I'm exploring options I have when it comes to implementing user authentication and authorization in Angular app with ASP.NET Core 3.1 backend that will be deployed to Azure AppService.
Only selected, invited users will be allowed to use application. There will be no "Create account" page accessible to everyone. There is a possibility that subset of those users will be our company users so leveraging their Active Directory identity and allowing SSO would be great. Application will be multi-tenant. Multi factor authentication might be needed for selected tenants/users (based on role for example). We don't want to allow logging in with 3rd party Identity Providers like FB, Google and so on.
Based on my explorations on I have 2 (4?) options.
ASP.NET Core Identity - simple, builtin, well known. But probably won't allow me to to implement SSO and users will need another login/pass. I'm not sure if it supports inviting users (out of the box) or is this something I would need to implement myself. Same with password resets. It allows me to add custom properties to stored user entity (TenantId) to allow me to implement multitenancy, but I need to deploy SQL Server database and manage it myself.
Azure AD (B2B, B2C) - this is new to me. How I understand it is that with Azure AD Connect I could synchronize users between AD and Azure AD and this would allow me to implement SSO for our company users. Only selected OU's could be synchronized and based on groups in AD they could be assigned different roles in our app. Then assigning roles is responsibility of people which are already managing those users in AD. If person is released and their account is removed/locked in AD they lose access to our app. If they're removed from specific group they lose access to our app. And probably all our company users are already in Azure AD - I see myself and my colleagues in it when I use my work e-mail to login to Azure portal. When it comes to supporting users which are not in our AD I tested that I can add "Guest users". At first I thought this is something I would need Azure AD B2C for but looks like it's not the case. Then what is Azure B2B and B2C for? In this case I don't need to manage SQL database and have user managment for free. Both on AD and Azure Portal site. I don't know if I can add custom properties to users (TenantId).
Which one of those options is better? Maybe there are other options?
Azure AD B2B is indeed the way to go for your requirements.
B2C is required when you would like to open up your application to external users while allowing them to login using social providers.
You can read more about the differences between Azure AD B2B and B2C.
Related
We want to build a .NET and Angular application which our internal users and invited external users can have access. We initially tried to build that by connecting to our internal azure-ad but that would mean that external users are part of our internal azure ad. One approach was to use Azure B2C AD but then not sure of how to get internal users in that AD without duplication. Eventually, we will have roles for users and wanted to check if we can avoid duplication of maintenance in multiple azure AD.
Hopefully, we are not doing something new i.e. creating an application that can be used by internal employees with their office 365 credentials and allowing invited external users to access the same application. Roles govern what part of the functionality is accessible within the application.
What are the possible approaches / recommended approach?
Use AAD B2C and add AAD as an identity provider to B2C, see here.
Lets say I set up and create a new Azure Account and Subscription. Azure automatically creates me an Azure AD called "somedomain.onmicrosoft.com".
Later I deploy REST API and Angular SPA app to Azure. Since I'm using Azure AD for authentication and authorization on both of the applications I register them on my Azure AD, under the domain "somedomain.onmicrosoft.com".
Everything works fine, however after some time I realize that I want to allow access to my services/apps to other organizations. After doing some research I realize that what I want to achieve is multi-tenancy.
In order to register a new tenant I do the following:
Go to Azure portal.
On the left blade menu click on "Create a resource" and search for "Azure Active Directory".
Create a new directory called "tenant-1.onmicrosoft.com".
Next, I update my registered apps (on "somedomain.onmicrosoft.com") according to this documentation - enabling multi tenancy and common endpoint.
After all of this, both users from AD "somedomain.onmicrosoft.com" and "tenant-1.onmicrosoft.com" should be able to authenticate and access my services.
Question
Is this the correct way of achieving and implementing multi tenancy?
You don't need to create a new Azure AD tenant (xyz.onmicrosoft.com). Just register the application in the existing tenant or mark the existing application as multi-tenant. Then, existing other AAD tenants will be able to signup to use your app without doing further registrations. You will need to modify your app code to accept tokens from other tenants, e.g. enter link description here This link points to a regular .NET web app, not SPA. You will need to translate it to your SPA environment.
I'm not sure of your high level use case but one thing to note about the AAD multi-tenant approach. You are assuming that person signing in has an Azure AD tenant, for example through Office365.
If they don't have an Azure AD then they won't be able to sign in.
You 'could' create an AAD for each new tenant and create a user account in there.
They would have the bob#mydomain.onmicrosoft.com address and could add their own domain later.
That way they can then take advantage of all the enterprise features of AzureAD.
It might be a use case, but I think you would need an AAD per tenant and I'm not sure of the limits or if this is best practice.
You can also look at B2C if you want social logins/other OpenIDConnect.
We are designing an application which will be used by client's employee, some of their vendors and consumers as well. All of these three types of user will have the different set of rights.
We were analyzing the Azure AD and found that Azure B2B can be used for employees and vendors whereas B2C can be used for consumers. So, we need both of them. Can we setup our application in such a way that if can authenticate from B2B and B2C both? Or any other suggestion to implement this.
