I understand how to access the Sharepoint REST API using interactive authentication, i.e. having a user at the computer type a username/password into a webapp. Is there a way to let a commandline app access the API? e.g. connect and query a Sharepoint list without user intervention?
I've registered a native client in the tenant and have an AppId (no app secret) but all API calls return 401 Unauthorized. I've also tried accessing via the Graph API but get 403 Forbidden. These are both using the access_token from the initial client_credentials flow of a tenant registered web app, which I would expected to have worked.
It doesn't appear to be possible to get an access_token using only an AppId as the flow requires a client secret.
This says:
This type of permission requires administrator consent and is also not
available for native client applications
which doesn't appear to make sense as it requires administrator permissions for something that can't be done. If native clients can't access APIs it's not clear what they're for. Perhaps the above refers to web apps rather than native clients, i.e. an Admin can allow a web app to connect using an access_token without a user context.
Regarding getting the token from SharePoint (using the SharePoint REST API) please see my answer to this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52582017/6445723
The mechanism is basically the same, you do the POST request described there from your application and get the answer in the FormDigestValue property. Use this value henceforth in ALL your API calls by placing it into the X-RequestDigest HTTP header.
AFAIK there is no difference in authentication mechanisms for native clients or other web applications. Some libraries like the SharePoint PnPJS can abstract out the REST call above, but they do pretty much the same thing.
You need to enable Basic Authentication credentials are sent in clear text in Authentication Providers. Goto Central Admin>> Security>>Security Authentication providers>> In Right side dropdown select the Application and click on default
Tick Basic Authentication in Claims Authentication Types
Related
I have a Xamarin forms mobile application that is accessing my app service up in azure. I want to secure the APIs so that only my client application can access them. The mobile app does it's own user/password authentication/authorization, so I don't need AD or a 3rd party for that. I just want to secure my APIs. All examples I can find seems to assume there is an AD user authenticated and I can pass a token from that. Is there a simple way to use the Azure "expose api" functionality without using an AD user? The mobile app is using REST api calls, so I'm also struggling with how to even pass in a proper authentication token if I can put one together. Thanks in advance.
One way to secure is adding an API Management in front of your API's and require subscription, then only calls with a specific ocp-apim-subscription-key will be accepted. I don't recomment storing the ocp-apim-subscription-key value in your app as anytime you need to change it, a new version of the app will be required. I recommend returning it after a succesful login by your users, this way, you're free to rotate the ocp-apim-subscription-key key when needed.
Since you are trying to validate the client application only and not the end user, you should either look into OAuth 2.0 - which has a more complex implementation since it encompasses both application and end user authentications - or you could set up JWT authentication which is simpler and which purpose is to authenticate either client applications or end users, not both at the same time like OAuth.
After your implement the authentication on your API(s), you send over the generated token(s) over a Authentication header on your Requests.
I have to develop a SSO system and I have to do it using IdentityServer4. I have gone through the documentation and examples but I have some doubts. To be honest I don't quite get it, but I am really new in Oauth2 and OpenId Connect.
We will have a bunch of clients (web apps), each of one of those will have their own Web APi. And we have to have a centraliced Login App for all of those. I think the example with the javascript client is the closes to the thing we want to achieve. Also, a user might have permission to access one client (app), but not another, so the IdentityServer must provide information about wich clients (apps), that particularly user can access.
So, These are the things I don Understand:
1.- In the documentation I can read there are two tokens, an Identity Token and Access token. But in the examples all I see are the access tokens. It seems to me that the access token is the one with all de info needed. am I wrong?
2.- Also, I have read about de Grant Types and I'am not quite sure wich one we must use. At first I thought to use the ResourceOwner password, because it requires the client, the secret, a user and a password, wich I assumed it could be the end user. I found this example http://sunilrav.com/post/How-to-Customize-Authentication-in-Identity-Server-4 were one could customise the class that validate the user and password. I thought that this could be the way to go but the documentation statesa about this grant type "...This is so called “non-interactive” authentication and is generally not recommended.". The javascript client example uses the implicit Grat type, wich the documentation states is for browser-based applications (our client apps will all be browser based using react).
