Introduction to the AppFabric Access Control Service ...az12722.vo.msecnd.net/wazplatformtrainingcourse2-02/Labs/IntroToAC... · Overview Connecting one application to its users is

Hands-On Lab

Introduction to the AppFabric Access Control Service (September 2010 Labs Release)

Lab version: 1.0.0 Last updated: 11/16/2010

CONTENTS

OVERVIEW ................................................................................................................................................... 3

EXERCISE 1: USE ACCESS CONTROL SERVICE FOR ACCEPTING USERS FROM MULTIPLE

IDENTITY PROVIDERS ................................................................................................................................ 6 Task 1 – Creating the Initial Solution .................................................................................................... 6

Task 2 – Signing-up for Windows Azure AppFabric Labs Access Control Service and Creating the

Service Namespace ............................................................................................................................. 11

Task 3 – Configuring the Allowed Identity Providers, the Relying Party and the Signing Certificate . 14

Task 4 – Configuring a Website to Accept Tokens from Access Control Service ................................ 23

Exercise 1: Verification ........................................................................................................................ 27

Exercise 1: Summary ............................................................................................................................... 29

EXERCISE 2: USE CLAIMS FOR AUTHORIZING USERS ...................................................................... 30 Task 1 – Visualizing the Claims from the Access Control Service ....................................................... 30

Task 2 – Creating Authorization Rules ................................................................................................ 32

Task 3 – Authorizing Based on the Claims Provided by Access Control Service ................................. 35



EXERCISE 3: TAKE CONTROL OF THE SIGN-IN EXPERIENCE ........................................................... 38 Task 1 – Hosting a Login Page as Part of your Application ................................................................. 39



SUMMARY .................................................................................................................................................. 45

Overview

Connecting one application to its users is one of the most basic requirements of any solution, whether

deployed on-premises, in the cloud or on both.

The emergence of standards is helping to break the silos which traditionally isolate accounts stored by

different web sites and business entities, however offering application access to users coming from

multiple sources can still be a daunting task. As of today, if you want to open your application to users

coming from Facebook, Live ID, Google and business directories the brute-force approach demands you

to lean and implement four different authentication protocols. Changes in today’s world happen fast

and often, forcing you to keep updating your protocol implementations to chase the latest evolutions of

the authentication mechanisms of the user repositories. All this can require a disproportionate amount

of energy, leaving you with fewer resources to focus on your business.

Figure 1

A functional view of the Access Control Service

Enter the AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS). ACS offers you a way to outsource authentication and

decouple your application from all the complexity of maintaining a direct relationship with all the

identity providers you want to tap from. ACS takes care of engaging every identity provider with its own

authentication protocol, normalizing the authentication results in a protocol supported by the .NET

framework tooling (namely the Windows Identity Foundation technology, or WIF) regardless of from

where the user is coming from. WIF allows you in just few clicks to elect the ACS as the authentication

manager for your application; from that moment on ACS takes care of everything, including providing a

UI for the user to choose among all the recognized identity providers.

Furthermore, ACS offers you greater control over which user attributes should be assigned for every

authentication event; again in synergy with WIF, those attributes (called claims) can be easily accessed

for taking authorization decisions without forcing the developer do understand or even be aware of the

lower level mechanisms that the authentication protocols entail.

In this introductory hands-on lab you will learn how to take advantage of the ACS for outsourcing

authentication, managing multiple identity sources, performing some basic authorization tasks and take

control of the authentication experience. You will discover that it takes less to do it than to describe it!

Objectives

In this Hands-On Lab, you will learn how to:

Configure your application to outsource authentication to ACS

Configure ACS to include the identity providers you want to leverage

Configure ACS to process incoming identities and add new claims

Modify your application to consume claims from ACS and drive authroization decisions

Customize the default authentication user experience provided by ACS

System Requirements

You must have the following items to complete this lab:

Microsoft® Windows® Vista SP2 (32-bits or 64-bits) , Microsoft® Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-

bits or 64-bits), Microsoft® Windows Server 2008 R2, or Microsoft® Windows® 7 RTM (32-bits or

64-bits)

Microsoft® .NET Framework 4

Microsoft® Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft® Windows Identity Foundation Runtime

Microsoft® Windows Identity Foundation SDK

Microsoft® Windows PowerShell

Setup

For convenience, much of the code used in this hands-on lab is available as Visual Studio code snippets.

