My company is planning to host some applications on public cloud. For identity management in cloud, my understanding is that we have 3 options
Federation
Provisioning
Identity as a service
My understanding for federation is that any access to cloud based services, can be intercepted and pointed to identity provider within the organization, which will then perform authentication and authorization, provide a token and the application can inspect token and allow/disallow access
For provisioning, instead of identity provider being located within organization, it can be located in cloud and it can refer to identity stores in cloud, which are provisioned in batch or real time by standards such as SPML or SCIM
Is the above understanding correct?
An app being deployed to the cloud has little to do with identity federation or identity as a service. You could very well use Forms authentication on a cloud service.
The question is whether you want to make your app responsible for authenticating users or not. If you choose not to (which is likely a good thing), then you need to rely on a mechanism to outsource identity. The techniques to do this are referred to as "claims based identity", "identity federation", among others, and involve a number of protocols (e.g. SAML, SAML-P, WS-Federation, OAuth). These depend on the systems you want to use for authenticating users:
SAML/WS-Fed are typically used for enterprises (using AD for example)
OAuth is mostly used by consumer oriented systems (e.g. Facebook, etc).
So, depending on where your users are you might need to implement one or the other (or both).
Identity As a Service, means you use an external service provider to handle authentication with these providers for you. It is not a requirement and you could build this capability on your own.
Without details of your infrastructure and your app it is difficult to provide any guidance: ASP.NET? Java? nodejs?Azure? AWS? Heroku? Where are your users?
Related
I'd like to setup an integration with a third party vendor for which I have to provide services, which need to be customer-aware.
The main flow is on the third party, that already have a service provider and an identity provider; the third party service provider then have to call my service, but then I need to check the authentication, for which I would like to rely on their identity provider, gaining so also access to the user identity (name, mail, other data).
basic flow
Does a flow like this can work? Do I have to receive the authentication infos cookie? Are other ways for which I can integrate with the third party identity provider?
Current web standards would likely dictate OIDC, especially if you want your service to be open to direct consumers as opposed to, or in addition to enterprise users. Were I building something today, I would choose to build out only OIDC, because it doesn't limit the Identity Providers I may want to use. In addition to enterprise, you could consider social logins as well, such as Facebook, Google, etc. If your users are ONLY enterprise users, then yes, you could consider SAML.
The identity data is usually returned to you in a JSON Web Token, or JWT.
I would suggest looking at OIDC implementations on your favorite stack, or look to a cloud provider.
I have a need to implement Open ID Connect in an ASP.NET Core 5 web app for authentication at an organization. I cannot test against the identity provider as this org has their own internal one.
I thought Open ID Connect (oidc) was a standard - yet when I look at docs and sample code for the various providers around, they all either have something provided with ASP.NET or I have to install their package.
For example, to use Google, the ASP.NET Core docs say to use services.AddAuthentication().AddGoogle(). For Facebook, it says to use .AddFacebook().
For Auth0, it wants me to install the package Auth0.AspNetCore.Authentication.
Is it not possible to just add OIDC authentication to my app and have it work with any OIDC provider and just change a configuration file to specify the authority URL, Client ID, Client Secret?
I'm confused about why I need these provider-specific calls and packages.
Architecturally, tieing an app to a single form of authentication is entirely wrong, as you suggest. These packages have limited use, perhaps for very simple use cases.
The original OAuth 2.0 spec from RFC6749, from 2012, describes how the OAuth framework is designed, to externalize difficult security from your apps:
The client only implements a code flow
It redirects to an authorization server (AS)
The AS can authenticate users in a myriad of potential ways, including many identity providers
After authentication (and possibly consent) the AS issues tokens to your apps
Tokens enable authorization in your APIs in a myriad of potential ways
Once you've implemented a code flow in your app, your set of users can potentially login in many ways, with zero code changes in the app:
Password sign in (a default option)
Multi-factor authentication (in a dynamic way potentially)
Cloud platform identity providers (for engineering staff)
CRM identity provider (for client focused staff)
SAML identity providet (for users from business partners)
Webauthn, Passkeys and Digital wallets (for some of your customers)
Unless you have a very good reason, stick to OpenID Connect standards based code flows in clients. You can do all of the above using the Microsoft libraries. Auth0 have good libraries also - just make sure you use the standards based ones.
OpenID Connect is an open standard that organisations use to
authenticate users. IdPs use this so that users can sign in to the IdP
From this blog.
And about the OIDC protocol, it allows you to authenticate users, and is designed for users to sign in many websites with only one account, usually it's a social/work account. This is only a protocol and you have to use an implement such as Google/Azure authentication to allow your users to sign in with their specific account.
By the way, since the implements are from different companies, so the configuration in our codes are different and they required different nuget packages like Microsoft.Identity.Web. For example, when using Azure, we need to set such as client id, client secret, tenant id, domain, redirect url... in appsettings.json.
I'm currently developing a API to commercialized in a B2B SAAS fashion.
The goal is to authenticate the worker of the company. We have an SDK that should be able to do that. There is the possibility to force each user to set credentials specific for our service, but that will hurt integration with companies applications.
The idea would be to have some kind of authentication (client independent) that make it easier to authenticate users.
The question is: There is a easy way to create an automatic process that does not depend on the client type of authentication methods, for this type of task?
Thanks in advance.
Have you taken a look at Azure AD? It specifically supports multi-tenant scenarios.
Tenants can use Azure AD Connect to sync their on-premise directory to the cloud. Clients can use ADAL to acquire a token which your service trusts. The issued token contains a tenant-id claim indicating via which tenant the user logged in.
