I have created new web service using VS 2019 ASP.NET Core Web API from the project template with AAD authenticalion. It creates a simple ValuesController and sets up AzureAdBearer authentication in StartUp, but there is no pointers of what do next. There are no doc links in the created project, and no comments. I could not find any documents on https://learn.microsoft.com/ referring this template, all examples there refer to other sample projects, which use different code constructs, authentication types, etc.
Out of the box, the project simply returns 401, whether run locally or published to Azure Web Service.
Is there any guidance on what to do next and make this template work?
A WebApi is out on the internet waiting for a client to call it with an access token in its headers.
Usually, to learn about this scenario, you would create a couple of projects in Visual Studio, a Web Api and a client app of some sort that calls this web api.
The client app will request an access_token for this web api from Azure AD and sent it along in its call to the api.
The generated code validates this access token to ensure that its a valid one and issued for this Api (among other things).
I'd suggest you try one of Please use the samples provided at Azure Active Directory Home page for developers
You can refer to code sample : Calling a web API in an ASP.NET Core web application using Azure AD .
Your web api is now protected by Azure AD , if any client call your api , it should append Azure AD Access token as a Bearer token to the Authorization header in an HTTP request . Your web api will validate the token and authorizes the user using the JWT bearer authentication middleware(AzureAdBearer middleware) .
Your client app could uses the OpenID Connect middleware and the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL.NET) to obtain a JWT bearer token for the signed-in user using the OAuth 2.0 protocol. Then the client app can use that token to access your protected API . See TodoListWebApp project .
Related
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.
I am using Microsoft Authentication (Azure AD) to log in a user to an app.
I have a separate node.js API which I'd like an authenticated user to call but as it is an external API how do I check that the user who is requesting a resource is authenticated?
What is the flow, are there any good Node.js resources?
You need to protect the node js api with Azure AD. After that, you can implement a client(the app you used to login) that is able to pass authentication tokens to the API.
Here is an sample which contains a web API running on ASP.NET Core 2.0 protected by Azure AD. The web API is accessed by an ASP.NET Core 2.0 web application on behalf of the signed-in user.
The scenario is the same as yours, but I only find .net samples.
I have a cordova application which I am authenticating using azure AD cordova plugin and it all works fine. But now I am integrating services published in another domain and I am unable to authenticate these services using the mobiletoken generated after authentication. Can someone guide me how to secure multiple domain APIs published as Azure web APIs and use token to access the secured APIs.
I have tried to modify the secured settings in azure portal of one of the APIs by including reply URLs for both the APIs
When I include the token in the header of the ajax requests going into 2nd domain endpoints, I just get "unauthorized" error.
It sounds like you're able to get an access token in a Cordova setting and you're having issues accessing multiple web apis after the user has logged in.
The authentication protocol I would suggest you utilize is the on-behalf of flow which is doocumented here : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth2-on-behalf-of-flow
Per the summary :
The OAuth 2.0 On-Behalf-Of flow (OBO) serves the use case where an application invokes a service/web API, which in turn needs to call another service/web API. The idea is to propagate the delegated user identity and permissions through the request chain. For the middle-tier service to make authenticated requests to the downstream service, it needs to secure an access token from the Microsoft identity platform, on behalf of the user.
This is to get a new access token with the right audience to gain access to web api 2.
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/