To check the prerequisites of the lab and install the code snippets:

1. Open a Windows Explorer window and browse to the lab’s Source\Setup folder.

2. Double-click the Dependencies.dep file in this folder to launch the Dependency Checker tool

and install any missing prerequisites and the Visual Studio code snippets.

3. If the User Account Control dialog is shown, confirm the action to proceed.

Note: This process may require elevation. The .dep extension is associated with the Dependency

Checker tool during its installation. For additional information about the setup procedure and how to

install the Dependency Checker tool, refer to the Setup.docx document in the Assets folder of the

training kit.

Note: If you have never run Visual Studio before on the machine, please make sure to do so before

running the setup of this lab.

Note: When you first start Visual Studio, you must select one of the predefined settings collections.

Every predefined collection is designed to match a particular development style and determines

window layouts, editor behavior, IntelliSense code snippets, and dialog box options. The procedures in

this lab describe the actions necessary to accomplish a given task in Visual Studio when using the

General Development Settings collection. If you choose a different settings collection for your

development environment, there may be differences in these procedures that you need to take into

account.

Using the Code Snippets

Throughout the lab document, you will be instructed to insert code blocks. For your convenience, most

of that code is provided as Visual Studio Code Snippets, which you can use from within Visual Studio

2010 to avoid having to add it manually.

If you are not familiar with the Visual Studio Code Snippets, and want to learn how to use them, you can

refer to the Setup.docx document in the Assets folder of the training kit, which contains a section

describing how to use them.

Exercises

The following exercises make up this Hands-On Lab:

1. Outsource Authentication to multiple Identity Providers

2. Create claims mapping rules and add claims-driven authorization to an application

3. Take control of the Sign-In experience

Note: Each exercise is accompanied by a starting solution. These solutions are missing some code

sections that are completed through each exercise and therefore will not necessarily work if running

them directly.

Inside each exercise you will also find an end folder where you find the resulting solution you should

obtain after completing the exercises. You can use this solution as a guide if you need additional help

working through the exercises.

Estimated time to complete this lab: 45 minutes

Exercise 1: Use Access Control Service

for Accepting Users from Multiple

Identity Providers

In the first exercise you will familiarize with ACS’ basic settings and terminology. Your task is to secure

access to a newly created ASP.NET Web site. The Web site will accept users from Google, Yahoo! and

Windows Live Id. As you will see in a minute, ACS makes it real easy.

Task 1 – Creating the Initial Solution

1. Open Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 with administrator privileges. From Start | All Programs |

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, right-click on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and select Run as

administrator.

2. Open the WebSiteACS.sln empty solution file located inside the Source\Ex01-

AcceptUsersFromMultipleIPs\Begin folder of this Lab.

3. Create a new empty website. From File | Add | New Web Site…, select Visual C# in Installed

Templates section and then click on ASP.NET Web Site. Change the Web location field to use

HTTP and set the value with https://localhost/WebSiteACS.

Figure 2

Add New Web Site

4. Go to Solution Explorer and delete the following folders from the web site:

◦ Account

◦ Scripts

And the following files:

◦ About.aspx

◦ Global.asax

Figure 3

Solution Explorer

5. Open Site.master file and remove the DIV with class named “loginDisplay” and the

NavigationMenu menu control.

ASP.NET

...

<div class="page">

<div class="header">

<div class="title">

<h1>

My ASP.NET Application

</h1>

</div>

<div class="loginDisplay">

<asp:LoginView ID="HeadLoginView" runat="server" EnableViewState="false">

<AnonymousTemplate>

[ <a href="~/Account/Login.aspx" ID="HeadLoginStatus"

runat="server">Log In</a> ]

</AnonymousTemplate>

<LoggedInTemplate>

Welcome <span class="bold"><asp:LoginName ID="HeadLoginName"

runat="server" /></span>!

