I have two projects in a solution. One is .net core 3.0 based Web API. Next is Angular 9 SPA. I've been asked to setup Azure AD based authentication. So I enabled that in API.
But I am seriously confused where it actually requires to enable? Client App or API? or Both?
Since your client needs to call the API, it needs to authenticate to it.
And since the API requires AAD tokens, your client will need to acquire one.
So you need to implement Azure AD authentication in your client application and in the API.
The client's job is to authenticate the user with Azure AD and acquire an access token for the API.
It then adds that token as a header on each request:
Authorization: Bearer token-goes-here
The API then validates that token on each request.
Related
I am using Azure B2C in my react SPA to sign in the user with external identity providers e.g. Google and Facebook. I have some .net core web API that needs to be called by signed-in users only. I have followed Azure documents for my scenario. As per the docs, I need to register another AD B2C application for web API security and my client app needs to acquire the token with the scope defined in the server-side AD app and pass that token while calling the web API.
Why can't I use the same access token received from azure AD B2C as part of the sign-in flow to pass it to my web API and validate it on the server side to secure the Web API? In that case, I don't need to create another server-side AD application for securing the API.
You can, but it’s simply against the protocol spec. Each client needs to be registered and have a unique client Id/AppId.
Plus if you do it with one App Registration, your logs would never differentiate access to your front end vs access to your api.
I am using Azure SSO Login to get authenticated to our own application.
Everything works fine except the fact that I would like to have JSON Web Token (JWT) which I could use in order to make some API calls to Microsoft Azure after login.
Azure SSO does not return JWT after login, is there any way to obtain it?
Mirko
Scenarios that you may refer to get idea in addition with #juunas suggestion:
This Microsoft docs tutorial of JavaScript single-page
application (SPA) signs in users and calls Microsoft Graph by using
the authorization code flow with PKCE. The SPA uses the Microsoft
Authentication Library (MSAL) for JavaScript v2.0.
This scenario uses js frontend and php backend with azure ad which might give an idea
Its Flow :
A user accesses front end
If the user is not authenticated, he will be redirected to Azure Active Directory (AAD) to login
AAD will redirect (on success) with an authorization token
We’ll inject this authorization token into the calls made to the backend (to prove your identity)
The backend API will validate the authorization token and verify it against the issuer (AAD)
Protect an API by using OAuth 2.0 with Azure Active Directory> This case registers two apps for azure AD - backend app and front end app ,uses validate-jwt policy to validate the OAuth token
I secure my nodeJs API with Azure B2C. I have two web application which accesses my API.
the two Web application has its own application Id in Azure B2C. Also, those can generate access_token with B2C.
But when I validate those access_token in my API I have to put application id of the web application witch generate the access_token as an audience.
But the audience does not support array. I can only put one application id.
How do I solve this?
If I secure an API with B2C I only can make requests from one web application?
The audience (aud) claim for an access token identifies the intended recipient (i.e. the API application) of the access token.
At a high-level, you must:
Register the API application in order for any client application to acquire an access token for use with the API application.
Grant access by one or more client applications to the API application.
Configure the application identifier for the API application as the expected audience for the API middleware.
The Azure AD B2C: Requesting access tokens article describes how a client application can acquire an access token for use with an API application.
At the moment I have an app that uses Azure Mobile App Services to manage offline sync as well as authentiation. Authentication is done with Azure Active Directory and the way that I have it setup is that the web api is published as an app service on azure and it is configured as an app in the Active Directory Section. The Native App which is done in Xamarin.Forms is also configured in azure so that whenever the app makes a request it can properly authenticate with the api.
What I want to do now is take this web api and put it in an on-premise server. I have to do this in order to optimize some latency issues that I am having when retrieving data. My question is how can I use the offline sync functionality with the api in and on-premise server while still using Azure Active Directory as my authenticator.
Where I am mostly having issues is with the authentication part of the implementation.
I appreciate any help.
According to your description, you are using Authentication and authorization in Azure App Service for build-in authentication without having to change code on the app backend. Authentication / Authorization for Azure App Service (Easy Auth) is implemented as a native IIS module that runs on Azure side, details you could follow Architecture of Azure App Service Authentication / Authorization.
My question is how can I use the offline sync functionality with the api in and on-premise server while still using Azure Active Directory as my authenticator.
AFAIK, we could not install the native IIS module easyauth.dll. Based on your scenario, you need to do some additional work to achieve your purpose.
For .NET backend, you could use Microsoft.Azure.Mobile.Server.Authentication OWIN middleware to validate tokens (the JWT authenticationToken). Note: This middle-ware is used to local development and debugging the mobile app .net server on your side.
