I am creating a website and my company feels accessing active directory from internet can be a security threat. I would like the users to be able to log in using Active Directory Credential. Is there a secure way to do that?
I think that Active Directory Federation Services might be what you're looking for. Specifically the "Web Single Sign On" functionality.
Since you've tagged with question with "insecure-connection" I feel I must add that you should not, under any circumstances let user account data flow in to or out from your company's firewall un-encrypted.
Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is based on the emerging, industry-supported Web Services Architecture, which is defined in WS-* specifications. ADFS helps you use single sign-on (SS0) to authenticate users to multiple, related Web applications over the life of a single online session. ADFS accomplishes this by securely sharing digital identity and entitlement rights across security and enterprise boundaries.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc736690%28v=WS.10%29.aspx
Related
really hope that I can get some pointers with this before I go wasting too much time. In truth, I'm not even one hundred percent sure where I need to be asking this. I'm dealing with a whole heap of technologies I've had little to know experience with. Historically, I've been a pretty simple vb.net desktop developer so I'm learning MCV5 & C# as I go. I realize some of this might be in the wrong place, but hoping for pointers at lease
So the situation is I've been asked to develop a web application/api by a number of my customers so that their field staff can perform certain data entry functions while out of the office and periodically feed back into their management systems. All these customer have the very close to the same requirements and management systems, so my my intent is to build a single web application with a multi-tenant database where I control who gets to see what based on their login.
The core of the web app, database(s) etc I've got my head around, in fact that all seems pretty seamless. Using https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx as a start point I think I can manage the database side of things.
Where I'm really struggling over is how best to secure this system. Looking at the options in available to me in visual studio (2015) I think the best option for me is for me to use an On-Premise ADFS. My boss has already put his foot down regarding Azure, so unfortunately not an option, we pretty much have our own server farm in house more than capable of hosting this.
The real sticker here is my SA has pretty much said this is not his problem, if you want ADFS and a web server, you sort it out. He's given me a nice fresh server VM with Win2012R2 at least, but doesn't want anything more to do with it.
So, to the questions
Is ADFS even needed in this scenario, or am I better deal with this
all via a standard AD or some other tooling? And even if it is possible, is it a good idea?
Duringdevelopment/testing, is it ok to use a self signing certificate or
am I going to run into to trouble with certificate errors?
When configuring ADFS, you get asked for the federation Service name. In
the senario above where I'm using it for authenticating a web app,
is it ever exposed directly to the end user? Are they going to be
needing to type this in to their browsers? and will it be better to have external DNS entries for this?
My 2-cent:
There will be a learning curve, but if all the users are stored in AD, using ADFS will give you some advantages such as SSO, federation against other providers if you ever need it later on.
Using self-signed certificates during dev/test is fine. You can turn off certificate revocation check on ADFS side.
No, that Federation service name doesn't get exposed to the end users. I would suggest you have external DNS entries for your ADFS because your users need to access it from the outside. In short, a user rarely needs to type in ADFS url. Instead, he or she needs to access a service provider site and it will redirects he or she to the ADFS site.
This is becoming a more common scenario and can be seamlessly handled with AD FS. Ideally what you would want to do is:
deploy your AD FS farm
Configure your Web Application to trust your ADFS STS
Whenever you need to add a customer who will be using your multi-tenant application, add a federation trust with that customer (i.e. federation trust between your AD FS and the customer's AD FS)
This will ensure that you don't have to deal with identity management for every individual user when you add a customer. When a customer tries to login to your WebApp, then he will be authenticated against his AD FS, and your AD FS will get the token and sign them and present it to the Web Application. This will give them SSO which everyone has started to expect as a de-facto :)
Self signed certificates - As Thuan mentioned it is ok to use them during testing, just ensure that all your test boxes are configured to trust the certificate or otherwise you will be seeing connection drops all around
Federation service name - As explained in the setup summary above, the federation service name will never need to be exposed to the end user from a customer's organization. For all he knows, he is being authenticated against his AD FS as he is used to it already.
You might want to consider deploying AD FS in Azure:
AD FS deployment in Azure
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've been scratching my head over this issue for over a week. We have a web app that we would like to implement SSO for. SSO with windows active directories of our clients (i.e. we essentially need to authenticate against our clients' active directories without much trouble)
The only thing I am 100% sure about is that I will needed a security token service that will have to communicate with an Identity Provider. My question:
Which service is most suitable for the above scenario (AD FS? OpenID & OAuth 2.0? SAML 2.0 and shibboleth?)
How will I connect to the active directories of the clients? Maybe I'm not understanding how the STS is to be used, could anyone clarify? I'm working with an Azure Web App
Will there have to be a different IdP for each client? Will the client have to do more than just give us standard information? What would this info be?
...should I be using Windows Identity Foundation?