[ <asp:LoginStatus ID="HeadLoginStatus" runat="server"

LogoutAction="Redirect" LogoutText="Log Out" LogoutPageUrl="~/"/> ]

</LoggedInTemplate>

</asp:LoginView>

</div>

<div class="clear hideSkiplink">

<asp:Menu ID="NavigationMenu" runat="server" CssClass="menu"

EnableViewState="false" IncludeStyleBlock="false" Orientation="Horizontal">

<Items>

<asp:MenuItem NavigateUrl="~/Default.aspx" Text="Home"/>

<asp:MenuItem NavigateUrl="~/About.aspx" Text="About"/>

</Items>

</asp:Menu>

</div>

</div>

...

The code should look like the code bellow:

ASP.NET

...

<div class="page">

<div class="header">

<div class="title">

<h1>

My ASP.NET Application

</h1>

</div>

<div class="clear hideSkiplink">

</div>

</div>

...

6. Open Web.config file and remove the following sections:

◦ connectionStrings

◦ system.web/authentication

◦ system.web/membership

◦ system.web/profile

◦ system.web/roleManager

The Web.config should look like the code bellow.

XML

<?xml version="1.0"?>



<configuration>

<system.web>

<compilation debug="false" targetFramework="4.0" />

</system.web>

<system.webServer>

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"/>

</system.webServer>

</configuration>

Note: all this cleanup is not strictly necessary, but it helps to keep things simple and highlight

the code that will be required for integrating with ACS.

7. Press F5 to run the Web site and ensure us that it works as expected. If an alert about

“Debugging Not Enabled” appears, select “Modify the Web.config file to enable debugging”

and click on OK.

Figure 4

“Debugging Not Enabled” Alert

Figure 5

Running Application

8. The Web site is, as expected, without any access control mechanism. You can close the browser.

Task 2 – Signing-up for Windows Azure AppFabric Labs Access Control Service and Creating the Service

Namespace

You are now going to subscribe to ACS. As of today ACS is offered as a preview, in a lab environment,

and is available free of charge. As the service moves to production this may change, but for the time

being you can freely experiment.

1. Navigate to https://appservices.int2.azure.com. You will be prompted for your Windows Live

ID credentials if you are not already signed in.

Figure 6

Portal Appfabricslabs

2. Click create a project link.

Note: If you already have a project, jump to step 7.

Figure 7

Clicking Create a Project

3. Type a name for your project in the Sign Up page.

Figure 8

Project Signing up

4. Click OK button to create you project.

5. In My Projects click on the project name.

Figure 9

Selecting the Project

6. Now you will add a new Service Namespace to your project. A Service Namespace

represents a namespace for the Service Bus and the AppFabric Access Control: in other

words, it is the unique component of the addresses at which all your endpoints on the

AppFabric service will be available. To do this, click the Add Service Namespace link.

Figure 10

Add Service Namespace

7. Type in a name for your Service Namespace and click the Create button. Make sure to

validate the availability of the name first. Service names must be globally unique as they are

in the cloud and accessible by whomever you decide to grant access.

Figure 11

Creating New Service Namespace

Please be patient while your service is activated. It can take a few minutes while all the

necessary resources are provisioned.

Figure 12

Activating Service Namespace

You may have to refresh the browser to show the service is active.

Figure 13

Active Service Namespace

Task 3 – Configuring the Allowed Identity Providers, the Relying Party and the Signing Certificate

1. From the Services Namespaces list, go to the Service Namespace just created and click on

Access Control link.

Figure 14

Click on Access Control link

2. Review the information like the service Status, Project ID, Subscription ID, etc. Click on

Manage Access Control button.

Figure 15

Access Control Settings

3. This launches the Access Control Service Management Portal, shown in the figure below.

Figure 16

Access Control Service Management Portal

4. The Management Portal offers you a global view of all the settings you can change in ACS. In

the typical application development flow, such as the one you are creating in this exercise,

there is a natural order you can follow for providing ACS with the information it needs to set

up authentication for you. Go to Manage - Trust Relationships section and click on Identity

Providers link. You will land on a page which helps you to manage the identity providers

from where your application users will come from.

Figure 17

Identity Providers

5. Click on Add Identity Provider link and choose the identity providers you want to add in your

Access Control Service namespace. Windows Live Id is there by default. For this exercise please

pick Google and Yahoo! as well.

