I am writing WCF service that uses wsHttpBinding binding, which is not hosted in IIS but in Windows Service. I want to have a Login(user,pass) method in service, which will give a ticket to the client if the user is valid.
Can anyone help me to understand how to implement ticket base authentication in WCF? Is there any standard mechanism or I have to implement my own? I also want to store other data for each user in the in the service as well.
I found the solution, I don't know are there any standard mechanisms or not, but the post here helps me to solve the problem...
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/bursteg/archive/2006/04/23/141.aspx
I just return ticket from login method if the user is valied, and send that token with the message header in every call, which can be checked in other service call
Related
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with doing the authentication right. Usually I'm using terms that I'm not familiar with so answerers misunderstand my questions. Its not helped bu the fact that this is a case with many implementations.
So now I'm going to try to explain the facts and requirements surrounding my project so that I might get a pointer towards a good solution.
I will have a Database that includes the information I need. Included in this info will be the usernames and salted hash of passwords. This database will be connected to a WCF web service that supplies the data to other front end projects.
One of the front end projects is a asp.net MVC 3 web site that users will use to log in and such. Now the default in such a project is some sort of SQlMembership that is not right in this case as this site is not connected to the database (it might not even be a MSQL database).
Here are implementations that I looked at but couldn't quite figure how to use correctly.
1) Write my own MembershipProvider in the MVC project that would query the WebService for validation. Here I mean that it would just call some methods for all its needs. Not liking it for security issues, client side solution.
2) Validata using a service side MembershipProvider but then I would have to send userName Password with each action and I can't store password for security reasons.
3) Then I discovered something called WCF authenticationService http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.applicationservices.authenticationservice.aspx and it seemed to be what I need but I'm having problem understanding how it works. I wan't it to be part of my service but it seems to be a dedicated service. Also its not really explaining how it authenticates (I need to have a custom authentication based on my table, not some default table created for me). Here is a post Should authentication be in a separate service for wcf? with same problem that I'm not sure how got solved.
Can the WCF authentication service be the right tool for me?
Can you answer this for someone who doesn't know asp.net, web or service terminology?
EDIT
Here is one solution that I was hoping for but not sure if exists.
The WCF Service exposes a MembershipProvider, RoleProvider, ProfileProvider that are defined in the service.
In the MVC web.config under membership\providers\add the MembershipProvider is added along with a endpoint towards the service. Same with RoleManager etc.
So when I call MembershipProvider in the MVC project to validate user it automatically calls the service and checks there and when it happens upon a Authorize attribute it as well checks the RoleProvider in the service automatically.
I would however also want to restrict the service calls themselves, even if they are inside a [Authorized] attribute method it might not be so in other clients that reference the web service. Would love if when a call comes from a website the service would automatically have access to the forms.authentication cookie.
I am not clear as to what you want to authenticate exactly, if the user login in, or the user accessing you service. Also, I am not sure how you mean for an answer about WCF Security not to use service terminology nor how you expect to solve this without knowing asp.net. I'll do my best though.
If you are authenticating a user login in, you can implement your own MembershipProvider and have a service request credentials and return the authenticated user.
Once authenticated, you can assign each user a GUID. This GUID is the ID which will travel with each message (encoded in the message header) and validate the user to call the service method.
This doesn't involve transport security, which you should configure if you want your message to be secure over the wire, yet this is a different matter, not involving authentication.
Hope this can somehow help you. I tried to make it the least technical possible and left out anything too complicated. Hope this helps somehow...
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 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.
Is there a clean way to expose a WCF REST service that requires basic authentication, but where we handle the actual validation of the username/password ourselves? It seems that when you tell WCF in config that you want to use basic authentication, it forces you to turn on basic authentication in IIS and IIS can only do basic authentication against window accounts.
The only hack we have found is to lie to WCF and tell it there is no security on the service and then do authentication outside of the WCF stack using a generic IHttpModule (which has a proprietary config file to indicate which URLs have which authentication/authorization requirements).
It seems like there should be a better way. Anyone have one?
The WCF REST Contrib library enables this functionality:
http://github.com/mikeobrien/WcfRestContrib
It also allows you to secure individual operations.
is the username and password set on the client like:
cc.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = ReturnUsername();
cc.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = ReturnPassword();
Or are they embedded in the body of the REST message?
If the former, you can use a custom UserNamePasswordValidator:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa702565.aspx
If the latter, you can set the service to no security, and use a custom ServiceAuthorizationManager to validate the contents of the message:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731774.aspx
Hope one or the other helps! I'd try to post sample code & config, but I'm # home and dont have access to code, which is all # work.
See Custom Basic Authentication for RESTful services. Pablo's approach uses the interceptor functionality that is provided via the REST starter kit to solve the problem. If you do not want to depend on the REST starter kit, then you can create your own service host and use the inteceptor functionality provided.
If you host it on IIS, using custom http module is the way to go. You can bring over the principal over to WCF side to do code access security. See HTTP Basic Authentication against Non-Windows Accounts in IIS/ASP.NET (Part 3 - Adding WCF Support). Also see Custom HTTP Basic Authentication for ASP.NET Web Services on .NET 3.5/VS 2008.
If you are not using IIS, you should be able to implement userNameAuthentication. See Finally! Usernames over Transport Authentication in WCF.
Yes absolutely there is a way. You need to configuring a custom userNamePasswordValidationMode value for your service and point it to a class with an overridden method that can inspect and validate the credentials provided. When making a RESTful call, these credentials when using Basic authentication in its proper form should be in the request header. With this custom method you can inspect the credentials and then authenticate the client to your service. No Windows accounts or domain even needed.
The nice thing is you can then take that security context to the next level and provide fine-grained authrization at the method level. You might have instances where a large pool of clients are able to access the service, but not all methods within (i.e. paid clients vs. unpaid). In this case you can also provide authorization at the method level as well if needed.
Below is a step-by-step solution (with too many steps to embed) by me that contains both the needed configuration and security required to have a complete solution. The problem is often Basic authentication is used without securing the Transport with a SSL certificate and this is bad. Make sure to follow all the steps and you will implement Basic authentication without the need of any type of Windows accounts or configuration on your WCF RESTful based service.
RESTful Services: Authenticating Clients Using Basic Authentication