I have an ASP.NET Core Web API app and to secure it, I've implemented JWT Bearer authentication. The next step is managing user access and issuingJWT token.
Initially I considered using Azure AD B2C but it doesn't seem to support my business requirements. So I'm now considering using Identity Server 4.
Is Identity Server 4 run as a completely separate application? Also, am I understanding it correctly that it is used as:
A web interface for users to register and login
Also a web app with API that issues the JWT token
In other words, does Identity Server 4 "act" as my own Azure AD B2C service?
IdentityServer 4 is a Web app (Login & Logout pages) with an API that implements the OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect specifications. The samples provide a simple user login and logout views that you can change to your liking.
Regarding the user registration process, you may add that to your IdentityServer4 implementation or have that as a separate web application.
Similarities to Azure AD B2C
This came from another blog article
Authorization
Azure AD B2C allows you to model user roles as membership in groups
that you define. You can’t currently get a token containing those
claims, but you can use the Azure AD Graph API as a workaround to
retrieve the group memberships, and use them in authorization checks
inside your application. It’s a little tricky right now, but
improvements to this are on the B2C team’s roadmap.
API Authentication
Azure AD B2C can provide tokens for authenticating API access via
OpenID Connect, but beyond that the functionality is limited. The
OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials flow isn’t supported, and B2C doesn’t
include any API key management features, so you’ll need to roll your
own code if your services need to support API key authentication.
Another article with PROS for IdentityServer4.
IdentityServer 4 is an authentication framework capable of out of the
box Single Sign On (SSO) and security for your APIs, and most recently
support for implementing your own authentication protocols and tokens,
with a sample implementation for the WS-Federation protocol and SAML
tokens. SSO works across all applications regardless of whether they
are using OpenID Connect or WS-Federation.
Summary
IdentityServer4 is similar to Azure AD B2C with more functionality as noted in the linked articles.
Related
I am working in a project where we are authenticating any REST API requests from UI or anywhere else using ADFS STS tokens. There are some direct calls from UI with ADFS STS token in header for authentication/authorization and there are some external 3rd party calls not from UI, but also using ADFS STS tokens in header. Now we are planning to migrate partially to Azure AD token, post which there may still be some applications that will keep using ADFS STS tokens, so there can be situation where an external application that is unaware of migration to Azure may still call an internal application using ADFS STS Token and we are supposed to be compatible with it. Similarly there can be a situation that an internal application that is migrated to Azure AD token is internally calling one of the legacy applications which is still not migrated to Azure AD and won't in future too.
I have two challenges now:
How to support the above design so that even if an Azure token is used the API is still able to call an external service (working on ADFS) by creating an ADFS token from within the code and setting it in headers ?
Header in a HTTP request seems to be an unmodifiable data and when i tried to modify it within a requesttemplate in an request interceptor code, it failed saying unmodifiable map.
How do I handle this ? Please someone help.
Unfortunately I cannot share code due to internal restrictions.
Please check if below references provide some idea in your case.
According to Mix ADFS and Azure AD for authentication - Microsoft Q&A.
If you have O365 federated with ADFS and you federate an application
with Azure AD, the authentication flow would be:
User accesses the application which is federated to Azure AD.
Application will redirect to Azure AD authentication endpoint (https://login.microsoftonline.com) for authentication.
User will be prompted for credentials.
Based on the UPN suffix (If the domain is federated with ADFS), user will be redirected to ADFS.
ADFS will authenticate the user and issue a WS-Fed token to Azure AD.
Azure AD will receive the token and issue a SAML token to the application.
User will finally get access to application.
References:
Configure AD FS 2016 and Azure MFA | Microsoft Docs
Azure AD Connect - Manage AD FS trust with Azure AD using Azure AD
Connect | Microsoft Docs
federating ADFS with Azure Active Directory (techdirectarchive.com) & reference- Solution Zone
We have single page app (Angular front end and .NET Core Web API) using Azure AD for authentication. Both front end and and Web API are registered in the same tenant and WebUI has permissions to call the Web API. This Web API uses a few other internal Web API's as well.
We have a new requirement in the app to allow access to certain areas of the app to external users who need to register first. So now the app need to authenticate both existing AD Users plus external users.
My question is if this is possible in a single application? And if yes what is the recommended approach for authenticating both corporate and external users?
As you need to use register feature, you will need to use Azure AD B2C, and it supports multi providers for a valid user flow.
For example, if you want azure ad users and external users to use your application. You can choose OpenID Connect(Azure AD) and Local Account(or other social accounts). In the login page, users can choose to sign up or use Azure AD account to login directly.
Steps:
Just keep your Wep Apps and api apps in the existing tenant. You need to create a Azure AD B2C tenant, create a user sign up/in flow, configure the providers for the user flow.
Reference:
Create B2C tenant
Create user flow
Add identity providers
Configure your original Azure AD application to the identity provider
I need help integrating Azure AD B2C and Google APIs. Briefly, I created a tenant on Azure AD B2C, policies and a Native App. Users can register to my app and sign in without any problems. Now I need to use Google APIs to access the logged-in account's information and manage some information (Google MyBusiness data). How can I achieve that. Is that possible ?