HELP :( ... this is an SOS
If anyone could clarify at all, I will forever be grateful. I normally upvote anything I find helpful and accept whichever answer is the best so feel free to answer with what you think might be useful in helping me understand how I can achieve what I am after.
These are the three options I know:
As you mention one option is ADFS this solution means that your customers should install and expose Adfs. ADFS means Active directory-Federation Services, so in this case your application needs to speak WS-Fed (not oauth). Typically if the user is inside the LAN adfs uses integrated auth, if not it will prompt credentials.
WAAD is a new service from Azure, it allows companies to expose their directories to use in cloud applications. With this approach your customers need an account in Azure, create a directory and use the dir sync agent. Your application will talk SAMLP with WAAD.
Auth0 is an authentication broker that allows developers to use social but also enterprise identity providers like AD but also google apps, waad, adfs, salesforce, etc. if your customer only has AD you will provide him an msi for a windows service, that will bridge the company AD with your auth0 account, you can have as many AD as you want. Your application speak oauth with Auth0. This agent supports kerberos authentication as well. The following graph explains this solution:
Disclaimer: I work for Auth0.
WIF doesn't support SAML or OAuth.
Your application is in Azure.
Suggest add WIF to the application and then "bind" to Azure Active Directory. In VS 2013, use the "Change Authentication" feature for this.
Make the application multi-tenanted.
Each customer has their own tenant. User DirSync to sync. each customer AD with their AAD tenant. (That gives same sign-on). Adding ADFS to each customer gives single sign-on.
However, the customers will probably push back on this because of perceptions around security.
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.
After some theoretical help on the best approach for allowing a SaaS product to authenticate users against a tenant's internal Active Directory (or other LDAP) server.
The application is hosted, but a requirement exists that tenants can delegate authentication to their existing user management provider such as AD or OpenLDAP etc. Tools such as Microsoft Online's hosted exchange support corporate AD sync.
Assuming the client doesn't want to forward port 389 to their domain controller, what is the best approach for this?
After doing some research and talking to a few system admins who would be managing this, we've settled on an two options, which should satisfy most people. I'll describe them here for those who were also interested in the outcome.
Authentication Service installed in the origanisation's DMZ
If users wish to utilise authentication with an on-premises active directory server they will be required to install an agent in their DMZ and open port 443 to it. Our service will be configured to hit this service to perform authentication.
This service will sit in the DMZ and receive authentication requests from the SaaS application. The service will attempt to bind to active directory with these credentials and return a status to indicate success or failure.
In this instance the application's forms based authentication will not change, and the user will not be aware of the authentication behind the scenes.
OpenId
Similar to the first approach, a service will be installed in the client's DMZ, and port 443 will be opened. This will be an OpenId provider.
The SaaS application will be an OpenId consumer (already is for Facebook, Twitter, Google etc login).
When a user wishes to log in, the OpenId provider will be presented, asking them to enter their user name and password. This login screen would be served from the client's DMZ. The user would never enter their username or password into the SaaS application.
In this instance, the existing forms based authentication is replaced with the OpenId authentication from the service in the client's DNZ.
A third option that we're investigating is Active Directory Federated Services, but this is proprietary to Active Directory. The other two solutions support any LDAP based authentication across the internet.
Perhaps this might help…
This vendor, Stormpath, offers a service providing: user authentication, user account management, with hookups to your customers’ on-premise directories.
What about an LDAPS connection to the customer's user directory? They can firewall this off so that only your servers have access if they're concerned about it being public. Since it's SSL it's secure end to end. All you need from them is the certificate from their issuing CA (if it's not a public one). I struggled to get this working for an internal web project in the DMZ and there's a real lack of any guides online. So I wrote one up when I'd got it working:
http://pcloadletter.co.uk/2011/06/27/active-directory-authentication-using-ldaps/
Your best bet is to implement a SAML authentication for your SaaS application, and then sign up with identity providers like Okta or OneLogin. Once that's done then you can also connect it with ADFS to provide Single Sign On for your web application through Active Directory.
I'm just doing this research myself and this is what I've came across of, will have more updates once implementation is done. Hope this gives you enough keywords to do another google search
My understanding is that there are three possible solutions:
Installing something on the domain controller to capture all user changes (additions, deletions, password changes) and send updates to the remote server. Unfortunately there's no way for the website to know the initial user passwords - only new ones once they are changed.
Provide access for the web server to connect to your domain controller via LDAP/WIF/ADFS. This would probably mean opening incoming ports in the company's firewall to allow a specific IP.
Otherwise, bypass usernames/passwords and use email-based authentication instead. Users would just have to authenticate via email once every 3-6 months for each device.
I have to begin implementing this for an upcoming project and I'm seriously leaning towards option #3 for simplicity.