Just to add to MvdD answer, in Azure AD support three ways to sign in:
Federated Single Sign-On enables applications to redirect to Azure AD
for user authentication instead of prompting for its own password.
This is supported for applications that support protocols such as SAML
2.0, WS-Federation, or OpenID Connect, and is the richest mode of single sign-on.
Password-based Single Sign-On enables secure application password
storage and replay using a web browser extension or mobile app. This
leverages the existing sign-in process provided by the application,
but enables an administrator to manage the passwords and does not
require the user to know the password.
Existing Single Sign-On enables Azure AD to leverage any existing
single sign-on that has been set up for the application, but enables
these applications to be linked to the Office 365 or Azure AD access
panel portals, and also enables additional reporting in Azure AD when
the applications are launched there.
Our SAAS system is currently using standard Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Owin libraries to authenticate users via Bearer tokens, as well social logins such as Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc.
Some of our users are asking for us to start allowing of authentication via ADFS.
I'm trying to understand how this can be done. Unfortunately, all of the blogs appear to dive right into the details without providing a good overview as to what's involved. Furthermore, most blogs talk about trusting a specific Active Directory, while we need to trust a whole number of possible customers' active directories - and do it dynamically. IE: customer registers for an account using custom username/password, then provides our SAAS application with some information about their AD. Afterwards, our SAAS application should trust authentication for users in that AD (just the auth part)
Can anyone provide information on what's involved?
TIA
Agree with #vibronet's points.
Another approach would be to add STS support to your SaaS application. This could be either WS-Fed or SAML. You have tagged the question with Azure so AAD could be an option.
You could then federate with any number of other STS's (like ADFS). Note as stated that each ADFS has to agree to add your metadata.
Another approach would be to use IDaaS (e.g. Auth0, Okta). These would do the Identity heavy lifting for you and would essentially provide the STS capability.
The question has 2 parts,
how to work with an ADFS instance and
how to deal with an arbitrary number of ADFS instances from different
owners.
The answer to 1) is to use the WS-Federation middleware, which can be added alongside the middlewares you are already using. However the initialization of that middleware requires knowledge of the location of the metadata document of the ADFS you want to target; furthermore, the ADFS administrator must provision your app explicitly or no tokens will be issued. Hence, the flow you are suggesting (temporary username/password and subsequent details exchange) might be tricky - but not impossible.
About 2) there isn't a way of wiring up an arbitrary number of different ADFS instances unless you modify the middleware setting pretty heavily. The actual answer is that the standard practice for dealing with that scenario is to rely on one intermediary ADFS (or equivalent) that can broker trust toward all others, while your app only needs to trust the intermediary ADFS.
I'm working on a WCF project that will be our new service layer.
These services will be called by 2 separate clients, the first of which is a WPF application and the other is an ASP.Net web application. The WPF client will be run by internal users and will authenticate with the service via domain authentication and run under the context of that user. The other will be used by external users and needs to authenticate using some separate mechanism then impersonate a "WebUser" account on our domain.
I'm reading a bit about Windows Identity Foundation and it sounds like this might be a good fit. Am I right in thinking I could have 2 token services, one for domain authentication and one for something like ASP.Net membership authentication (Or some similar equivalent) and have each client get it's token from the relevant STS and pass that along to the WCF service?
I'm assuming there is an STS I can use out of the box for domain authentication, but will I have to implement the second one myself to authenticate web users? I can't find a lot of information on this.
Am I thinking along the right lines or should I just be creating duel endpoints for each service each with a different authentication mechanism? Or should I be doing something completely different?
Thanks
The big advantage of using Claims-Based authentication / WIF is that both the task of authenticating the user AND the administration of the user's properties are moved way from the applications to the STS/Identity provider.
You are developing a service layer but the true benefits of using WIF will be for the applications written on top of your layer. The WPF application will no longer need to connect to the AD and fetch the user's groups to figure out what they are allowed to do. The groups will already be visible as claims in the token the user/WIF provides.
The web application (is it just one web application or more?) will no longer need the ASP.Net Membership database with accompanying user administration. This functionality gets moved to the STS.
There is a cost. (There always is, somehow...) Claims-Based authentication has a rather steep learning curve. It takes a while for the quarter to drop for all people involved.
So the answer to your question depends on what kind of users the web application(s?) built upon your service layer have and how many. And how much they wish to know about them. Can you perhaps trust Google / Facebook / Windows Live for authentication? Are the users already in an existing database within your domain? How much work will it take to maintain the user directories? Do your marketing people wish to send them emails regularly? Et cetera.
This is probably not just for the service layer's developers to decide, but something to discuss with people in the rest of your organisation.
If the benefits are not particularly big, the alternative is to simply keep these responsibilities at the web application's server. Each web application will have a good old ASP.Net membership database, it'll authenticate the user all by itself. When asking queries from the service layer, it'll present its web server certificate plus specify the user's name and type.
If the benefits are big enough, you can in principle use ADFS 2.0 for everything. It can also store external users nowadays and it's free if you already have Active Directory. Or the ThinkTecture 2.0 server that Ross recommends. It's easier to customize and perhaps your systems administrators and security folks will not be too enthusiastic about opening the firewall to the ADFS server.
Microsoft has some good reads on WIF, in particular an Overview of Claims-Based Architecture.
You should take a look at identity server as it can indeed handle this scenario.
The person who leads the project above has a great pluralsight video on this exact scenario! You need to sign up to watch it, but they offer a free trial.
Basically you get a token from the identity provider (windows ADFS for the internal client, and what ever you decide for the external users). You will give this token to the federated gateway (identity server probably, but it could be Azure ACS). This will return an authentication token that you can then use with your service.