For Client-managed authentication flow
You need to add a additional endpoint in your app backend for receiving the access_token returned by AAD to the client user, then your app backend would use the access token to access the signed-in user endpoint (e.g. https://graph.windows.net/me?api-version=1.6) to retrieve the user basic info, then encode user info into a JWT token and return to your client. Here is an example for generating the JWT token, you could refer to it.
Note: The App Service build-in authentication would also generate the JWT authenticationToken to the mobile client. For this approach, you retrieve the signed-in user information manually and follow the custom-auth to generate the token by yourself.
For Server-managed authentication flow
You need to provide a login endpoint and redirect the user the AD authorization endpoint, then your app backend receive the authorization_code and retrieve the access_token, then access signed-in user info via the access_token, then encode the user claims to JWT authenticationToken and redirect the token (e.g. https://{your-domain}/.auth/login/done#token={the-json-string-of-LoginResult}) to the client user.
Note: The above two approaches are used to implement some similar features from Easy Auth in your on-premise server.
Moreover, you could just use the middlewares UseWindowsAzureActiveDirectoryBearerAuthentication for AAD v1.0 endpoint or UseOAuthBearerAuthentication for AAD v2.0 endpoint to project your web API instead of the authentication middleware provided by Microsoft.Azure.Mobile.Server.Authentication. Here are some tutorials, you could follow them:
Azure AD .NET Web API getting started
Secure an MVC web API with AAD v2.0 endpoint
For this approach, your mobile client could leverage the ADAL or MSAL client library for acquiring the token. Then when you implement the MobileServiceClient instance, you could specific a custom DelegatingHandler for adding the authorization header with the value to the access token you acquired as the bearer token against your Web API backend. Details you could follow the How to: Customize request headers section under Working with the client SDK.
Here's my current situation:
Xamarin iOS mobile app (using MobileServiceClient to login)
Azure Mobile/App Service (ASP.NET Web API) with Azure AD authentication
I would like to modify the Authentication part of this process to be handled by Okta instead of the Azure AD. How can I setup Okta or any other 3rd party Identity Provider Service similar to Okta as the ipd for both my mobile app and the api web service? Azure claims that you can use any Auth capable 3rd party provider but I don't see any way to integrate such a provider in Azure portal.
I found this url to a tutorial for custom Authentication: https://adrianhall.github.io/develop-mobile-apps-with-csharp-and-azure/chapter2/custom/
From this post:
IdentityServer 4 as Identity Provider for Azure App Service
Is this really the only way to do it? I would really rather keep using the server flow through MobileServiceClient and configure Azure to use the 3rd party OAuth identity provider, does any one have an example or additional information on how to do this?
Thank you for your help, maybe someone from the Azure team can enlighten us on this topic, I have not seen any documentation or examples of how to do it in their documentation so far.
Client:
Found a working library for OAuth2 and OpenID that worked for integrating with Okta:
https://github.com/openid/AppAuth-iOS
https://github.com/openid/AppAuth-iOS/tree/master/Examples
with a Xamarin wrapper:
https://github.com/xamarin/XamarinComponents/tree/master/XPlat/OpenId
Tested it with Okta for client Auth with 2 factor authentication and it works well. On to figure out the App Service part.
After more research and trial and error, I've found the right combination that works for what I'm trying to do. Here's an outline of what it is:
Okta (identity provider)
set up a native application with an Implicit (Hybrid) grant on it
Mobile Client
use an OpenID Connect component for Xamarin.iOS, in my case https://github.com/openid/AppAuth-iOS
Server / Web Api
converted my asp.net web api webservice to an asp.net core web api webservice so I can use the latest owin middleware to validate jwt bearer tokens submitted in the header of calls to the secured endpoints, here's an example of how to set that up with Okta: https://developer.okta.com/quickstart/#/ios/dotnet/aspnetcore
One thing to note that tripped me up along the way:
in the client, after successfully authenticating with Okta through an OpenID Connect component, you will receive user information which will include an id_token and an access_token, although it might seem natural to use the access token to send with your api calls to the server, that's actually not the case, the access token is supposed to only be used to get userinfo and is not a validated token because it gets regenerated regularly, id token on the other hand contains the signature that the server needs to validate that the header and the payload of the token haven't been tampered with, this difference between these two tokens can be observed by the number of . delimited parts contained within the token, access token has only 2 . delimited parts, header and payload, id token has 3 such parts, header, payload and signature
read more information about jwt tokens here: https://auth0.com/learn/json-web-tokens/