Figure 18

Adding Identity Provider

6. Leave the default settings and click Save.

Figure 19

The Yahoo Identity Provider configuration page

7. You can follow the same steps to add Google as an Identity Provider.

8. Click on Return to Access Control Services button on the lower right corner to return to the

Access Control Service Management Portal home.

Figure 20

Identity Providers configured

9. Go to Manage - Trust Relationships section and click on Relying Party Applications link (see

figure 16) in order to register your Web site with ACS. ”Relying Party” is identity speak for

application, the entity which consumes identities, whereas as you already guessed “Identity

Provider” indicates one entity which stores identities and is capable of authenticating users.

10. Click on Add Relying Party Application and fill the form with the following values:

◦ Name: WebSiteACS

◦ Realm: https://localhost/WebSiteACS/

◦ Return URL: https://localhost/WebSiteACS/Default.aspx

◦ Token format: SAML 1.1

◦ Token encryption policy: None

◦ Token lifetime (secs): 600

◦ Identity Providers: Google, Windows Live ID, Yahoo!

◦ Rule groups: Create New Rule Group

◦ Token signing: Use service namespace certificate (typical)

Figure 21

Add Relying Party Application

11. Click on the Save button.

12. Click on Return to Access Control Services button to Access Control Service Management

Portal home, go to Manage - Trust Relationships section and click on Rule Groups link in

order to select the default rule group for your application.

Figure 22

An example of how ACS receives a token as proof of authentication (in this case from Google, but

it can come from any recognized IP) and can emit for the application a token containing the

original claims

Note: When a user successfully authenticates with one identity provider, ACS receives from

that identity provider an artifact (called “security token”) which represents the proof that

authentication took place. You don’t need to know the details of how a security token looks

like: the only information relevant at the moment is that the token contains information about

the authenticated user, the so-called claims, which help ACS to establish who the current user

is.

ACS can process the incoming claims in various ways: you will see a simple example of that in

the next exercise. In the current exercise we will configure ACS to enforce its default behavior,

that is to say making sure that your application receives the claims as they came from the

original identity providers. How does it do that? The ACS itself emits a token that your

application is configured to consume (as you will see in just few steps). All it needs to do is to

copy the incoming claims as is into the outgoing token.

13. Click on Default Rule Group for WebSiteACS and click on Generate Rules button. Then

select the identity providers you want to automatically generate rules for, based on available

claim types and click Save. Different identity providers offer different claims: ACS knows that

and generates the default rules accordingly.

Figure 23

Generating Rules

Figure 24

Rule Generation Options

Figure 25

Default Rules Generated

14. Click on Return to Access Control Services button to Access Control Service Management

Portal home, go to Develop – Application Code section and click on Application Integration

link. Here there are various URIs that come in handy when configuring your application to take

advantage of ACS.

15. Go to Endpoint Reference section and copy the value for WS-Federation Metadata. You will

discover what that is and what it is used for right at the beginning of the next step.

Figure 26

Copying WS-Federation Metadata

Task 4 – Configuring a Website to Accept Tokens from Access Control Service

By now you know that ACS takes care of accepting tokens in different formats via different protocols

from a number of possible identity providers, and normalizes the incoming information in a different

token that your Web site will consume. ACS can emit different token types on various protocols. For

Web sites, the default protocol is WS-Federation. There’s no need to go in the fine details: suffice to say

that WS-Federation is a protocol that is natively understood by Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), an

extension to the .NET framework that allows you to easily outsource application authentication to

tokens sources such as the ACS itself. In particular, WIF extends Visual Studio with a wizard which can

automatically configure your application to outsource authentication without requiring you to write a

single line of code. All it needs is the address of a machine-readable description of the token source to

be used: in our case, that description is the WS-Federation Metadata address you saved at the end of

Task 3.

In this task you will use the WIF wizard to outsource authentication to ACS.

1. Back to Visual Studio and in the Solution Explorer, right-click the

https://localhost/WebSiteACS/ project and select Add STS reference….

2. When the Federation Utility window shows up, please go through the following tasks for

each step in the wizard.

a. On the Welcome page click Next to continue using the pre-populated fields.

