I've been searching for a solution that makes sense for the past few days, so forgive me if I overlooked something or am ignorant to the correct path.
I have an existing Website built with asp.net framework MVC where users register for Individual Accounts and are stored in a MSSQL Database. I'm creating a Xamarin.Forms app where we want users to login with their website credentials.
I've been looking at Microsoft docs to try and accomplish this. In the past I created an Apache Cordova app (2014) that communicated in a similar fashion successfully (potentially in an insecure way) that called the /Token endpoint and Authenticated the user with 'grant_password' flow and returned the user data to the app.
So I landed on this documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth-ropc
However, from what I can gather it basically says this should be avoided moving forward and a MSAL approach should be used if possible.
After reading through hours and hours of documentation trying to make sense of it all, I can't seem to grasp what my options are. It seems to me that in any MSAL flow, users will have to login with Microsoft accounts or other social accounts (facebook, google).
Am I missing something?
Am I going to have to go against Microsoft's advice and end up storing the client_id and client_secret within the Xamarin app source code? Which from everything I've read is a big security concern, especially with Android apps.
References: 1. Restrict API requests to only my own mobile app 2. How to secure an API REST for mobile app? (if sniffing requests gives you the "key")
Any help or direction would be really appreciated. Thank you
Your focus should be on requirements + understanding preferred designs rather than jumping to a technology.
DIRECTION
Standard modern systems look like this:
Mobile apps use OpenID Connect to sign users in
Authorization Server issues access tokens to the mobile app
APIs authorize requests via JWTs containing scopes and claims
Aim to make iterative steps towards this type of architecture.
PATTERNS
Plug in an Authorization Server, which uses your existing database as a credential store
Mobile app uses AppAuth Libraries to sign users in and receives access tokens
Back end can handle JWTs without data security risks
DIFFICULT AREAS
Your existing back end may have no support for mobile clients, and be too web focused - eg requiring cookies to access data, so may need to be split in be into 2 entry points.
Choosing an Authorization Server (while you are learning) is difficult, because you may not know what you want yet.
The mobile app will spin up the system browser and present a login page from the Authorization Server, so the login UX could be unexpected.
STEP 1
Ensure that you can authenticate from the mobile app, then make API calls with JWTs and ensure that requests for data are properly authorized. This could use ropc and involve a temporary API. But the deliverable should be that your back end now supports calls from mobile apps.
STEP 2
Integrate AppAuth into the mobile app, which is tricky but there are resources online such as Curity Mobile Guides. Update the mobile app to use the Code Flow and integrate an Authorization Server, then deal with connecting to credential stores.
SUMMARY
This stuff is hard and reflects the cost of modernising architectures. It requires people agreement as well as the technical stuff. Happy to answer follow up questions if it helps.
This question is kinda complimentary to "Share credentials between native app and web site", as we aim to share secrets in the opposite direction.
TL;TR: how can we securely share the user's authentication/authorization state from a Web Browser app to a Native Desktop app, so the same user doesn't have to authenticate additionally in the Native app?
TS;WM: We are working on the following architecture: a Web Application (with some HTML front-end UI running inside a Web Browser of user's choice), a Native Desktop Application (implementing a custom protocol handler), a Web API and an OAuth2 service, as on the picture.
Initially, the user is authenticated/authorized in the Web Browser app against the OAuth2 service, using the Authorization Code Grant flow.
Then, the Web Browser content can do one-way talking to the Native app, when the user clicks on our custom protocol-based hyperlinks. Basically, it's done to establish a secure bidirectional back-end communication channel between the two, conducted via the Web API.
We believe that, before acting upon any requests received via a custom protocol link from the Web Browser app, the Native app should first authenticate the user (who is supposed to be the same person using this particular desktop session). We think the Native app should as well use the Authorization Code flow (with PKCE) to obtain an access token for the Web API. Then it should be able to securely verify the origin and integrity of the custom protocol data, using the same Web API.
However, it can be a hindering experience for the user to have to authenticate twice, first in the Web Browser and second in the Native app, both running side-by-side.
