When using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) with multiple Security Token Services (STS), is it possible to provision users before they first access the application?
For example, let's say I have a web site called BufferOverrun where users can login and ask/answer questions and I want to support authentication with external Google accounts. When a user first accesses the page, they have to authenticate with their Google account, then they can access the web application. In this scenario, there are two STSes, Google (for identity authentication) and a custom one for my application (for authorization).
How can I assign claims to a user before that users accesses the system?
Since the identity is owned externally to my application, I cannot assign claims directly to that identity (and I wouldn't want to anyway, as they would be application specific). But since the user has not accessed the system, I do not have an internal identity to assign claims to. I see two possible solutions:
Wait for a user to access the system (creating some default application-specific claims), then use some internal provisioning tool to modify those claims as desired.
Have the provisioning tool allow users to manually map a default identity claim (email address, for example) before that identity authenticates by manually typing it in, so that on first access if the identity asserts that claim, a specific set of application claims are granted.
I see a few issues with both 1 and 2. For 1, all users have some implicit access to the system, even if the default application claims allow no functionality. This seems to work great for something like stackoverflow where the initial account has a certain permission set, and as the user uses the systems, new claims are granted. However, this is likely not desirable for all applications. 2 is error prone, as it requires an admin to manually specify a claim.
In both cases above, how do I provision the identity which has access to actually use the provisioning tool (i.e., an admin account)?
For this, I envision that during application installation time, I require a user to authenticate and set the applicaton claims for that identity to be such that they have "administrative" privileges. Is this a good implementation?
Historically (I am now referring to an existing application), the application specifically interfaced with Active Directory only. The way this was handled was that there was a built-in admin account (not affiliated with AD) that allowed the admin user to first login. After authenticating with the admin application, that user could search AD for users/groups and provision them individually. Any user/group not provisioned by the admin would not have access to the system at all. I don't see this paradigm being applicable to using an external STS like Google, etc, so I am trying to conceive an architecture that would enable external STS systems. Retaining the ability to search the STS is desired, though not required. In practice, the two STSes involved would likely both be Active Directory using federated services.
Note: This is similar to this question and this question.
When using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) with multiple Security Token Services (STS), is it possible to provision users before they first access the application?
The answer is yes, if you have a way of identitfying those users (e.g. their e-mail)
In this scenario, there are two STSes, Google (for identity authentication) and a custom one for my application (for authorization).
This is frequently used, but not necessarilly always the case. If you rely just on Google, then you could simply have the authorization code in the app itself (e.g. "AuthorizationManager" classes, etc). The value of another STS is that it can be a broker for multiple identities (e.g. Google, LiveID, Yahoo!, whatever) and you can do some authorization related transformations.
Since the identity is owned externally to my application, I cannot assign claims directly to that identity (and I wouldn't want to anyway, as they would be application specific).
Why not? You can define a rule that says:
"Anyone authenticated with Google is a 'reader' in App BufferOverrun". You can even say:
"someone#gmail.com is a 'reader' on BufferOverrun", before someone accesses the app.
You can still use the original approach (an out of band admin account for setup). Or you can also "bootstrap" config during provisioning defining which is the claim that will identify admin users.
Take a look at sample "Federation with Multiple Partners and ACS" (sample 7) in http://claimsid.codeplex.com
We do exactly that.
Related
I was wondering if it was possible to login to different salesforce environments (Sandboxes, scratch orgs, production env, etc) using either Apex/LWC/Aura (or anything that I can make a quick action to). For example, I have a list of credential records, with the username and password, and I would like to have a login button that creates a separate tab that can automatically redirect to that specific instance and log in.
Currently, if a user wants to login to a particular instance, they have to either go to test.salesforce.com or login.salesforce.com (depending on if it's a sandbox or production) manually, then copy the password and username in. The ideal situation is to have a login button that can do this automatically from the record page where the username and password is located.
I think previously this could have been accomplished through the URL, but salesforce has recently patched this out due to security concerns. Is there another good way to do this?
It sounds like you're trying to solve two specific challenges:
Your users need to be able to manage very high volume of credentials.
You need authentication to survive password resets.
The clear solution, in my mind, is to use the OAuth Web Server flow to execute initial authentication and then store the refresh token that results from this flow. This token survives password resets, and may be used more or less indefinitely to create new access tokens - which users can then use to log in via a frontdoor link.
There's an out-of-the-box tool that does this already: the Salesforce CLI. You can authenticate orgs to its toolchain, name them, and subsequently access them with a single command (sfdx force:org:open). Users that prefer a GUI can access the exact same functions in Visual Studio Code.
If you're hellbent on doing custom development to handle this use case, you can, but you need to be very careful of the security implications. As one example, you could implement an LWC + Apex solution that executed the relevant OAuth flows against orgs and stored the resulting data in an sObject, then allowing users to click a button to generate a new access token and do a one-click login.
But... if you do this, you're storing highly sensitive credentials in an sObject, which can be accessed by your system administrators and potentially other users who have relevant permissions. That data could be exfiltrated from your Salesforce instance by an attacker and misused. There's all kinds of risks involved in storing that kind of credential, especially if any of them unlock orgs that contain PII or customer data.
One of the two best answers for that (the other one being 'pure Apex' and relatively more complex) is using Flow.
"You can use a login flow to customize the login experience and integrate business processes with Salesforce authentication. Common use cases include collecting and updating user data at login, configuring multi-factor authentication, or integrating third-party strong authentication methods.enter image description here"
"You can use login flows to interact with external third-party authentication providers by using an API.
