I need help on securing my WCF Service so that only authorized users can make a call to service methods.
The WCF Service is configured with wsHttpBinding and is hosted under Windows Service.
The client application is an asp.net website. Also, the users making call to WCF service are already authorized by client application, so just need to make sure that they are authorized while handling the request on service side.
Please guide me on what are the different ways (along with their pros and cons, if possible) to achive above.
Thank you!
If you are using the ASP.NET role provider infrastructure, you could pass the user on and leverage the same provider via WCF. This would be nice as it would maintain logic across the process boundaries.
If you are using Windows groups for ASP.NET, the same would apply, just re-authorize.
Certificates are an option, but then you have to manage them.
Lastly you could issue an access token and validate it on the WCF side. This could be done by extending WCF(probably at the contract level). You would then have to manage the token via some other service to enforce expiration etc.
Related
I have a WCF web service application built and tested on IIS7. Regarding authentication I wanted to implement a sql server hosted userd id and password authentication for consumers accessing the operations in the web service. However I was told that my company policy dictates that I implement SAML into my web service. That means any client that is accessing my web service operations need to be authenticated using SAML 2.0. I am not familiar with SAML but like to know and get started on how to implement it within my web serivice. I keep hearing two terms - Service Provider and Identity Provider, based on definitions on the web, I am assuming the service provider is my web service. identity provider is where the user authenticates to and the identity provider provides a assertion to my web service and then I let the client access the operations. I understand the theory but not sure how to put into practical implementation. Clients accessing my web service are not internal , i.e. they are external (extranet clients), so in this case what will be the identity provider and how do I add code to my web serice to make it a service provider?
I hope you understand my dilemma, can anyone explain the approach I need to take and any samples or tutorials that help me complete the web service is greatly appreciated.
I think SAML 2.0 is not provided by standard WCF. To make it work you must combine WCF with WIF (Windows identity foundation). Here you have very complex example of usage WCF with WIF and claim based authorization. The example uses SAML 1.1 but it is only configuration change to make it work with SAML 2.0.
Your problem is generally called Federated authentication or Federated identity where user authenticates against STS (service token service) and it receives security token (it can be for example SAML token). Than the client calls real service (RP - relaying party) where it passes its security token. So what are you going to build? If your company policy demands SAML usage they most probably already have STS and you just need to authenticate clients by SAML tokens as mentioned in the article.
Since 2011, support for Claims-Aware WCF Services has apparently improved with the release of .NET 4.5. I'll copy info from that article in case it ever changes, but as of the time of this answer, the process appeared to be as simple as:
Adding a reference to WIF (Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll) in your WCF Service project. Since this is delivered with .NET 4.5, I do not believe a NuGet package is necessary.
Use the following code sample to create a self-hosted Claims-Aware service:
var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(ClaimsAwareWebService), new Uri("myUri"));
FederatedServiceCredentials.ConfigureServiceHost(host);
host.Open();
Set your WCF service to use the federatedServiceHostConfiguration Behavior Extension.
We write a WCF web service.
How can we call it's methods in JSON format?
An additional issue is how can we secure our web services.
I'd like to use Microsoft Membership and Roles providers for users authentication and authorization. The question is how to do this. Is it possible to do authentication and authorization behind-the-scenes (in context of WCF), or I must call ValidateUser() and IsUserInRole() in every web method for every user call?
Whether I restricted to use webHttpBinding (over wsHttpBinding) because our client-side programmer familiar with AJAX/JSON? Whether there are any restrictions of webHttpBinding concerning using Membership/Roles comparably comparably to wsHttpBinding?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Ilan.
I am currently working on a project that has an iPad application that uses JSON to call WCF services hosted with IIS. One of the requirements is that the WCF services needs to use IIS Basic Authentication to login. Once the user has been authenticated from the database, a few values need to set to a cookie for return trips to other WCF functions (similar to asp.net session variables). Is this possible with WCF and using cookies to hold state? If not, any recommended method?
Thank you.
WCF absolutely supports basic authentication. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733775.aspx has details on this. WCF will then identify this user on all messages that come through.
If you want to implement a customer authorization mechanic, you will need to implement ServiceAuthorizationManager. I've recently done something similar where I have iOS clients that use OAuth to authenticate with our services. I have this implemented a ServiceAuthorizationManager to determine who they are and what privileges that they have. Might be worth looking into.
I have an application that uses Silverlight and ASP.NET as a front-end. It retrieves data from the server by calling some RESTful WCF services that are hosted there. I'd like to prevent the curious user from opening up a new browser window and calling the web service themselves. Is there a way to restrict access to the web services to a specific application?
Thanks!
You can use HTTPS to secure the endpoint and require authentication. You can put an obnoxiously long secret key embedded in the code. Unfortunately, System.Security.Cryptography is not in the SL install, so no encrypt on server/decrypt on client capabilities. And there's no reason the user couldn't just use something like reflector to read the code anyway.
SL can be made "mostly securish", but definitely not secure.
Here's the guide of the Patterns & Practices team for WCF Security. There's a lot to be found there.
http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide
If you're truly interested in securing your web services, you should think about migrating from RESTful services to SOAP Based Web Services and implementing the WS-Security standard for Message based Encryption.
You can then secure your services so only clients that have the proper security information (be in username/password or X.509 certs) can call your web services.
Update
As you can see...I've removed X.509 as an option. I blanked for a moment and forgot the WS-Security limitations in Silverlight. The good news is that you can implement username tokens based on the WS-Security standard in Silverlight:
Implementing Username Password & WS-Security with Silverlight
No there's not.
The environment is in-house service based applications running in a Windows environment with WCF.
There are several "middle-tier" ASP.NET Web Applications and Web Services that authenticate the final client using Windows authentication, and use ASP.NET Roles to set Thread.CurrentPrincipal to a suitable RolePrincipal. These applications each run under their own service account, which is a domain account, and are considered to be trusted subsystems.
Some back-end WCF web services that may only be accessed by these trusted "middle-tier" applications. They use Windows Authentication to limit access to the service accounts used by these applications.
We now have a requirement for the back-end services to audit the identity of the final client whose call to the middle-tier application resulted in the call to the back-end service.
To avoid making any application changes, I was thinking of writing an endpoint behavior which inserts a SOAP Header with the final client's identity into the request sent to the back-end service. Note that the middle-tier applications are trusted, so no authentication of this SOAP Header would be required.
It occurred to me that this requirement may not be unique, so before I invent my own SOAP Header for this purpose I thought I'd ask if there exist any standards in this area I could reuse?
It sounds like you're after WCF Impersonation, check out the MSDN Link or Google that search term for more info. I've never used it myself so can't fully advise, but hopefully it's what you're after. Good luck
Edit: Does the WCF OperationContext not carry through the identity to the second phase? (OperationContext.Current.ServiceSecurityContext.PrimaryIdentity.Name)