Figure 27

Welcome

b. On the STS options page select the third radio button "Use an existing STS" option,

paste the endpoint address taken from Task 3 – Step 13 in STS WS-Federation

metadata document location field and click Next.

Figure 28

Use an Existing STS option

c. On the Security token encryption page select No encryption and click Next.

Figure 29

Security Token encryption

d. On the Offered claims page click Next.

Figure 30

Offered Claims

Note: The WS-Federation Metadata can contain descriptions of the claims that the

endpoint offers. The wizard shows those to you so that you will know what

information about incoming users you will be able to process in your application. In

this case ACS declares that it can release information about which identity provider

was actually used for authentication and a user identifier.

e. On the Summary page review the changes that will be made and click Finish.

Exercise 1: Verification

It’s time to give your newly secured Web site a spin. In order to verify that you have correctly performed

all steps in exercise one, proceed as follows:

1. Start debugging by pressing F5. The relying party application

(https://localhost/WebSiteACS/) will redirect to the Access Control Service to authenticate.

2. Choose an Identity Provider; you will be redirected to the identity provider’s Web site where

you will be prompted for entering your credentials. In this example we will use Windows Live

Id: choosing other options will lead to comparable experiences.

Figure 31

Choosing you Favorite Identity Provider

3. In the Windows Live ID website enter your Live ID and password.

Figure 32

Login with Windows Live ID

4. Upon successful authentication you will be redirected to ACS (observe the address bar)

which will briefly process and redirect back to your Web site.

5. The process is entirely transparent to the user, but the Web site is now configured to verify

that a valid token from the ACS is present in the call: that is the case, hence you are granted

access and the default page finally appears in the browser.

Figure 33

User Authenticated

6. Close the browser.

Exercise 1: Summary

In the first exercise you learned the ropes of using ACS for handling authentication for you. At the same

time, you learned how to use WIF for automatically configure a Web site to outsource authentication to

external entities. The process is exactly the same whether you point your application to ACS, an internal

identity provider such as ADFS2, and any product complying with WS-Federation.

Once you outsourced authentication to ACS, you can start changing settings (such as which identity

providers should be used) directly at the ACS portal without the need to touch the application code.

Exercise 2: Use Claims for Authorizing

Users

The first exercise focused on granting access to users from multiple identity providers, but didn’t do

much with the incoming claims. In this exercise you will get a taste of what you can do with ACS for

enriching the information you have about users for driving authorization decisions, without having to

store any permanent information in the application itself.

Your task is simple: you will assign a role to a specific user, and you will authorize certain actions on the

Web site according to it.

Task 1 – Visualizing the Claims from the Access Control Service

WIF does an excellent job at hiding the details of the underlying protocol negotiations. Before creating

rules for processing claims, it is useful to take a peek behind the curtain and see exactly what the

application receives from ACS. To that purpose, you will use a debug component which is capable of

visualizing the incoming tokens directly on the Web site pages.

1. Copy the completed solution of the Ex01 to Source\Ex02-EasyAuthorizationWithACS\Begin.

Figure 34

Copying the completed solution from the previous exercise

Note: Although exercises in our hands-on labs are normally independent from each other, in

this case there are shared settings in the cloud that would not make much sense to duplicate

here. If you didn’t go through the first exercise and you didn’t set up the ACS account,

namespaces and similar you will need to follow the instructions of tasks 2, 3 and 4 from

exercise 1 before going further with exercise 2.



administrator.

3. Open the WebSiteACS.sln solution file (copied in step 1) located inside the Source\ Ex02-

EasyAuthorizationWithACS \Begin folder of this Lab.

4. Go to the Solution Explorer and open Default.aspx file.

5. From the Visual Studio Toolbox drag and drop a Security Token Visualizer Control at the

bottom of the main content control:

Figure 35

Security Token Visualizer Control in Toolbox

ASP.NET

<cc1:SecurityTokenVisualizerControl ID="SecurityTokenVisualizerControl1"

runat="server" />

Note: In case no code appears when you drop the control on the page, please close Visual

Studio, run the Configuration Wizard again and restart Visual Studio.

