What are the basic functionality which it provides?
Specifically for the person who has never used asp.net built in stuff.
The MSDN tutorial is confusing me a lot. Claims, OWIN,etc are going above my head.
What I can make out of all this is - The Identity framework helps me to manage my application plus social logins. It handles my cookie,etc.
What if I have just one role in my application - just the plain user?
Should I go for the Identity then or I should implement my own custom thing?
Any help is appreciated.
If you are starting from scratch, build a sample MVC project with individual membership option, which will create the following components for you:
Login module that creates and manages authentication cookies
Simple database to store basic user data (credentials, name)
EF code to interact with the database
This will most likely meet your use case for a user without roles and attributes.
OWIN really has nothing to do with authentication, it is a new spec for building web apps. The login module happens to be implemented according to this spec and it sounds cool, so Microsoft likes to throw this term around a lot.
If you are not planning to have authorization logic in the app, then you don't need to worry about Claims. Claims is another term for user attributes (login, name, roles, permissions). The Claims collection will be populated by the framework, but you most likely won't use it. If you need just the user id/name, the old ASP.NET interfaces are still there to get this data.
As far as implementing your own, I've seen people here ditching the database and EF code, especially if they already have an existing user store. You just need to implement a credential verification logic against your store. You don't want to build your own cookie management, though. Use the login module provided by Microsoft or well established third party systems (SiteMinder, Tivoli, etc.)
Looks at this open source project for a good alternative to ASP.NET Identity.
This is a very well put together tutorial that explains many of these concepts, you can get a free trial to the site to see it.
Related
I am working on a project which needs User Authentication. The "Clients" are iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin) native applications. The original form of the API (NodeJS) used Facebook and Account Kit for OAuth and Phone authentication respectively. Since Account Kit shutdown, we moved to Firebase Phone Authentication for Phone but left Facebook in its original form. Now, we're wanting to consolidate our Authentication providers (to Firebase) but I can't seem to find a way to "convert" or "import" Facebook users to Firebase-based Facebook users.
So far, I've read through the Documentation, including the category about importing users, but it doesn't seem to indicate an ability to maintain backwards compatibility, while also moving forward to Firebase. What I mean is, it has an ability to set information, but it doesn't indicate that the same information will be used to authenticate that user as the same unique visitor.
What I am looking for is either transitory logic, which will handle this during login, or preferably, a "bulk-insert" type migration. Essentially, I want to have it setup so that the API only needs to keep a single authentication UID, and use only a single third party (even if they then use another subsequent third party) while maintaining user uniqueness (so that it doesn't create a new user for the same Facebook account).
Part of my problem in creating a temporary patch (not necessary if the main question is answered) is that I don't know of a way to differentiate between a Facebook UID and a Firebase UID to fork the logic. Again, this is only relevant if there isn't a solution for migration.
Feel free to request any more details that would be useful.
Update #1
I realized my question was open ended in what I was asking. I've been digging further and can better define my question:
I need a way to bulk insert users into Firebase's Authentication with a provider of Facebook. I know I can import them, via admin.auth().importUsers([...]) and that I can create accounts via admin.auth().createUser({...}) but when I do the former I can't seem to get back the user's UID, and the latter doesn't seem to allow specifying a provider. Am I missing something?
I want login system in my capsule so that i can provide user more recommendation based on their profile of interest. So far, neither I am able to find any document related to login facility nor any example. It would be appreciated if will get any document or example.
Bixby supports logging in through OAuth 2.0, and this is the best way to guide your users through a login flow.
You will need to provide your own service to handle this OAuth flow, as Bixby Developer Center does not offer any web hosting services.
https://bixbydevelopers.com/dev/docs/dev-guide/developers/actions.using-oauth
Also is there a possibility that user can user can use app as a guest
user if no login credentials?
When you define your endpoints, you can define Actions that require OAuth and other Actions that do not require OAuth and the latter ones will define the "guest user" flow that is capable within your capsule prior to logging in.
If you don't need all the features of OAuth, and only need to store a few things between sessions with the same user, you may use the $vivContext.bixbyUserId value as an anonymous, but unique identifier for a user, and store their preferences using that id as a key, in a 3rd party database that you maintain.