3.- can my Login app be a Javascript (react) app? The example Quickstart is made in MVC.NET. This login app connects directly to de IS4 server without asking for a access token? (In the example the app is embebed in the IS4).
4.- Can I protect with IS4 a WEB API which is developed in .net framework (4.6.2) and not in .Net Core? I havent Found Any examples.
the documentatios I followed is the offcial. The examples (quickstart) are also there. (I can't post more than two links).
thank you very much for reading and for your help.
Identity Token and Access token
Identity token is the one that contains the identity of the user, that will tell the client app that what user it is. After successful login, user will be redirected to the client app with these tokens. Response will also have claims, such as permission scopes, name , email you can add custom claims as well.
Access token is used to access your protected web api resource. You have to send the access token with each request to access the api.
Grant Types
Grant types is basically how you want your client app to interact with the auth server. https://identityserver4.readthedocs.io/en/release/topics/grant_types.html
can my Login app be a Javascript (react) app? Your client app can be a javascript app but your auth server that is the identity server which will have the login/signup pages(and other login jazz) and account controllers should be you MVC app. As, everything is already done using MVC and Entity framework, why you want to re do everything.
Can I protect with IS4 a WEB API I am not sure about this one, but I dont see why you would not be able to do it.
This is a good answer for basic IdSrv flow!
UPDATE In my understanding, the answer to which Grant Type to use it depends on your client application requirement. If you want to use a Javascript client you can use Implicit Flow, but you won't be able to use refresh tokens and your access token is not 100% secured with the browser as client can access it.
If you want to open your web api to public then you can use client credentials flow. If you want to be more secure you should use Hybrid flow or HybridClient credential flow. ( again depends on the requirements ). with this you will be able to use refresh tokens and in this way your access token would be more secure.
I have a REST API, written with express directly. Nowhere in it do I use session, and authentification is for now done using JWT.
However, I dislike having to handle, save and secure user's credentials, that is when I heard about Azure Active Directory.
Adding passport to my app was easy enought, but that's when trouble started.
First, I had to search what strategy I needed, and all of them seems to require the server to maintain sessions/remember who is logged in, all the while using JWT internally. That seems contradictory, JWT is supposed to remove the need of maintaining session.
Finally, I found this MS example which use the Bearer strategy without session.
After setting it up (changing the config file for the right tenant, client ID, changing the routes for a test app more representative of my API), I tried to use them. The protection work well since I am indeed "Unauthorized". But how do I get a valid token to send?
The MSDN guide that use that quickstart don't mention it at all, just redirecting to the AAD library for Android or iOS, implicitely telling me to develop a test app in another language when I just want a crude tool to test if my test server work at all!
That is especially frustrating since I am pretty sure it is "just" a series of HTTP(S) request on the tenant, and the call to the api with the token attached, but I can't find anything to do just that.
/!\: I know asking for something as vague as "How can I do that" isn't a good question, and this question isn't one. What I am asking is why I couldn't find some tools like POSTMan that implement OAuth and allow to quickly test and debug a OAuth protected API. What are the reason that push MSDN to tell me to write a custom tool myself instead of providing a barebone one?
The code sample you mentioned in the post is using the Azure AD V2.0 endpoint. We can use OAuth 2.0 code grant and client credentials flows to acquire the token from this endpoint.
To compose the OAuth 2.0 request directly you can refer the links below:
v2.0 Protocols - OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Flow
Azure Active Directory v2.0 and the OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow
In addition, the access tokens issued by the v2.0 endpoint can be consumed only by Microsoft Services. Your apps shouldn't need to perform any validation or inspection of access tokens for any of the currently supported scenarios. You can treat access tokens as completely opaque. They are just strings that your app can pass to Microsoft in HTTP requests(refer here).
If you want to protect the custom web API with Azure AD, you can use the Azure AD v1.0 endpoint.
For getting a valid token to send to your API, you'll need to do an auth request to login.microsoftonline.com and get an access token (in the JWT format). Then you can send this token to your api in the http body: "Bearer ey...".