6. Open Web.config file and add the saveBootstrapTokens attribute inside

microsoft.identityModel section:

XML

<microsoft.identityModel>

<service saveBootstrapTokens="true">

<audienceUris>

7. Start debugging by pressing F5. The application will go through the same authentication routine

enabled by the steps in exercise 1.

8. Choose Windows Live Id and authenticate as shown in the first exercise.

9. Expand the Security Token Visualizer Control.

Figure 36

Security Token Visualizer Control

Note: The Security Token Visualizer Control is showing the content of the security token issued

by ACS. For the purposes of this exercise you can ignore most of that: the only thing that needs

your attention is the first table on top, the one labeled Issued Identity. That table contains the

claims carried by the incoming token, as established by the default rules. In the case of

Windows Live Id, those claims are identity provider (which indicates from which identity

provider the ACS received the authentication token from) and nameidentifier (which provides

an identified which is unique for that user in the context of the ACS namespace).

The nameidentifier value is very important, as we can use it for telling one user from another.

More specifically, the nameidentifier value can be used as the input claim for transformation

rules which will assign new claims to specific users.

10. Go to Issued Identity section and save the value of the nameidentifier claim in Notepad (Claim

type and Claims value). Type depending on the Identity Provider you picked in previous step.

11. Close browser.

Task 2 – Creating Authorization Rules

1. Navigate to https://appservices.int2.azure.com. You will be prompted for your Windows Live ID

credentials if you are not already signed in.

2. Click the project where you created your Service Namespace (Ex01 – Task 2 – Step 3).

3. From the Services Namespaces list, go to the Service Namespace you created on Ex01 – Task 2

– Step 3, click on Access Control link and review the information like the service status, Project

ID, Subscription ID, etc..

https://appservices.int2.azure.com/

4. Click on Manage Access Control button to launch the Access Control Service Management

Portal.

Figure 37

Access Control Settings

5. Go to Manage - Trust Relationships section and click on Rule Groups link.

6. Click on the rule group associated with your Relying Party: “Default Rule Group for

WebSiteACS” and then click Add Rule.

7. Fill the form with the following values:

◦ If…

Claim issuer / Identity Provider: Windows Live ID

(And) Input claim type / Select type:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier

(And) Input claim value / Enter value: Claim value taken from Task 1 – Step

10

◦ Then…

Output claim type / Enter type:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/role

Output claim value / Enter value: Administrator

◦ Rule information

Description: Administrator claim rule

Figure 38

Adding Rule

8. Click Save button.

The rule you just entered assigns the role claim “administrator” to the Windows Live Id

account you used for signing in the application earlier in the exercise. The specific claim type

used for indicating role is automatically mapped by WIF into traditional Windows roles, as you

will see in the next task.

Note that you could create analogous rules for other identity providers as well. In this lab we

picked Windows Live Id because you are already required to have an account with it for signing

up with ACS, but there’s really nothing special about ACS and Windows Live Id: you can obtain

the exact same result with any other identity provider, as long as a unique user identifier claim

is available.

Task 3 – Authorizing Based on the Claims Provided by Access Control Service

Now that the new rule has been added, the Web site will receive a token with the extra role claim in it.

Let’s leverage the role information for granting or denying access to some Web site function, such as

access to special areas of one page.

1. Back to Visual Studio and on the Solution Explorer open Styles\Site.css file.

2. Add the following CSS class:

CSS

.secretContent

{

border-style: solid;

background-color: Red;

padding: 5px;

color: White;

}

3. Open Default.aspx and add the following ASP.NET Panel control at the bottom of the main

content control:

ASP.NET

<p>

You can also find <a

href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=152368&clcid=0x409"

title="MSDN ASP.NET Docs">documentation on ASP.NET at MSDN</a>.