I've done this with the "My Brain" capsule, to store quick memories/notes for users, without any requirement that they login or establish an account. I've created a tutorial version of the My Brain capsule that outlines the steps you need to use AWS for this purpose. Please feel free to clone or fork it and customize it for your needs.
What Cross-Domain Single Sign-On implementation best solves my problem?
I have two domains (xy.com & yz.com) which already have their own database of users and are already implementing their user authentications separately. Recently there has been the need to implement CDSSO so that users dont have to log in each time they try to access resources from both domains.
Ideally the CDSSO implementation I hope to use should allow custom implementation of authentication, as I hope to call API's provided by both domains during authentication to confirm a user exists in at least one of the domains user database.
I've been looking at Sun's OpenSSO which seems to provide a means to extend its AMLoginModule class yet this seems to be a long thing and more annoyingly they seem to stick to GlassFish.
I've also considered developing a custom CDSSO to solve our needs. Is this advisable?
Is this achievable using Suns OpenSSO considering the disparate user database as I there will be no need to make use of the User db that OpenSSO requires?
Are there any simpler means of achieving what I intend to achieve?
In addition both applications which exist on the two domains were developed using PHP. How does this have an effect considering Suns OpenSSO is based on Java EE?
Are there any clearly specified steps on implementing OpenSSO and or any other SSO implementations from start to finish?
I suggest you to use simpleSAMLphp in order to deploy an Identity Provider and 2 Service Provider (for each app).
SimpleSAMLphp allows you to select multiple authentication source and is not hard to build your own authsource that consults the 2 databases.
My experience in SAML says that the fact of not consolidating the Identity of the user in 1 unique authsource is a bad idea due several reasons:
* identity conflicts: what happen if you have the same user registered with different mail (if that is the field yoy use to identify the user) and you try to access? You could be logged in different account each time.
* what happen if you add a 3rd service, do you gonna add a 3rd database
* what happen if user change its data in one app, the other gonna be no synched?
* what happen if user uses different passwords?
I recommend you to execute a migration process before adding the SAML support and build a unique database for all your identities and unify the registration/edit profile/password recovery process of both sites in one.
SimpleSAMLphp has good documentation, but I can provide to you any documentation related to the process that I suggested.
We want to implement SSO functionality in our organization, but we're not really sure what our options are, and what the benefits / disadvantages for the different solutions might be.
-We have multiple old ASP(Active Server Pages) sites which should use SSO
-We have multiple ASP.net web-Applications which should use SSO
-We want Sharepoint to use the SSO
-CRM (Biztalk?) integration (Additional information about the user, such as Address, company, etc )
Since we're primarly .net, c#, Microsoft oriented, my first idea was to use Active Directory.
I've also noticed that there is something called ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode), and ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services), but I can't really say I understand when/where these should be used.
Here is a brief overview of the different web-applications
-"My Personal Page" : User log's into an application where they can modify their personal information along with their company-information and their employees. (Asp.Net)
-E-learning application (ASP)
-CMS system for web-publishing (ASP.Net)
-Sharepoint sites
I haven't really been able to find any articles that can tell me "AD is a great choice! , you can use it everywhere", so If anyone has got any experience /feedback to give me on this, it would be really helpful.
Also: How should rights/roles be managed ? Should all access/rights/roles for each application be stored in AD, or should this be stored in the applications themselves.
IE : AD stores the roles:
"Cms" <-allowed to login to the cms system
"Cms.Article.AddAllowed" <-allowed to add article
"Cms.Article.DeleteAllowed" <-allowed to delete article
Or should this information be split up, so that AD holds information about which applications the user is allowed to log into, while the application itself holds information about what the user is allowed to do within the application when logged in
AD rights:
"Cms" <-Allowed to login to the cms system
Cms rights:
"Article.AddAllowed" <-allowed to add article
"Article.DeleteAllowed" <-allowed to delete article
So, when the user logs in, they are first authenticated against AD, and if that goes ok, the rights for the Cms application is fetched from a rights-table in the cms system ?
