So I've read numerous articles on a password system for a web app, and they all seem very confusing. Some say you need to hash your PW's AND establish an https secure connection, others say you just need to hash AND salt your PW's.
I just know, after this has been done millions of times, there's PROBABLY some sort of library out there that can do a bunch of things for me for a password inputted on a client side, and give me something to save securely in my SQL Server 2008 database.
Do I need to worry about all the https secure connection stuff? Can I just make sure I hash the PW correctly? To hash it, do I need any external libraries or can I create a secure user/pw system entirely in .NET?
I've never done this before so any articles, tips, links would be very helpful. Thanks.
If you don't want to roll your own you can always use ASP.Net Membership
ASP.NET membership gives you a built-in way to validate and store user credentials. ASP.NET membership therefore helps you manage user authentication in your Web sites. You can use ASP.NET membership with ASP.NET forms authentication by using with the ASP.NET login controls to create a complete system for authenticating users.
ASP.NET membership supports facilities for:
Creating new users and passwords.
Storing membership information (user names, passwords, and supporting data) in Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, or an alternative data store.
Authenticating users who visit your site. You can authenticate users programmatically, or you can use the ASP.NET login controls to create a complete authentication system that requires little or no code.
Managing passwords, which includes creating, changing, and resetting them . Depending on membership options you choose, the membership system can also provide an automated password-reset system that takes a user-supplied question and response.
Exposing a unique identification for authenticated users that you can use in your own applications and that also integrates with the ASP.NET personalization and role-management (authorization) systems.
Specifying a custom membership provider, which allows you to substitute your own code to manage membership and maintain membership data in a custom data store
Configuring an ASP.NET Application to Use Membership
There's also a project on github called Membership Starter Kit for MVC
The default MVC3 Internet Application template (file-new project) has this setup for you already, simply add [Authorize()] to the controllers/methods you want to protect. Don't roll something new, use what's there for you. In addition, please use SSL as someone can easily steal a session by sniffing traffic and simply using your cookie. It's that easy.
Related
I am currently looking for a method to provide site wide authentication, for services exposed to the cloud, on the site I am responsible for. Some services are a Python based, some in PHP and some in Perl. Individual services would need to be able to get access to the user profile and the associated roles.
On the main page users are logged in and a cookie is created using a JWT token. The main site is using NodeJS for the auth system and is built in-house.
At this point I am wondering whether we should use OAuth2 across the site or whether there is another approach that may be simpler, where we don’t need to deal with inter domain requirements?
The approach you're currently investigating is the re-use of a JWT as an authentication token across multiple services. Although it's technically possible - it is not the ideal secure approach.
The most secure approach is for separation of application contexts, whereby each application should be tied to a different application credential (in OAuth2 terms). This is ensures that the user receives a credential unique to that application, allows the credentials to be managed/revoked separately and audited in isolation.
To implement this smoothly for UI flows requires an identity provider that supports SSO, and also assumes that each UI application can handle negotiation to the IDP to access that SSO session.
For interactions that are system to system authenticated, eg. Python, you would need to use system to system authentication (OAuth2 client credentials) that again have its own credential. In the case where you need access to the end-user's profile, a management api key (or similar) would be required.
As with many applications, my service's authentication logic lives in the application code. Now however, I need to expand my authentication to incorporate 3rd party identity providers for single sign on.
I want to retain the old authentication behavior (database lookup) but also want to add support for 3rd party identity providers.
With this increase in complexity, does it make sense to separate the authentication logic to its own service? In this model the application server will redirect unauthenticated users to the authentication server. After authentication is successful, the authentication server will redirect back to the application server.
Is this approach sound?
If you have available servers and infrastructure budget, let your web application perform the authentication, using a community maintained library.
Generally its no recommended to build one by yourself.
Store your users in a database table.
Authentication using other sites problems:
Your visitor may not want to have an account with 3rd party site.
It results in giving too much information to the 3rd party site (who share much of it with other sites which use their authentication mechanism).
It is generally a good idea to separate your authentication logic and have a different service perform that task. This is also true for other 'cross cutting' concerns such as authorization and SSL offloading. It gives you a simpler development environment and in general an app that is easier to reason about (for example, you don't have to worry about authentication while in development mode and you can develop the services independently which goes a long way in terms of productivity and velocity).
In order to compose the authentication service with your application, it is better to have a third component that orchestrates and routes the calls accordingly (as opposed to having autentication related code in your application).
We need a new authentication server for our large business system (ERP). The previous authentication server was internally developed. Now that we need a new one we will first try to find an already existing authentication server that we can use. Can anyone recommend an authentication server? Remember that this is a business system, so things like Facebook login is not an option. Do microsoft / google or others have any authentication servers that can be installed and run locally?
Seems like you need to store the usernames in your DB, because you do not want to be dependent on 3rd party to store them for you. Furthermore, you do not want to force your users to have accounts in the 3rd party (e.g. Facebook, Google).
