Trouble getting ClaimsPrincipal populated when using EasyAuth to authenticate against AAD on Azure App Service in a Asp.Net Core web app - authentication

Question

We have a web app built on Asp.Net core. It doesn't contain any authentication middleware configured in it.
We are hosting on Azure App Service and using the Authentication/Authorization option (EasyAuth) to authenticate against Azure AD.
The authentication works well - we get the requisite headers inserted and we can see the authenticated identity at /.auth/me. But the HttpContext.User property doesn't get populated.
Is this a compatibility issue for Asp.Net core? Or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

I've created a custom middleware that populates the User property until this gets solved by the Azure Team.
It reads the headers from the App Service Authentication and create a a user that will be recognized by the [Authorize] and has a claim on name.
// Azure app service will send the x-ms-client-principal-id when authenticated
app.Use(async (context, next) =>
{
// Create a user on current thread from provided header
if (context.Request.Headers.ContainsKey("X-MS-CLIENT-PRINCIPAL-ID"))
{
// Read headers from Azure
var azureAppServicePrincipalIdHeader = context.Request.Headers["X-MS-CLIENT-PRINCIPAL-ID"][0];
var azureAppServicePrincipalNameHeader = context.Request.Headers["X-MS-CLIENT-PRINCIPAL-NAME"][0];
// Create claims id
var claims = new Claim[] {
new System.Security.Claims.Claim("http://schemas.microsoft.com/identity/claims/objectidentifier", azureAppServicePrincipalIdHeader),
new System.Security.Claims.Claim("name", azureAppServicePrincipalNameHeader)
};
// Set user in current context as claims principal
var identity = new GenericIdentity(azureAppServicePrincipalIdHeader);
identity.AddClaims(claims);
// Set current thread user to identity
context.User = new GenericPrincipal(identity, null);
};
await next.Invoke();
});

Answer 2

Yes, this is a compatibility issue. ASP.NET Core does not support flowing identity info from an IIS module (like Easy Auth) to the app code, unfortunately. This means HttpContext.User and similar code won't work like it does with regular ASP.NET.
The workaround for now is to invoke your web app's /.auth/me endpoint from your server code to get the user claims. You can then cache this data as appropriate using the x-ms-client-principal-id request header value as the cache key. The /.auth/me call will need to be properly authenticated in the same way that calls to your web app need to be authenticated (auth cookie or request header token).

Answer 3

I wrote a small basic middleware to do this. It will create an identity based off of the .auth/me endpoint. The identity is created in the authentication pipeline so that [authorize] attributes and policies work with the identity.
You can find it here:
https://github.com/lpunderscore/azureappservice-authentication-middleware
or on nuget:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/AzureAppserviceAuthenticationMiddleware/
Once added, just add this line to your startup:
app.UseAzureAppServiceAuthentication();

Answer 4

The following code decrypts the AAD token from the Azure App Service HTTP header and populates HttpContext.User with the claims. It's rough as you'd want to cache the configuration rather than look it up on every request:
OpenIdConnectConfigurationRetriever r = new OpenIdConnectConfigurationRetriever();
ConfigurationManager<OpenIdConnectConfiguration> configManager = new ConfigurationManager<OpenIdConnectConfiguration>(options.Endpoint, r);
OpenIdConnectConfiguration config = await configManager.GetConfigurationAsync();
var tokenValidationParameters = new TokenValidationParameters
{
ValidateIssuerSigningKey = true,
IssuerSigningKeys = config.SigningKeys.ToList(),
ValidateIssuer = true,
ValidIssuer = config.Issuer,
ValidateAudience = true,
ValidAudience = options.Audience,
ValidateLifetime = true,
ClockSkew = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 10)
};
JwtSecurityTokenHandler handler = new JwtSecurityTokenHandler();
ClaimsPrincipal principal = null;
SecurityToken validToken = null;
string token = context.Request.Headers["X-MS-TOKEN-AAD-ID-TOKEN"];
if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(token))
{
principal = handler.ValidateToken(token, tokenValidationParameters, out validToken);
var validJwt = validToken as JwtSecurityToken;
if (validJwt == null) { throw new ArgumentException("Invalid JWT"); }
if (principal != null)
{
context.User.AddIdentities(principal.Identities);
}
}
It only works for Azure AD. To support other ID providers (Facebook, Twitter, etc) you'd have to detect the relevant headers and figure out how to parse each provider's token. However, it should just be variations on the above theme.

Answer 5

You can give this library a try. I faced a similar problem and created this to simplify the use.
https://github.com/dasiths/NEasyAuthMiddleware
Azure App Service Authentication (EasyAuth) middleware for ASP.NET
CORE with fully customizable components with support for local
debugging
It hydrates the HttpContext.User by registering a custom authentication handler. To make things easier when running locally, it even has the ability to use a json file to load mocked claims.