What are my options ? What other solutions other than AD do I have ?
Thank you for any feedback, its much appreciated !
We have done something similar in my organization. Here is the overall flow:
User requests web page
User is redirect to login screen along with SAML request
User authenticates against Active Directory
User is passed back to request web page with SAML response
User group/rights information is retrieved from database
If user requests page from another website same process occurs however if the user still has a session or selected the "remember me" feature then user does not have authenticate and gets logged in directly.
We use Sharepoint, but have not setup SSO yet. I believe Sharepoint gets the rights of the user from its own backend database/system. We also have a homegrown system to update user's groups/rights. I know Sharepoint can use web services so you could possible update Sharepoint when using a centralized user management system (of course you'd have to build that). The main thing is finding out where Sharepoint gets its information about the user and how you can tie your existing system to it...
I wouldn't rely on Active Directory to store group/rights information. It a pain to deal with compared to a database and is not flexible. It's fine for authentication and password management you just have to tie the user on Active Directory to your database system.
As far as I know, Active Directory is only practical for users within your domain. You would need an administrator to manage all those users and to add new users.
I've been working on a project myself where I wanted users to sign in, just to know their identity. I did not even care about their access rights but just wanted an identity on every visitor, something more reliable than an IP address, cookie, session key or whatever else. So I first asked my administrators if I could use Active Directory for this project. Sure, I could. But the webhost wasn't connected to our company domain so I would end up with only one user. Yeah, my administrator is a bit sarcastic sometimes.
So I started to explore SSO options. OpenID like this site is a good option and you could even implement your own OpenID server and require all visitors to sign on there first. It's a very powerful technique and you have less worries about managing users in your project. (Because the OpenID provider takes care of this.)
However, I ended up using CardSpace instead. :-) With CardSpace, every user can create their own user-token and store it on their own system. To log on, the website just asks for the card and the user just clicks on it. Those cards can be migrated to other systems but tend to be tied to a single computer and user, most of the time. (Although users can share a card!)
Rights and Roles are a different matter than Authentication. People always think they're connected while in reality, these are two different things. First, use OpenID or CardSpace or another authentication technique to verify the identity of the user. It doesn't matter how they're identified, you just need an identifier.
Next, you need rights and roles. Roles are basically just user-groups and you can connect an identity to a group. Or to multiple groups. And rights would be linked to roles, not users. But how you're going to divide these roles just depends on the applications. Just remember that someone who is an administrator in your version control system should not be an administrator in your customer database. Roles tend to be application-defined, thus every application could manage their own rights and roles and just needs a way to link these to an identity.
I myself just needed identities so I knew whom to blame when something ended up messed up. Then again, when there's only 5 users, things tend to become quite simple.
I'm starting on a project to allow an existing web application to use active directory for authentication but leaving authorization within the application. I want to start off simple so I was thinking a user would type their AD username/password into my existing login form, I would then do an ldap bind against the AD server to authenticate the user.
Once the user is authenticated, I would pull that user from my database which has all the authorization information as to what functions the user can see.
My question is what is the best AD element to store in my table to make the association? In the past I've used username but after looking at some of the elements that AD returns I was wondering if I should use the security ID or GUID or something else?
I've been burned when a username changes like an employee gets married or divorced... so I know that is brittle.
I was targeting windows 2003 AD and above if that makes a difference; this is for a product where some clients have large AD forest and some are small networks.
Storing the SID is the most reliable approach; this is the unique ID that all Microsoft AD things use, security groups, permissions, etc.
If you're building on .Net you should seriously consider .Net 3.5, there's a new namespace System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement that greatly simplifies code here and gives you nice neat objects to go against.
Unless users share computers, why not use Windows integrated logon? Much easier on the users, easier on yourself as developer, and more secure (one less place a password can be sniffed).
Need I mention that allowing user identities to change is poor corporate security policy? Makes traceability harder, permits some novel attack vectors, and gives you this headache.
As Nick mentions, the SID is a stable identifier, but not something you should ask a user to enter for him/herself!