Thanks In Advance
You can totally setup an app to authenticate with multiple directories.
Setup one Azure AD that will be used by employees, where partners can be added through B2B. Then also setup a B2C directory for the customers.
On your app side you need to display a choice for the user: if they want to sign in as an employee/partner or as a customer. Then you redirect to the correct sign-in page.
You'll need to define the app twice, once in both directories.
The actual implementation will vary based on your tech stack, but in ASP.NET Core you would need to setup multiple Open ID Connect middleware. And none of them can use AutomaticChallenge, as you do need to know where to redirect the user, you can't really choose for them.
Update to B2C allows you to do it all from there now
Azure AD B2C now allows custom policies (preview feature). This means you can use any OpenId Connect provider for sign-in, including Azure AD of course.
This new feature allows you to:
Create a B2C tenant with custom policy for employee/partner login through Azure AD
Send all users to authenticate with your B2C tenant
Users can choose if they want to sign in with social accounts or if they are an employee or partner
If they choose to sign in as employee or partner, they would be redirected to your Azure AD
In the end your app gets a token from B2C telling where the user signed in, so you can then do authorizations based on that info
My organization has our own custom software solution hosted as a Web App in Azure. We are utilizing Azure AD for our authentication security. Some of our customers may have their own Office365 AD tenants, and so we take advantage of the B2B capabilities to invite these users to our apps and have some visibility of their accounts in our AD tenant (as external users).
We have one customer who would like for us to integrate with their Shibboleth service. We would like to support using their Shibboleth service as the identity provider for their users, and allow their MFA settings to be honored. We don't want to force them to create new identities in AD. What would be needed on our side to support this sort of trusted federation with Shibboleth? Ideally we'd like to be able to see their identities surfaced as external users in our AD tenant so that we're using a single security model for our app.
Azure AD's only equivalent for "trust" or "federation" with others is, as you've been doing, via B2B. Currently there is no B2B-like equivalent that supports direct federation to non-Azure AD IdPs.
However it is possible to set up Azure AD so that it leverages a third party IdP as its primary auth mechanism.
You should be able combine these two approaches to achieve what you want.
Have your customer sign-up for Azure AD
Have your customer configure Shibboleth as per the steps in this article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/jj205456.aspx
Add your customer's users to your Azure AD via B2B as you've been doing for everyone else.
We want to create a MVC web application using claims-based authentication, expecting roles as one of the claims. We want to Federate authentication providers using the Azure Access Control Service to manage this federation. One of the authentication providers is our Azure AD.
The problem is that Azure AD doesn't seem to be able to generate role (or even group) claims. What is the appropriate method to manage group or role access in Azure AD and have role claims served by Azure Access Control Service.
Thanks.
Edit:
A previous comment asked for details: We want to provide access to our cloud application to 3rd parties using their active directory (to simplify user management for them). Our application has a few levels of access to information that the 3rd parties can configure. We were hoping they could do this in their AD (based on our instructions). Groups seemed like the obvious choice, but if there is another way that works, as long as we can provide instructions, it'll work.
We want our application to get claims for a user's level of access. If we had only one partner that was using Azure AD, we could use the graph API against that endpoint, but with multiple partners changing over time, we wanted to federate them so our application only needs to trust the federation server. We were assuming that we needed Azure ACS to manage the federation.
AAD does support roles / groups and you can administer them from the Azure Portal.
Howeve, these are not passed in the "canned" set of claims.
You need to use the Graph API and then convert them e.g. Windows Azure Active Directory: Converting group memberships to role claims.
Update:
ACS requires something to federate with. You can't hook a customer AD up to ACS - you need something like ADFS on top of their AD.
I assume your cloud app. runs in Azure?
Then make your app. multi-tenanted. If your customers have their own Azure tenant, it will work. You just need to add the Graph API code to your app. ACS is not required.
Your customers then run DirSync. This keeps their Azure tenant in sync. with their AD changes.
So two options:
Customer does not have Azure tenant. They install ADFS and federate with AAD.
Customer's who do have Azure tenant use DirSync.
Good news: we have recently turned on the Application Roles and Groups Claim features in Azure AD.
Get a quick overview here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2014/12/18/azure-active-directory-now-with-group-claims-and-application-roles.aspx
Deep dive post and video on app roles feature is here: http://www.dushyantgill.com/blog/2014/12/10/roles-based-access-control-in-cloud-applications-using-azure-ad/
Deep dive post and video on app roles feature is here: http://www.dushyantgill.com/blog/2014/12/10/authorization-cloud-applications-using-ad-groups/
Hope that helps.
Groups aren't the best choice because they are unique within each directory. Unless you get your customers to define a set of groups that have well-known names and match against the strings, that is (the object IDs of a group is different per directory even if they have the same name). I'm actually from the Azure AD team and we are seriously considering releasing a feature to allow you to define roles in your app that your customers can assign their users to. Please stay tuned on this. In the meantime, unfortunately groups are the only way to go. You would have to call "GetMemberGroups" using the Graph to retrieve the groups that the user is assigned to.
What are your timelines for releasing this application? You can contact me directly to see if we can work with your scenario.