So AFAIK, the only option for you is to maintain your own authentication-server...
The good news: you have oauth-2 packages that you can use, and I've written a project that implements all authentication-server flows, such as registration, forgot password, etc.
You can see a demo here.
HTH.
Looking for a pointer in the right direction ...
Is there a mechanism which allows you to configure SharePoint in such a way that:
if a user has been successfully authenticated within a SharePoint site that there is some kind of "authentication token" what can be passed or is available to 3rd party sites
or a way for 3rd party sites to "recognize" that the user is currently authenticated within a sharepoint environment
all 3rd party apps can be modified to accommodate whatever needs to be done
but the constraint is: SharePoint may or may not be a hosted (by a separate service provider) and how the original authentication took place is irrelevant i.e. just need to know they authenticated ok, not how
EDIT
scenario to help clarify:
authenticated SP users require access to a 3rd party service provider for additional content. a "link" on their SP site redirects through to the 3rd party. the 3rd party needs to recognize the referrer (based on a collection of evidence supplied by the request) so that it need not challenge for a secondary authentication process.
one of the 3rd parties is me. the SP instances are many and varied and would be any one of my clients (which i don't offer support to, just provide a content service to).
so the attempt is to solve more of a general "community/ecosystem" problem.
Going on the small amount of information available here.... You are probably going to use Windows Authentication (via Active Directory) or Forms based authentication.
If you are using AD within your organization and the other server you are authenticating to is using the same AD, it's a no brainer. If it's AD based but both servers are using different domains, it's much more complex. One option would be to setup a trusted share between the ADs.
If you are using Forms Based authentication it becomes a bit more of an issue. If both servers are using the same FBA, you could create the authentication cookie in SharePoint and then add the cookie as a header to a Request object and then redirect to the server.
If they are different authentication methods totally, you need to determine if your security requirements will allow users to authenticate via some URL based mechanism (like querystrings) and then develop the logic on your SP box to create the URL to authentication.
Your requirements are a little vuage but this should point you in the right direction.
Plan authentication methods (SharePoint Server 2010)
Specifically Claims based authentication.
I'm guessing that by "3rd party sites" you mean sites that aren't hosted in your domain. If that's the case, then the servers won't be able to use your AD authentication (unless you share them, which probably isn't worth it).
I would suggest modifying the way users are authenticated on the 3rd party servers, as you have control over how you send your users over there. You could easily encrypt their usernames/emails/unique IDs and a timestamp (to make sure they can't bookmark that link) in a query string.
The information is then decrypted on the 3rd party server. Invalid information and they are redirected to your login page. Valid information and the 3rd knows that they were authenticated in your sharepoint app.
Your question is very confusing.
SharePoint may or may not be a hosted
What do you mean by that?
Are you invoking a 3rd party web app from a SharePoint page? You can get the current user using SPWeb.CurrentUser property and make use of it.
We have one web application (sharepoint) that collects information from disparate sources. We would like to be able to link users to the main websites of those various sources and have them pre-authenticated. I.E. they enter their credentials for the other sources (which are a number of different types LDAP, AD and home grown!) and we retrieve some information for them, and remember there details (Possibly Single Sign-on to keep em nice and safe). The user can then click a link that will open the full app in another window already authenticated.
Is this even likely to be possible?
Office Server has a Single-Sign-On api as a builtin feature. you may want to look into that. It enables you to register user credentials securely, and to access it at runtime.
You need to act as a web browser acts to different sites with storing credentials (usually in cookies) locally. Use therefore a a proper client library with cookie support. This could go probably for most of sites. There are sites using HTTP authentication, which are also easier to access from appropriate client libraries. The most demanding can be access to SSL websites, but again, most client HTTP libraries cover that nowadays as well.
All you need now is just to prepare your web application to act as a proxy to all those separate web resources. How exactly this is done in Sharepoint, well, I hope others will answer that...
True Single Sign-on is a big task. Wikipedia describes common methods and links to a few SSO projects.
If you want something lighter, I've used this approach in the past:
Create a table to store temporary security tokens somewhere that all apps can access.
From the source app (Sharepoint in your case), on request of an external app, save a security token (maybe a guid, tight expiration, and userid) in the token table.
Redirect to a request broker page/handler in the destination app. Include the final page requested and the guid in the request.
In the broker, look up the security token. If it exists and hasn't expired, authenticate, authorize, and redirect to the final page if everything is good. If not, send a permissions err.
Security-wise, a guid should be near impossible to guess. You can shrink risk by letting the tokens expire very quickly - it shouldn't take more than a few seconds to call the broker.
If the destination app uses Windows Auth and doesn't have role-based logic, you shouldn't have to do much. Just redirect and let your File/UrlAuthorization handle it. You can handle role-based permissions with the security token db if required.