Designing a user content website and the question is for the admin section, from a security point of view, where should it be placed?
same domain and allow admin to enter site like other users from signin form using admin email
Have a separate sub-domain only for admin login
Have a separate secret domain used to access admin features
or any other suggestions?
goal is prevent anyone from knowing about the admin section and to keep it locked as much as possible.
Thanks
Actually I work on a system that uses a separate subdomain, and there's a whole another ASP.NET project dedicated for the Admin section of the parent domain.
This has many advantages for us. Some of them are:
Completly different authentication mechanism for one site and the other.
We can deploy the website without shutting down the admin site and viceversa.
Well, as a basic rule, I'd say it doesn't really matter. Your login form needs to be secure, whether it's exposed or not.
However, I understand the desire to keep the admin area hidden in any case. I personally like this variant the best:
same domain and allow admin to enter site like other users from signin form using admin email
because it doesn't leave any traces on the client computer that are easily detectable (like "admin.example.com" or "example.com/super-secret-admin-area").
Related
I would like to enable viewing a website that I created to one person, whose IP I do not know. Is there a way to hide the website under a simple password (without publishing the page and logging by Facebook etc.)?
Thank you!
If the person can have an account in an active directory you trust, you can add them pretty easily.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/app-service-mobile-how-to-configure-active-directory-authentication
Only users that have access to the AAD (including guests) can see the site afterwards.
I would love to get advice on my current project structure idea. I have been searching regarding node.js multi domain packages but i am not sure if they will suit. I also would like to have a easy to manage apps eg. if i want to modify specific app, i have a feeling a single app will get really full and confusing to manage code wise? Basically i am building a website that will have:
Landing Page - www.maindomain.com
User Dashboard - members.maindomain.com
Admin Dashboard - admin.maindomain.com
Now each subdomain app can communicate to each other if they have the credidentials etc.
Would it be correct to create separate 3 Apps to handle each of the sites?
Is there any security concerns having this kind of 3 app setup?
Can account creation occur upon paypal payment?
Ideal flow would be User visits website on landing page and selects a paid package which in turn would direct to paypal. Upon payment user would be returned to website with account creation form, and said Package(order) would become an option on user dashboard.
Admin can pretty much view everything via admin dashboard pretty standard, setup promos etc.
Thanks for your help and advice.
I currently have a web config file in a web service that is using the following code snippet so that it can access resources on Sharepoint
<identity impersonate="true" userName="[domain admin]" password="[password]"/>
Clearly this situation is not a good idea and we are currently replacing this with the correct way of doing things. However, in the mean time we are creating a new domain user that is NOT the domain admin and using that as a stop gap. The domain admin was used as people were too lazy to determine the right security levels required and a domain admin will be guaranteed access to every resource.
My question is: What is the minimum level of security that this domain user requires in order to continue accessing the Sharepoint Web Service? What sort of things should I be thinking about?
What web service are you talking about exactly? SharePoint web services are permissions aware, just like any other module, so it is different if you want to say read items or create a site. You need to know first what you are trying to accomplish and then give the user the exact permissions to do that
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.
In Moss 2007 you have the ability to set the target audience for each individual web part within a page. Is there a way to preview how the page will look to another user without logging in as that user? What I am looking for is a way for someone with full control/design permissions on a site to be able to preview how the site will be displayed to another user. Any suggestions?
I have a few test accounts that our IS department uses to preview pages, however we do not allow non-IS departamental staff to use those accounts. Those staff members only have access to their one account. So, if a user makes changes the target audience on a web part on one of their pages, right now they have no way to preview how the page will look to someone else other than asking someone else to login & watching over their shoulder. I can't give out the account information for the test accounts, nor can I create new test accounts.
Thanks!
Edit: I have the ability to preview. The problem is that other users with full control of a site can't preview the page. Here's a scenarios: In my school division each school has a site. The principal has full control of his school's site. On the landing page, he wants all the school announcements to be visible. However, some should only be visible to teaching staff, while others need to be visible to the students. He uses audience targetting but cannot preview to see at a glance that the targetting is correct. A lot of the users are not computer savy so things need to be as simple as possible. Also, that was just one scenario, there are other scenarios that are not divided by school. There are many users with full control of a site with different requirements - so it's not feasible to create test accounts for all scenarios.
First I don't think it is possible to have a preview feature if you are using NT security. Maybe it is something you can do with forms authentication but I never used it.
On that subject. I think when you are developing new features or integrating stuff on a MOSS/WSS server you need a little flexibility.
With what I see you have to following things you can do. It is surely more cost effective than developing a custom solution. I assume you are using NT Security.
User accounts : Ask your domain administrator to have dedicated user accounts to play with.
Virtual Machines : Ask to have some virual machines to be able to play with that server combined with tests accounts
Sandboxed environment : Ask your IT dept to create a sandboxed MOSS environment to have to possibility to replicate your actual MOSS environment and create custom user scenarios.
Edit: After re-reading the question I released that you want the users to be able to preview a page. I think you will need to look into writing a preview control that uses Impersonation to load the page. Not sure how feasible this is, but surely someone has created a preview feature. Sounds like a pretty common scenario to me.
Old Answer:
Could you not fire up a non MS browser such as Firefox, which will prompt for the username and password.
You can then just clear the session cookies to be prompted to log in as someone else.
This is the technique I used for an ASP.Net site that used authentication against the domain in a similar manner to SharePoint.
Alternatively, you can create a control/webpart that hooks into the audiences for the site and displays the audience membership to the user (maybe from the GetMembership call). This does not preview the site, but it will give your editors a heads up on who is in each audience. Something that will help them get the audiences correct.
We have made a similar webpart for security group membership.
I think there are two approaches you can take:
Do make use of test accounts to preview the pages. You can ease the "pain" to log in as another user by making use of the RUNAS command (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490994.aspx). So it's possible to just create a shortcut on the desktop that opens a browser making use of another account's credentials. Only that browser instance will work with the test account.
Make a copy (or more copies) of the page that you want to preview, store it in a secured site (so it's only accessible for the principal for example), and tweak the Audience Targetting properties of the web parts on that page/pages.
For previewing target audiences only, the only way to do it is to create a target audience that runs based on a properties in the SSP User Profile Properties.
You can then have a control that allows the editor to change the value stored thier profile, re-compile the profiles and voila (for some description of voila) the user will have change thier audience targetting values to something else.
This would need quite a bit of coding and some thought put into the rules for the audience targetting.
At the end of the day, the most cost effective way is to push back to your infrastructure guys for an account solution that will allow you to have an "reader" account people can use for this function.