I am new to windows azure development.
I am developing an application for hosting online tests.
This application needs to have multiple authentication options like Windows live ID, Facebook etc.
It also needs to have default form based authentication fed by the database in back end (simple User name and Password match).
Based on the authentication mechanism different permissions will be available to the user.
Can anyone please suggest how i should proceed on this?
Thanks
Do you really need forms authentication, or do you just need an application specific store where people can use a credential specific to your app?
I'd suggest researching Windows Azure Active Directory and Windows Azure Access Control Services together. You may create either an AD tenant for your application store and use it as an Identity Provider for ACS or you could host your own Secure Token Service and Identity Provider which uses your backend database as the user store also registered with ACS. This means that all of your authentication goes through the same process and allows for you to have your own user store, plus the social Identity Provider capability.
The key here is that you want try to avoid having forms authentication AND Social, but rather a mechanism where multiple Identity Providers can be used, including one of your own.
As Gaurav stated there are a ton of resources out there for this:
Understand the difference between WAAD and ACS.
Provisioning an Azure AD Tenant as a Identity Provider in ACS
Windows Azure Identity
There are also many blogs and MSDN documents talking about how to set these up.
If you start with the default "ASP.net MVC4 Web Application" template in Visual Studio you get a web application mini-sample with an AccountController that supports local and 'social' accounts out of the box. See documentation here. It is based on DotNetOpenAuth (a fantastic lib with terrible documentation) and a Microsoft implementation of an special MembershipProvider which lives in WebMatrix.WebData.
Regarding the Azure Access Control Service 2.0: I have no idea what the status of this service is but it looks to me as if MS itself tries to discourage developers form using this service since it was to deeply hidden somewhere under Windows Azure Active Directory in the documentation.
Related
I have an asp .net core 3.1 web application that uses the MS Identity (for users) and Entity (codefirst) framework to authenticate users stored in database.
All user rights/groups etc. are stored locally and used to allow/deny access to different areas of the application.
So what I think I need is a way to allow users in my web-app to choose to authenticate using AzureAD account, and when the authentication is done, the wep-app will sign-in the local-user somehow linked to the Azure user
Is this how to do this, or can you guide me to how to do this the correct way
To achieve the above requirements, You can use Azure AD authentication & external login in your asp.net application by implementing the code in your appsettings and controller as mentioned here .
As you wanted to implement the application ,
Consider other options before storing users of your Web applications in a local database. Instead of managing users in a local database, it's best practice to store and manage user information outside of the application, such as with Azure Active Directory or Azure Active Directory B2C. Consider Identity Server if the authentication service must run on-premises. Identity Server is a member of the.NET Foundation and is OpenID certified.
To implement from scratch you can refer this blog.
Please refer the below links for the similar discussion & Documentation to get started with :-
MICROSOFT DOCUMENTATION|Secure a hosted ASP.NET Core Blazor WebAssembly app with Identity Server
SO THREAD|Implement both Individual User Accounts and Azure AD Authentication & .NET Core Identity Server 4 Authentication VS Identity Authentication
BLOG| Integrating with External identity Providers
I got absolutely confused when trying to understand the differences between MicrosoftAccount, AzureAD and OpenIDConnect authentications.
I am trying to build a .Net Core MVC app that allows some users to authenticate with local accounts, but some with Microsoft accounts. I do need to have a local user in DB for both types of authentications as I have some custom authorization mechanisms built on that.
I started with creating the app from template and selected "local accounts" authentication. Then I added the MicrosoftAccount authentication according to this tutorial (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/social/microsoft-logins?view=aspnetcore-3.1). This is using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.MicrosoftAccount and seems to be working fine.
However, when I create a new app from template and select "work or school account" authentication I can see it uses a different library - Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.AzureAD.UI. It seems to do the same thing. I can see there are events I could hook into to connect the AAD user with my local DB.
Looking through the web I found some other tutorials that were using OpenIDConnect for the same purpose.
How are those methods different? Which one should I use and why?
In future I would like to be able to query the user's directory for a list of other users. Would that requirement be easier met with either of those three methods?
MicrosoftAccount: This is the login with a general Microsoft account, using OAuth2. This is also what Microsoft will refer to as “private account” and useful when you want to authenticate someone just using their Microsoft login as an external authentication provider. This is similar to how you would sign in to sites with your Google account.