For example, Yubico offers strong authentication using a physical security key called a YubiKey. Yubico also provides an example Apex library and login flow on GitHub. The library supplies Apex classes for validating YubiKey one-time passwords (OTPs). The classes allow Salesforce users to use a YubiKey as a second authentication factor at login. For more information, see yubikey-salesforce-client.
You can also implement a third-party SMS or voice delivery service, like Twilio or TeleSign, to implement an SMS-based multi-factor authentication and identity verification flow. For more information, see Deploy Third-Party SMS-Based Multi-Factor Authentication."
learn more here: enter link description here
since anypoint platform url anypoint.mulesoft.com is publicly accessible anyone can access the resources. Is there anyway i can restrict access to my org users apart from creating access roles.
Can i create org specific url with org secific access so that others cant access?
Can put some network related restrictions?
I think you confusing two different things:
Accessing a public URL (ie https://anypoint.mulesoft.com)
Authorization inside your organization's account
You can not restrict access to a site that you don't own, it is publicly accessible and needs to be accessed by other users. It doesn't even make sense really. Would you attempt to restrict access by others to google.com or twitter.com (or their API URLs)? It is not the right approach and it is just not possible.
What makes sense however is to manage permissions inside your organization in Anypoint Platform. It means when an user belonging to your organization logs in you can manage what of the available roles are permissions that user will have. You can do that in the Access Management page. You can also create custom roles with specific permissions and teams to better organize your users.
As mentioned you are not able to change MuleSoft's main URL (ie https://anypoint.mulesoft.com), one option being to control from Access Management page, both mentioned by #aled
There are two main ways you can get what you need:
If your organization already has some MFA tool that requires you to be in your corporate VPN, you could use that MFA as the MFA for the Anypoint Platform e.g. Users will need Username/Password, connect to the VPN to be able to get access to the MFA generator/auth and then use that code to finish logging into the platform. As Admin in Anypoint Platform you can enforce EVERYONE to have MFA set up (keep in mind ClientApps authorization for your automation users)
If your company already has an Identity Provider you can configure identity management in Anypoint Platform to set up users for single sign-on (SSO). The fragments below extracted from the official docs external-identity:
After configuring identity management, you must add new SSO users using your external identity management solution and internal provisioning process. If you use the Invite User feature to add users to your organization after you have configured an identity provider, the credentials for these users are stored locally in your organization rather than with the identity provider.
Users that log in with SSO are new users to the system. If the new user has the same username as a user that already exists in your Anypoint Platform organization, the new user co-exists with the original user with the same username. Users with the same username are managed independently from one another.
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.
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.
In section 1.1 of RFC 6749, there are four roles: resource owner, resource server, client, and authorization server.
Does OAuth become redundant or unnecessary if the client and the resource owner are the same entity?
For example, I have a closed API and a front-facing web server. (The front-facing web server would be both the client and the resource owner.) I am trying to decide whether to switch to OAuth 2 authentication instead of using the current username/password authentication method. Is there any added security for moving to OAuth 2 if the API remains closed to third-party applications? (That is, no third-parties will ever have access to the API.)
Thanks!
In the case where the Resource Owner and Client/Resource Server roles coincide OAuth 2.0 may become less relevant from a security point of view, since one of the primary objectives of OAuth not to expose primary credentials of the user to the client becomes moot. That is also the reason why the so-called Resource Owner Password Credentials grant is considered to be a legacy/deprecated flow.
However, it may still make sense to follow the OAuth 2.0 pattern for a number of reasons:
the ability to leverage a standardized protocol through stock libraries and
frameworks without relying on custom code
the fact that in your case the Resource Server is still made strictly OAuth 2.0 compliant, dealing with Clients presenting access tokens, irrespective of what the Client/Resource Owner relationship/implementation is; this would make it easier to allow for 3rd-party client access in a future scenario
the fact that you concentrate verification of user credentials on a single path between Client and Authorization Server so each of your Resource Servers don't need to be bothered by checking user credentials individually, possibly dealing with different authentication mechanisms
and perhaps most importantly, also security-wise: once the user has authenticated through the Client using his primary credentials, the Authorization Server can issue a refresh token as well as an access token; the Client can store and use the refresh token to a new access token when the old one expires; this frees the Client from storing the primary user credentials if it wants to keep accessing the API for a long period of time without requiring explicit user interaction and authentication and makes the resulting system less vulnerable for leakage/loss of user credentials since the user credentials (password) are not stored in the Clients
If you have the following issue then you should use OAuth;
Let's say you a Gmail like web mail provider. Some of your users are using a third party app which logs in into your user's account and auto replies certain emails for you. Or you are Facebook like social network web site where some of your users use a third party app which analyzes your friend networks and prints a 2D graph for you. In this case your users are giving away their usernames and passwords. How would they prevent a certain third party app accessing their account after they gave away their username and password? Simply by changing their password. Now you have another problem; other third party apps won't be able to access the user's account. Then the user have to re-give away his password to other apps he trusts. Now this is problem too because it is not user friendly. OAuth is simply a temporary password that your user gives away to a third party app developer. He can revoke it whenever he wants without changing his own password.
Other than that OAuth is unnecessary. Just use a session cookie if you are not going to have third party app developers. It is a random string stored in user side. And on the server side will have whatever you want. Just look how PHP sessions are used and stored on server side. You can define their lifespan and refresh time automatically from php.ini.