We have a company building a web application for us and they want to authenticate using our existing website. I have written a login form that authenticates the user and needs to send back a token they can use for all future calls. At the moment I'm setting a cookie before redirecting back to their web app but I'm not sure if this is the way to go. Also, I need to test what I have built but not sure how to redirect to a login page and wait for that token response.
Token based authentication is stateless. You are not storing any information about your user on the server or in a session.
This concept alone takes care of many of the problems with having to store information on the server.
Although this implementation can vary, the gist of it is as follows:
User Requests Access with Username / Password
Application validates credentials
Application provides a signed token to the client
Client stores that token and sends it along with every request
Server verifies token and responds with data
More info here The Ins and Outs of Token Based Authentication
Here's an infographic to explain the process:
I am building a reactjs website that will communicate with asp.net web api 2 to save and retreive data.
but I am not sure how to do this.
I know to accomplish this on a high level it would be something like
User comes to my site and hits signup/log
Chooses which provider then want to use(google, facebook and etc). I am only want to support external providers(ie I don't want to have to deal with usernames/pwds)
User it sent to authenticated part of site
User clicks "add course" that data send via ajax to webapi with some sort of token to prove they have access to these methods.
I am not sure how to implement this problems I see is
Reactjs I guess is handling the authentication part? then once they been authenticated it would have to be saved in my db via webapi so it knows about this new user?
Reactjs would have to block users from going to secure pages till they are authenticated
Web api would have to generate a token for the user for that session so they can access the web api(I want to stop people from consuming my api).
Is there some simple example out there how to achieve this?
Reactjs I guess is handling the authentication part? then once they been authenticated it would have to be saved in my db via webapi so it knows about this new user
Better use some third party auth library here like PassportJS that does the auth for you using strategies like Passport-Facebook. This will give you an Oauth access token from Facebook upon authentication. You can now save this token in your cookies (or localStorage), take a look at the security considerations.
Should you store it in a DB? Here are some arguments about it.
Reactjs would have to block users from going to secure pages till they are authenticated
This can be done by checking if they have a valid token.
Web api would have to generate a token for the user for that session so they can access the web api(I want to stop people from consuming my api).
This can be easily achieved by using JSON Web Tokens. Note that you will have to store the JWT in your client side locally, along side your FB-Google oauth tokens (or you can relegate that to a single API by storing them in DB?. Its a design choice, I would prefer to store them separately and save a lot of hassle).
We have an ASP.NET/MVC website that's using FormsAuthentication. As is usual, when the user tries to access a page, and doesn't have a valid FormsAuthentication cookie, IIS redirects him to the login view. When the user does a HttpPost to the login controller, our controller action makes a call to our WebApi webservice, which validates username, password, and customerid against a Sql Server database. If the authentication passes, the controller action sets a FormsAuthentication cookie, and redirects to the page the user had asked for.
Now sales is making noises about "Single Sign-On", though I'm not clear exactly what they mean by that. From what I've read, in the Microsoft World this usually means accessing MS's Active Directory Federation Services.
At this point I have almost no idea how this would work, but before I dig into this too deeply, would it be possible to put the authentication code within the WebApi webservice, where we could choose to validate against the Sql Server database, or against whichever ADFS server was appropriate for the specified customer?
Our problem is that we have I don't know how many thousands of users, working for some hundreds of customers. Many customers will not have ADFS running, and those who do will each have their own ADFS server.
Most of what I see with respect to Single Sign-On seems to involve doing browser redirection to the ADFS server, then redirection back, and looks to be avoiding login at all, if you're already logged in. I don't think we can do that, in our case. We can't know which ADFS server to redirect to, until we hit the database.
So, the question - is it possible to do ADFS authentication entirely from C# code in our WebAPI web service?
(One possible complication - the website itself has zero access to any database. The sole configuration setting in its web.config is the base URL of the webservice. Whatever authentication happens has to happen in the webservice, not in the website.)
