basic process is very straightforward: at authentication stage we redirect (ACS does it) the user to one of our “trusted” IPs, that will redirect the user (with a valid token) to the ACS and eventually to our application.
Here comes a number of questions:
Since we don’t want that all the users with a Live ID account can access to our application, I presume there should be another process to validate that user and checking if he is registered in our application. The question is where? In the ACS or in our application?
I have an idea about this but I don’t know if it’s the right way to do it:
At registration stage, the system (our web app.) asks the user which IP (i.e. Live ID, Google, Facebook, and our app.) he wants to use to authenticate himself in the application. Then the user goes through the authentication process on the IP system and when he comes back, we store his username (IP username) in our DB.
So, next time, at authentication stage we can check if that user is registered in our system.
If the above theory is correct, that means in our app. we need to build our membership provider to store usernames coming from IPs and users that chose our app. as IP.
Am I correct? What is the best practice to design the above process?
Now let’s talk about Authorization and “Roles”. How does it work with ACS? Does ACS manage multiple roles per user?
Again my understanding is that with ACS you can create a number of “Rule groups” related to the IP and not to a single user. If this is correct, how do we manage users in role in our application? Let’s say, for example, that we have multiple roles and our users can be associated to those roles, can we use ASC to manage it?
So the final questions are: Does ACS itself cover the whole Authentication and Authorization process? Do we still need to use the .net Membership Provider? What's the best practice in order to cover our requirements?
For the part of the question about the registration stage, the best thing to use to identify users is the NameIdentifier claim type
http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier.
This should be unique for each identity provider and also fixed. If you use the email address claim, it could change for the same user. Technically it could be possible for two identity providers to use the same NameIdentifier (none of the out-of-the-box ones with ACS do) so you could combine the NameIdentifier claim with the IdentityProvider claim type
http://schemas.microsoft.com/accesscontrolservice/2010/07/claims/identityprovider
to guarantee uniqueness.
For the part about role, I would say using ACS to issue role claims from generic identity like Google would be quite hard to manage using the claim transformation rules in ACS on per user basis. You would have to add a rule for each registered user - probably not feasible. I think the ACS rule groups are more suited to transformation of role claims (e.g. issued by a federated ADFS). Your idea to do it in your application is a better one IMHO. In code, the place to do this using WIF is in a custom ClaimsAuthenticationManager. You override its Authenticate method and based on the NameIdentifier claim from the incoming principle, you look up in your membership datastore and create a new IClaimsPrinciple based on the roles that are in your membership DB (i.e. you add a role claim for each role the user is in).
You then make your authorization decision in a custom ClaimsAuthorizationManager. There are some good samples and info on this around on the web. You can start at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748497.aspx
The user validation process is done with claims.
After you set up an IP with ACS, when users authenticate, ACS will get claims about the authenticated user from the IP. You need to configure rules in ACS to say which claims you want forwarded on to your application. You can also tranlate claims into different types, to normalize the incoming claim set to what your application expects
If you want to implement your role based access with ACS, you can. In this case a role just another claim ACS will issue, and you'll implement your application to give user privileges based on the role claim it receives from ACS.
You can configure ACS rules that map certain IP input claims to role output claims. ACS also has a management service that can change these rules so you can implement a user registration process.
Individual claim rules in ACS relate to identity providers that issue the claim, but rule groups don't. Rule groups associate to RPs (your applications). A rule group is simply a group of claims transformation rules that tell ACS: "for this application, apply this rule group policy when you issue the token".
The ACS docs have lots to say about ACS claim rules configuration, both through the web portal and through the management service::
https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/hh147631.aspx
Expanded response:
Let's say you're using ACS to authenticate to an ASP.NET app that's using WIF. You would configure ACS to issue a Role claim of "Manager" for the google user with email "jdoe#gmail.com".
Now in your ASP.NET app, WIF will see this role claim and it will allow you to control access using either HttpContext.Current.User.IsInRole("Manager"), or the web.config equivalent.
You can manage these ACS rules manually using the web UI, or you can implement a registration process that adds such rules to ACS programatically using the ACS management service. There are some ACS management service samples available at acs.codeplex.com.
Also, the identity developer training kit has some examples on WIF role based access:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=14347

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