Thus, the question: is there a way to pass an OAuth2 access token (or any other authorization bearer) from the Web Browser app to the Native app securely, without compromising the client-side security of this architecture? I.e., so the Native app could call the Web API using the identity from the Web Browser, without having to authenticate the same user first?
Personally, I can't see how we can safely avoid that additional authentication flow. Communication via a custom app protocol is insecure by default, as typically it's just a command line argument the Native app is invoked with. Unlike a TLS channel, it can be intercepted, impersonated etc. We could possibly encrypt the custom protocol data. Still, whatever calls the Native app would have to make to decrypt it (either to a client OS API or some unprotected calls to the Web API), a bad actor/malware might be able to replicate those, too.
Am I missing something? Is there a secure platform-specific solution? The Native Desktop app is an Electron app and is designed to be cross-platform. Most of our users will run this on Windows using any supported browser (including even IE11), but ActiveX or hacking into a running web browser instance is out of question.
The best solution : Single Sign On (SSO) using Custom URL Scheme
When I was checking your question, I remembered the Zoom app that I am using in my office. How it works ?
I have my Gmail account linked to a Zoom account (this is account linkage, which is outside the scope of implementation). When I open Zoom app, I can choose the option to login with Gmail. This opens my browser and take me to Gmail. If I am logged in to Gmail, I am redirected back to a page that asking me to launch Zoom app. How this app launch happen ? The application register a custom URL scheme when app get installed and the final redirect in browser targets this URL. And this URL passes a temporary secret, which Zoom application uses to obtain OAuth tokens. And token obtaining is done independent of the browser, a direct call with SSL to token endpoint of OAuth server.
Well this is Authorization code flow for native applications. And this is how Mobile applications use OAuth. Your main issue, not allowing user to re-login is solved. This is SSO in action.
There is a specification which define best practices around this mechanism. I welcome you to go through RFC8252 - OAuth 2.0 for Native Apps.
Challenge
You need to implement OS specific native code for each application distribution. Windows, Mac and Linux have different implementation support for custom URL scheme.
Advice
PKCE is mandatory (in IETF words SHOULD) for all OAuth grant types. There is this ongoing draft which talks about this. So include PKCE for your implementation too.
With PKCE, the redirect/callback response is protected from stealing. Even some other application intercept the callback, the token request cannot be recreated as the PKCE code_verifer is there.
Also, do not use a custom solution like passing secret through another channel. This will make things complicated when it comes to maintenance. Since this flow already exists in OAuth, you can benefit with libraries and guidance.
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Update : Protecting Token Request
While the custom URL scheme solves the problem of launching the native application, protecting token request can be challenging. There are several options to consider.
- Bind native application launch with a secret shared from browser
When browser based client launch the native client, it can invoke a custom API to generate a secret. This secret acts like a one time password (OTP). User has to enter this value in native app before it obtain tokens. This is a customization on top of Authorization code flow.
- Dynamic client registration & Dynamic client authentication
Embedding secrets into public clients is discouraged by OAuth specification. But as question owner points out, some malicious app may register itself to receive custom URL response and obtain tokens. In such occasion, PKCE can provide an added layer of security.
But still in an extreme case, if malicious app registers the URL plus use PKCE as the original application, then there can be potential threats.
One option is to allow dynamic client registration at the first time of application launch. Here, installer/distribution can include a secret that used along with DCR.
Also, it is possible to use dynamic client authentication through a dedicated service. Here, the application's token request contains a temporary token issued by a custom service. Custom service obtain a challenge from native application. This may be done through totp or a cryptographic binding based on an embedded secret. Also it is possible to utilize OTP (as mentioned in first note) issued through browser, which needs to be copy pasted manually by end user. Once validated, this service issue a token which correlate to the secret. In the token request, native client sends this token along with call back values. This way we reduce threat vectors even though we increase implementation complexity.