</p>

<asp:Panel Visible="false" CssClass="secretContent" runat="server"

ID="SecretContent">

Secret Content (Only administrators can access this section)

</asp:Panel>

<cc1:SecurityTokenVisualizerControl ID="SecurityTokenVisualizerControl1"

runat="server"></cc1:SecurityTokenVisualizerControl>

4. Open Default.aspx.cs and add the following using statement:

(Code Snippet – Introduction to AppFabric AC Lab - Ex02 Default.aspx.cs Usings – C#)

C#

using System.Threading;

5. Now that we added some extra UI elements, let’s make sure that only administrators will be

able to see it. Add the following validation inside Page_Load method:

(Code Snippet – Introduction to AppFabric AC Lab - Ex02 Page_Load – C#)

C#

if (Thread.CurrentPrincipal.IsInRole("Administrator"))

{

this.SecretContent.Visible = true;

}


In order to verify that you have correctly performed all steps in exercise two, proceed as follows:

6. Start debugging by pressing F5. The relying party application (https://localhost/WebSiteACS/)

will redirect to the Access Control Service to authenticate.

7. Select the Windows Live ID Identity Provider and put your credentials. The usual sequence of

redirects occurs, and the user is authenticated.

8. The secret content section shows up, as the current user is in the administrator role.

Figure 39

Administrator Role Seeing Secret Content


10. Start debugging again by pressing F5.

11. Select another Identity Provider or use a different Windows Live Id account.

12. The secret content section is no longer visible.

Figure 40

Other Role not Seeing Secret Content


Exercise 2: Summary

In the second exercise you learned how to manipulate the claims issued by ACS for your application, and

how to use that information for driving authorization decisions. The exercise was very simple, assigning

a role to a specific user; however it shows the power of the claims transformation rules approach and

can be easily extended to more sophisticated cases.

Exercise 3: Take control of the Sign-In

experience

Using the WIF wizard for outsourcing authentication to ACS creates what is often referred to as “blanket

protection”: from that moment on, any attempt from an unauthenticated user to access any page in the

Web site triggers a redirection to the ACS. There are various scenarios in which that is not the effect you

want to achieve: for example you may want to leave some pages available also to unauthenticated

users, or you may want to take finer control on the authentication experience.

ACS makes it easy for you to craft your own authentication pages if you choose to, by providing you with

boilerplate HTML code already geared to use the endpoints in your own namespace. You can just cut

and paste the code in your app and integrate it with whatever UI elements you see fit. The last exercise

of this introductory lab shows you precisely how to do that.

Task 1 – Hosting a Login Page as Part of your Application

1. Copy the completed solution of the Ex02 to Source\Ex03-CustomSignInExperience\Begin.

Figure 41

Copying the completed solution from the previous exercise

Note: Although exercises in our hands-on labs are normally independent from each other, in

this case there are shared settings in the cloud that would not make much sense to duplicate

here. If you didn’t go through the first exercise and you didn’t set up the ACS account,

namespaces and similar you will need to follow the instructions of tasks 2, 3 and 4 from

exercise 1 before going further with exercise 3.

2. Navigate to https://appservices.int2.azure.com. You will be prompted for your Windows Live ID

credentials if you are not already signed in.

3. Click the project where you created your Service Namespace (Ex01 – Task 2 – Step 3).

4. From the Services Namespaces list, go to the Service Namespace created on Ex01 – Task 2 –

Step 3 and click on Access Control link.

5. Click on Manage… button to launch the Access Control Service Management Portal.

6. Go to Develop – Application Code section and click on Application Integration link.

Figure 42

Application Integration

7. Click on Login Pages and select your relying party application (WebSiteACS).

https://appservices.int2.azure.com/

Figure 43

Login Page Integration

8. Go to Option 2: Host the login page as part of your application and click on Download Example

Login Page.

9. Save the HTML file in %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot\WebSiteACS \WebSiteACS folder

of this Lab.



administrator.

11. Open the WebSiteACS.sln solution file (copied in step 1) located inside the Source\ Ex03-

EasyAuthorizationWithACS\Begin folder of this Lab.

12. Go to the Solution Explorer and right-click https://localhost/WebSiteACS/ and Add Existing

Item, select the HTML file that you downloaded in step 7 (WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html).

13. Open the HTML file that you downloaded in step 9 (WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html).

14. Go to the DIV tag with ID=“Banner” and replace the text “Sign in to WebSiteACS” with “My

custom login page for WebSiteACS”.