If you want a full sample with a client app that hits that API sample you tried:
Dashboard w/ all the samples for Azure AD Converged Apps
Simple Windows Desktop App
Angular SPA
Node Web API
During the recent Microsoft Cloud roadshow in London, something that came out of one of the talks on App Service was using AAD B2C for authentication.
It is possible currently to add Azure AD as an authentication for an API App:
Calling this API app from a browser based web app with no authorization header results in a 302 redirect immediately followed by a 401 response.
It was mentioned at the cloud event that it would be possible to call an API app anonymously from a web app, and have the azure App service handle the redirection to the AAD login page, get the token on successful login and then pass the call on to the API app and return the data.
However, I am struggling to see how this can be achieved without any responsibility on the calling web app to handle the redirect. Normally you would handle a 401 response from an API by obtaining a bearer token via AAD on the client side and sending it through as the authorisation header with the api request.
I have been through numerous examples on the Azure site and others and all of them are handling the logon/obtaining the token in the client web app.
Is this even possible?
UPDATE I just realized (as pointed out by #Darrel-Miller that you don't really want to allow the user to put the credentials in.
The only thing that is still unclear to me, is where do you want to provide the credentials for AAD?, What is it exactly what you would like to accomplish.
Even more, why would you use AAD if there no user interaction at all.
If all that you want is a secure connection you can just use the standard application key for the web api without enabling AAD. And its as pretty straight forward to just add the MS_ApplicationKey to your header and you are good to go.
As you described in your comment you have a webclient that tries to do the requests and gets the 302, that is why my original answer wast that you would use ADAL. But now that I get deeper into what you want probably what you want to use is KurveJS :
https://github.com/MicrosoftDX/kurvejs
And it has the AAD app model v2 with Active Directoy B2C.
This makes it easy to add third party identity providers such as Facebook and signup/signin/profile edit experiences using AD B2C policies
You can read more about it here:
https://github.com/MicrosoftDX/kurvejs/blob/master/docs/B2C/intro.md
Do you mean this??
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn463788.aspx
Just use ADAL nuget package to handle the call...
You can read this from the post:
As soon as the execution hits the call to AcquireToken, you’ll get the authentication dialog shown in Figure 8. ADAL takes care of contacting the right endpoint and rendering the authentication experience provided by the server in a pop-up dialog without requiring you to write any UI code.
I hope this works for you!
I have a webservice which acts as backend for smartphone apps.
I want to be able to authenticate users as painless as possible, but even though I thought I understood the OAuth I must admit there are some missing pieces here and there.
Authentication:
Let's say the user has an Android phone. He is probably already Authenticated to Google and it would be really nice if I could just extend this authentication to my webservice. Android has OAuth support so the users opens his app, grants permissions to use his google account and the app authenticates him to the web service.
Web service
Since the service should accept users from all kinds of devices it should not be Google specific. It should be possible to register an account and login from any device. I'm unsure if it is possible to register a new account with OAuth alone or if you need some other kind of authentication first - OpenID for instance.
How would the flow be for the generic webservice? A generic API for registering a user and granting him access to an API?
Furthermore - I do not want to control the devices connecting to this service. I can see OAuth requires a consumer_key and a consumer_secret. If I run everything through SSL - is the consumer secret still secret or can I just use some dummy values? Thus avoiding creating a device-registration system where people can acquire a consumer_secret?
For your case, if you want to use Google/Facebook etc as authentication providers, you will need to use the 'Authorization Code' flow of Oauth2. In this case, you register with Google/FB as a developer and get a client id and secret for using their API.
Then you obtain the Login with Google/Facebook button and code, which you will use to fire a "webview" or an embedded browser where the user will be taken to google/facebook and asked to provide his login credentials.
Upon success, an authorization code will be sent to a redirect url that you would have provided while registering as a developer at Google/Facebook. You will need to catch this authorization code and then again call the relevant API to obtain the access token, which you can then use to fetch the user's details to register him in case of first time or authenticate him if he's already registered through this method earlier.