Summary
Use custom URL scheme to launch the native application
Browser app generate a temporary secret shared with a custom service
At native app launch, user should copy the secret to native app UI
Native app exchange this secret with custom service to obtain a token
This second token combined with call back authorization code (issued through custom url scheme) is used to authenticate to token endpoint
Above can be considered as a dynamic client authentication
Value exposed to user can be a hashed secret, hence original value is never exposed to end user or another client
DCR is also an option but embedded secrets are discouraged in OAuth world
As you mentioned, using a custom protocol handler is not a safe way to pass secrets, since another app may handle your protocol and intercept that secret.
If you are imposing a strict constraint that the communication channel between the native app and the web app is initiated from the web app, and that the native app has not previously established a secure channel (e.g. shared secret which could encrypt other secrets), then it is not possible to safely transmit a secret to the native app.
Imagine if this were possible, then PKCE would be redundant in an OAuth 2.0 Code Flow, since the server could have safely transmitted the access token in response to the authorization request, instead of requiring the code_verifier to be provided with the grant when obtaining the access token.
Just got the following idea. It's simple and while it doesn't allow to fully automate the setup of a secure channel between Web Browser app and the Native app, it may significantly improve the user experience.
We can use Time-based One-Time Password algorithm (TOTP). In a way, it's similar to how we pair a Bluetooth keyboard to a computer or a phone.
The Web Browser app (where the user is already authenticated) could display a time-based code to the user, and the Native app should ask the user to enter that code as a confirmation. It would then use the code to authenticate against the Web API. That should be enough to establish a back-end channel between the two. The life time of the channel should be limited to that of the session within the Web Browser app. This approach might even eliminate the need for a custom protocol communication in the first place.
Still open to other ideas.
You could try driving the synchronization the other way:
Once the user is authenticated into the web app, launch the native app from the web app via the custom URL scheme.
If the native app is not authenticated, connect securely to the backend over HTTPS, create a record for the native app, retrieve a one time token associated with that record and then launch the web app in the user's browser with the token as a URL parameter.
Since the user is authenticated in the browser, when the server sees the token it can bind the native app's record with the user account.
Have the native app poll (or use some other realtime channel like push notifications or a TCP connection) the server to see if the token has been bound to a user account: once that happens you can pass a persistent auth token that the native app can store.
Did you think about using LDAP or Active Directory?
Also OAuth2 could be combined, here are a related question:
- Oauth service for LDAP authentication
- Oauth 2 token for Active Directory accounts
SSO should be easier then too, furthermore access-rights could be managed centralized.
Concerning general security considerations you could work with two servers and redirect form the one for the web-application to the other one after successful access check. That 2nd server can be protected so far that a redirect is required from the 1st server and an access check could be made independent again but without need to login another time, might be important to mention here the proposed usage of Oracle Access Manager in one linked answer for perimeter authentication.
This scenario with two servers could be also hidden by using a proxy-server in the frontend and making the redirects hidden, like that data-transfer between servers would be easier and secure too.
The important point about my proposition is that access to the 2nd server is just not granted if anything is wrong and the data are still protected.
I read here some comments concerning 2FA and some other ideas like tokens, surely those things increase security and it would be good to implement them.
If you like the general idea, I'm willing to spend still some time on the details. Some questions might be helpful for me ;-)
EDIT:
Technically the design in detail might depend on the used external authentication provider like Oracle Access Manager or something else. So if the solution in general sounds reasonable for you it would be useful to elaborate some parameters for the choice of a external authentication provider, i.e. price, open-source, features, etc.
Nevertheless the general procedure then is that the provider issues a token and this token serves for authentication. The token is for unique one-time usage, the second link I posted above has some answers that explain token-usage very well related to security and OAuth.
EDIT2
The Difference between an own OAuth2 / OIDC server and a LDAP/AD server is that you need to program everything by yourself and can't use ready solutions. Nevertheless you're independent and if everything is programmed well perhaps even a bit more secure as your solution is not public available and therefore harder to hack - potential vulnerabilities just can't be known by others. Also you're more independent, never have to wait for updates and are free to change whatever you want at any time. Considering that several software-servers are involved and perhaps even hardware-servers the own solution might be limited scale-able, but that can't be know from outside and depends on your company / team. Your code base probably is slimmer than full-blown solutions as you've only to consider your own solution and requirements.