HTML

<div id="Main" style="display:none">

<div id="Banner" class="Banner"><b>My custom login page for

WebSiteACS</b></div>

15. Go to <style> section and update the following CSS classes:

◦ div.SignInContent

width: 1020px;

height: 170px;

◦ div.Banner

width: 1020px;

background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #4B6C9E;

color: #F9F9F9;

◦ div.LeftArea

width: 960px;

The CSS classes should look like:

CSS

div.SignInContent

{

text-align: center;

margin-left: auto;

margin-right: auto;

border: solid 1px #BBBBBB;

position: relative;

width: 1020px;

height: 170px;

}

div.Banner

{

padding-top:10px;

padding-bottom:10px;

text-align: center;

margin-left: auto;

margin-right: auto;

background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #4B6C9E;

color: #F9F9F9;

border-top: solid 1px #BBBBBB;

border-left: solid 1px #BBBBBB;

border-right: solid 1px #BBBBBB;

width: 1020px;

}

div.LeftArea

{

padding:15px 15px;

width: 960px;

height: 100%;

position: absolute;

top: 0px;

left: 0px;

}

16. Go to the Solution Explorer and open Web.config file.

17. Add the following section inside <configurations> node:

(Code Snippet – Introduction to AppFabric AC Lab - Ex03 Location - XML)

XML

<configuration>

...

<location path="WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html">

<system.web>

<authorization>

<allow users="*"/>

</authorization>

</system.web>

</location>

18. Go to microsoft.identityModel/service/federatedAuthentication/wsFederation section and

update the issuer attribute with

“https://localhost/WebSiteACS/WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html”.

The web.config should look look the code bellow.

XML

<microsoft.identityModel>

<service saveBootstrapTokens="true">

...

<federatedAuthentication>

<wsFederation passiveRedirectEnabled="true"

issuer="https://localhost/WebSiteACS/WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html"

realm="https://localhost/WebSiteACS/" requireHttps="true"/>

<cookieHandler requireSsl="true"/>

</federatedAuthentication>

19. Save and close Web.config file.


In order to verify that you have correctly performed all steps in exercise three, proceed as follows:

1. Start debugging by pressing F5. The relying party application

(https://localhost/WebSiteACS/) will redirect to the Access Control Service to authenticate.

2. Choose your favorite Identity Provider (i.e.: Live ID) from your custom login page and put your

credentials.

Figure 44

Custom Login Page

3. Access Control sent to our application the claims it was expecting and we are now

authenticated.


Exercise 3: Summary

The last exercise of the lab showed you how you can seamlessly integrate ACS authentication elements

in your Web site, demonstrating that you can take advantage of ACS’ advanced capabilities without

having to break the experience and style you want for your web applications.

Summary

By completing this Hands-On Lab you have learned how to:

Configure your application to outsource authentication to ACS

Configure ACS to include the identity providers you want to leverage

Configure ACS to process incoming identities and add new claims

Modify your application to consume claims from ACS and drive authorization decisions

Customize the default authentication user experience provided by ACS

The notion of outsourcing authentication to an external entity, instead of taking care of the details

yourself, is an extremely powerful one. Windows Identity Foundation makes it easy to configure .NET

applications to trust their authentication needs to external authorities.

The AppFabric Access Control Service is a great service to outsource authentication to, as it can easily

abstract away the complexity of dealing with mutiple identity providers such as Windows Live Id,

Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and even business providers such as directories enhanced by Active Directory

Federation Services or equivalent. Furthermore, ACS offers powerful tools for manipulating the way in

which the user’s identity is processed before reaching your application.

This introductory lab barely begun to explore the capabilities of ACS. Here we focused on Web sites, but

ACS can handle just as well SOAP and REST web services; we used the portal, but ACS offers a rich

management API which can be used to automate provisioning tasks; we focused on Web identities, but

ACS offers comprehensive support for business identity providers and processing capabilites for the

richer claims set they generate. If you are interested in knowing more about those capabilites, please

refer to the upcoming intermerdiate and advanced hands-on labs.

Documents

Introduction to the AppFabric Access Control Service ...az12722.vo.msecnd.net/wazplatformtrainingcourse2-02/Labs/IntroToAC... · Overview Connecting one application to its users is