Furthermore, even if that is not connected to Azure AD B2C, how can I request to the user to accept that my app to view MyBusiness data?
UPDATE: I understand that I need to authorize my app to https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.business.manage Google scopes. Is it possible to request that scope during Google SignIn application authorization process?
Thanks everyone.
As part of the authentication exchange between Azure AD B2C and Google (as well as other identity providers), an access token is issued by Google for use by (and only by) Azure AD B2C, where this access token is used by Azure AD B2C to access the authorized information for the authenticated end-user.
Currently, Azure AD B2C does not pass this access token through to the relying party application (i.e. your native client application), therefore applications can't access the information for the end-user.
UPDATE on 20 June 2019
Using a custom policy, you can pass the access token from the external identity provider through Azure AD B2C to your relying party application.
From the official Azure AD B2C FAQ:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-b2c/active-directory-b2c-faqs
Can I configure scopes to gather more information about consumers from various social identity providers?
No, but this feature is on our roadmap. The default scopes used for our supported set of social identity providers are:
Facebook: email
Google+: email
Microsoft account: openid email profile
Amazon: profile
LinkedIn: r_emailaddress, r_basicprofile
Newbie question here on Authentication. I am used to incorporating authentication into my app backend server, like Spring Security Authentication for example. I don't really understand how the authentication providers work.
My concern is that somehow each provider can only authenticate its own accounts, ie google can only authenticate for gmail accounts, and Azure Active directory can only authenticate some kind of Microsoft registered account? I am disinclined to oauth because as a user I am always paranoid about signing in for some game or app from an unknown provider becacuse I never am sure whether I just gave my gmail or facebook account password to a rando.
I am fine giving people the option to use Oath, but less comfortable if that's the only option. I would like people to be able to give me whatever email address they want, and a password which they create for my site only.
Also these questions: If I use an authentication provider can I get the actual email address being used to log in? Or do I only get a token?
If I am going to build my own authentication service so I can accept any email domain as user name, what is the easiest to implement in Xamarin forms, and can somebody point me to a tutorial or something?
Advice appreciated thanks.
Yes, you're right, each identity provider provides the ability to authenticate their own users; Google OAuth supports Google accounts, Azure Active Directory supports Microsoft work & school accounts, Microsoft Account supports Microsoft personal accounts, and so on.
You have quite a few options on how to add support for these identity providers in your app, in addition to what we typically call 'local accounts', or accounts created specifically for the given application. I'll list out a few approaches:
You can write all the code yourself to integrate with each identity provider individually, and build-your-own local account solution as well.
You can use an SDK/library in your Xamarin Forms which facilitates using multiple identity providers within your app. The Xamarin.Auth package has historically served this purpose for Xamarin apps. It provides auth capabilities for Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.
You can use a dedicated cloud service which provides authentication services for your app. Some examples include Azure Mobile Apps, Firebase Auth, Gigya, and more. The exact identity providers supported and the level of support for Xamarin/Xamarin Forms will vary across each one. Azure AD B2C is another option that I know supports Xamarin Forms as well as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and local accounts (disclaimer: I work on AAD B2C). These services sometimes have free tiers & paid tiers, so you can compare & contrast each.
You could also build your own authentication service using open source code like Identity Server if you wish.
It definitely depends which route you go, but generally speaking each solution will provide you access to some user profile information upon user authentication. For Azure AD B2C, you can configure the claims that are returned to your application in the tokens your app receives. For other services, you may need to make a REST API call to get some user data like the email address.
HTH.
I am trying to use spring social for my REST services and my mobile app.
I wonder what the best approach is.
I am planning to use linkedin, google login and password authentication inside my mobile app. This social login should be connected to users in my database.
My spring application will act as an API which should be secured with a JWT token. The mobile app will afterwards use this JWT token to consume the API.
On my mobile I would like to have the possibility to sign up/sign in with linkedin, facebook or password.
As far as I understood mobile requires a different oauth flow than described in https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-oauth2/
Seems like it required the "Proof Key for Code Exchange" flow as stated in:
https://auth0.com/docs/api-auth/grant/authorization-code-pkce
Is this correct? I didn't find any information how to best do this with spring social and if spring social supports this use case.
Could someone point me in the right direction? I just found information how to do this with single page application and not with mobile applications. Thanks a lot in advance!
One possible way would be
The mobile app uses LinkedIn or Google's SDK to do SSO to retrieve an authN token.
The mobile app passes it to the backend service, which uses it to retrieve user details (e.g email) from the oauth service.
The backend service could do additional work about the user details (for example, link with existing users).
The backend service returns a JWT token to the mobile app, which ends the SSO.
The SSO should be able to return an email address for you to link users. Sometimes you need to apply for the permission explicitly (which Facebook requires).
The key point of this approach is that it avoids using the OAuth2 library completely in your backend services because it is now handled in the mobile app by using SSO provider's SDK.
The flow is summarized in the following drawing:
========
Edited:
We used this approach to do Facebook SSO with one mobile app and it worked very well. The mobile app was in iOS, and the backend service Spring Boot.
Discussion is welcomed.