The weak point in your solution might be that you have to program interfaces to several things that exist ready for business-frameworks. Also it might be hard to consider every single point in a small team, large companies could have more overview and capacity to tackle every potential issue.
I am writing an app that uses Parse Server, with Auth0 as the authentication provider. For unrelated reasons, we need to use Auth0 rather than Parse for user management.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to "link" a user authenticated via Auth0 to Objects in Parse Server. Without this, the authenticated user will not have permission to write to his/her Objects on the Parse Server. I believe my issue is similar to this question, which has no solution: here.
I have found many articles discussing the migration of users from Parse to Auth0, but am finding surprisingly little documentation on how to link those users to Parse. There is one article (I believe written by the same person who posted the question I linked to), but I couldn't get it to work, and it involves storing passwords in cleartext in Javascript.
I thought to create a default Parse user that would simply own all the objects in Parse. This would be invisible to the authenticated end-user so they wouldn't know, but that's just security by obscurity and doesn't seem like a good approach.
If anyone has suggestions on how to approach this, or has done it before, I'm interested to read your suggestions. Thank you very much.
Auth0 supports the most common and used authentication protocols (OAuth2/OIDC, SAML and WS-Federation) so configuring an application to rely on Auth0 is really easy when that application already talks one of the previously mentioned protocols.
According to the Parse Server Wiki, it does support custom authentication leveraging OAuth so that seems your best starting point for integrating Auth0 with a Parse Server based application.
It is possible to leverage the OAuth support with any 3rd party authentication that you bring in.
Disclaimer: I never used the Parse service or Parse Server so I'm assuming that when you mean linking Parse objects to users this can be accomplished by simply having an authenticated user in Parse and the identity of that user is just verified and proven by Auth0 instead of something like built-in username/passwords managed by Parse itself.
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.
Our company has a web application that is only used internally by our employees. We also have Google Apps Premier Edition. We would like to make it so our employees can log into our private web application using the Google Apps account that they already have.
Requirements: We want to display our own login form. We don't want to pass the email/password in plain text through the internet.
Which authentication mechanism should we use to achieve this?
Note: our application is written in PHP using Zend Framework (if that matters).
I would look into some combination of OpenID and your domain users (i.e. only let those at domain.com can log in).
Google API
They also have libraries for PHP and other languages that you can leverage to make this happen.
EDIT:
Some more info
When it comes to integrate Google Apps and an internally used private system, we simply have two options.
Use Google as the authentication center. Modify the private system to authenticate at Google's server. We could use OpenID or AuthSub. Check http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OpenID.html and http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthSub.html for more information.
Use the private system as the authentication center. In this case, we have to implement SAML protocol in the private server and configure Google Apps's SSO settings. Check http://code.google.com/googleapps/domain/sso/saml_reference_implementation.html for more information.
It is easier to accomplish SSO with the first method since there's already bunch of OpenID libraries out there. But, as you described in the requirements, you want to use your own login form. So I guess you have to go with the second method.
BTW, if your private system has to get or set information from Google, you may want to use OAuth for authorization. See http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OAuth.html for more information.
Use the ClientLogin API, it does exactly what you're after: allow you to verify username and password. (the link goes to provisioning API doco but that is not relevant here)
Pro's:
you get to use you own login form
Cons:
you don't get SSO with Google Apps, i.e. users already in Apps will be prompted to login again (you didn't mention that as a requirement, but it seems a reasonable thing to want)
Google won't like you (they're trying to discourage ProgrammaticLogin.
you will get occasional CAPTCHA tests you'll need to show your users.
OpenID specifically prevents you from displaying your own login page, so if that's a hard requirements, Programmatic Login is really your only choice.
Going the SSO route let's you do pretty much anything, but may be a bit of overkill to take on authentication for the whole domain to make one app authenticate in a nicer fashion? If you really want to go down this route, check out SimpleSAMLphp.