First of all, "Single Sign-On" (SSO) is not limited to ADFS. It simply means that you type your credentials only once, and then all systems you access automatically "recognize" you; all subsequent authorizations request are transparent. For instance, if you have several web sites using Windows Authentication in your company Intranet (same AD domain), you have SSO: you authenticate once when you log in to your computer, and then your web browser authenticates automatically to these web sites using NTLM or Kerberos. No ADFS in this case.
What ADFS (and "Federation" more generally) allows, is SSO accross security boundaries. In Windows world, a security zone is typically created by an Active Directory forest; everything within this forest is accessible using SSO provided by Windows authentication. But as soon as you leave this zone (SaaS application, web site in another company network), you need another authentication protocol to perform SSO, and these protocols are implemented in ADFS.
Then about your particular problem:
What you could do is instead of using FormsAuth, you use AdfsAuth. When a unknown user accesses a page, he would be redirected to ADFS for authentication (using browser redirects as you correctly mention). To know which ADFS server should authenticate your user, you need a way to differentiate them indeed: a list of IP range per customer? a different URL per customer? If you don't have something like this, then the only way is to show them a list of choices such as: "I work for CompanyA", "I work for CompanyB", "I work for CompanyC", "I don't work for any of these companies and want to authenticate using FormsAuth."
In this case, what your WebApi web service has to do is: if I know which ADFS server to use, redirect the user there. Otherwise authenticate the user as usual using the database.
When you use AdfsAuth for a customer, your database is useless. You can delete all credentials related to this customer.
do ADFS authentication entirely from C# code in our WebAPI
Well it's possible to "re-implement" ADFS in your service, but you won't get SSO if you do that. When you use federation, your redirect the user to the ADFS server of his company. This ADFS server is in the same domain as his computer, so the user gets SSO here. Once again, your users can't get SSO if you authenticate them yourself, because your users are not in the same security zone as your site.
When authenticating to multiple identity providers, it is typical redirect to your own STS. So, in this case, you would have www.yourapp.com redirecting to sts.yourapp.com, which redirects to sts.somecustomer.com.
The specific tools to enable such a dataflow is the home realm parameter (whr), and the AD FS Powershell API (to allow IDP maintenance).
Your RP-STS acts as the trust-point for the app, and manages selection of the appropriate IDP. One RP-STS, many IP-STS's. Each of your Customer's IP-STS gets set up as a Claims Provider Trust in AD FS.
As always, Vittorio has already covered the subject better than I could.
I'm struggling about the best way to go about this.
We have a mobile app where the user can login using various 3rd party providers (Facebook / Google etc).
The app then sends the token to the c# web api for registration of the user (or login if they exist).
The only way I can see to implement OAuthAuthorizationServerProvider is with options i do not have access to (Username & password etc). I want this to verify that the facebook token sent from the application is valid (by using the facebook api - this is not a problem). Then if correct generate a barer token from my api so i know they are authenticated and can map that authentication to a user in the DB.
Everything online seems to only cater for the web api end either accepting a username and password or getting the server to get the facebook (google etc) token to begin with.
I want the API authentication to be based on the user so I can use the standard [Authorize] and Identity system in .net.
Thanks all and I hope that makes sense.
i created a mathod facebookInfo(string username,string password) ,so i received username and password but after receiving its not possible to login at server side,because ther is only one way to connect to facebook using facebook api ie.
facebookservie.ConnectToFacebook();
and its open IE browser,so there is any way to login automatically and get session,using any javascript or nay other way at server side using ASp.net in C#...pls help me..my whole project depend on this.....thanks in advance
You cannot remotely login a user from your site using their login details. This is against the Facebook terms and conditions. If you want to make requests via the graph api then you have to options:
You could acquire an access_token from Facebook and make requests as an application
You could allowed the user to login and request the offline_access permission, which allows you to make requests on behalf of the user without requiring them to have an active session
What exactly do you want to do to interact with Facebook? What you are currently doing sounds an awful lot like phishing...