AzureAD: This is the sign in to a specific Azure tenant. This is often understood as a “work or school account” because it doesn’t sign people in using a public account but rather some account bound to some organization. Usually, you would have an Azure tenant where you have direct users (or configure it to allow external users) but you want to control access through that Azure AD.
OpenIdConnect: This is the general OpenID Connect protocol which you can use to sign in with many different authentication providers because it is a protocol that many of them will support. You can use OIDC to sign in to either of the above (and many other services) but that will require you to do some more configuration as you will need to figure out specific addresses for example.
You can always use the OpenIdConnect or the OAuth authentication scheme to authenticate with most authentication providers but those are the “manual” schemes which will require you to configure additional things. All the other authentication schemes, including MicrosoftAccount and AzureAD but also the other ones like Google or Twitter build on top of those protocols and come preconfigured so that you do not need to set up much else. So those are mostly for convenience and for more specialized support.
So when you want to authentication through Microsoft or Azure, then you should choose MicrosoftAccount or AzureAD. Which of those depends on where you want to authenticate with. If you have an Azure AD, then you should use that.
I am working on an application which has an azure asp.net mvc website and an azure mobile service. Both will be using the same azure sql database.
I understand that I can use custom or Microsoft, Facebook based authentication using my mobile service. The website and the mobile app that I will be building though will have different features in the website and on the mobile app based on the role of the user.
How should I go about implementing user roles? If this was just an asp.net application, I would have just used ASP.NET Identity but not sure how to do this with Mobile Services.
I found a similar question asked a year ago with no resolution - Using ASP.NET 4.0 membership provider with Azure Mobile Services
If there is an existing implementation or guidance out there, please point me in that direction. Thanks.
As of today, there isn't a super easy way to handle this no matter how you slice it. You can take a look at this post (there is another dealing with the JavaScript backend that is linked from this) http://www.acupofcode.com/2014/04/general-roles-based-access-control-in-the-net-backend/ that talks about role based access control using Azure Active Directory. AAD may not be the option you want to go with. In which case, you'd need to implement the roles and checks in your Mobile Service yourself. If you only have two levels such as "normal user" and "admin" you COULD dictate everything based off of the user.level property and if they are "authenticated" they only have basic user access but if they're "admin" they have admin functionality. You'd still need to do the role based logic in your backend but I think you'll need to handle that no matter what.
Alternatively, what I think you could look at doing, is using the ASP.NET Identity system. Then from your Mobile Service, you can use the same type of custom auth I've documented here (http://chrisrisner.com/Custom-Authentication-with-Azure-Mobile-Services-and-LensRocket) but instead of checking against and storing a username/password in your Mobile Service like that sample is doing, when the user goes to register / login, you could check against the user backend created by the ASP.NET identity system. I don't have a sample off hand of that working but it sounds doable in my head.
I am trying to evaluate a strategy where I can integrate our Azure based application to SharePoint Online.
The idea is to provide seamless UI so that they are able to use the best of the features from both these applications without having to navigate away from our application.
We would like to bundle the application with Sharepoint online so that if a user comes to our application they will see another tab for collaboration which will open SharePoint online in a seperate iFrame or something like that.
However the issue here is that we do not want the user to keep another set of user credentials for SharePoint online. Is there a way where we can provide some kind of single sign on here.
Our application uses forms based authentication.
I could verify that you sure can use ClaimBased SSO with Azure and SPOnline. Look for the following:
Claims-Based Single Sign-On for the Web and Windows Azure
Remote Authentication in SharePoint Online Using Claims-Based Authentication
So using Claim Based Authentication (Use Windows Azure ACS) you can merge SP online and Azure Web Role together.
I need to implement a web application hosted on sharepoint. This is a client requirement. So I cannot create a standard asp.net web application. Another client requirement is that the authentication is not an active directory one but they want to use an existing database of users.
I am a bit concerned how this would work on sharepoint because users would need to log-in onto sharepoint. Would it make sense that users log into sharepoint as anonymous and then we use our custom controls for log-in. How does sharepoint handle anonymous users?
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated
When building apps over SharePoint, you use the SharePoint authentication mechanism, whatever it is.
Does the SharePoint farm is already in place ? Or do you have to also build the farm ?
In the former case, probably the authentication mechanism is already in place and you just have to build a "standard" sharepoint application.
In the later case, you will have to carefully plan your authentication. SharePoint can use a combination of AD authentication, Forms authentication (over a DB in your case if you want) or a Claims authentication pattern. My guess is that a Forms authentication with a custom Membership/role provider is the way to go.