Introduction to the Windows Azure Access Control …rvitolo06/WATK/Labs/IntroToACS2/Lab.docx · Web viewMicrosoft® Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Microsoft® .NET Framework

Hands-On LabIntroduction to the Windows Azure Access Control Service 2.0 Lab version: 1.0.0

Last updated: 5/7/2023

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 Access Control Service and Creating the Service Namespace...........................................................................................................................................................11

Task 3 – Configuring the Allowed Identity Providers, the Relying Party and the Signing Certificate. 13

Task 4 – Configuring a Website to Accept Tokens from Access Control Service................................22

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

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

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

Task 2 – Creating Authorization Rules...............................................................................................33

Task 3 – Authorizing Based on the Claims Provided by Access Control Service.................................36



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



SUMMARY................................................................................................................................................ 46

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 1A functional view of the Access Control Service

Windows Azure Access Control Service (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 authorization 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® Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0

Microsoft® .NET Framework 4

Microsoft® Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft® Windows Identity Foundation Runtime

Microsoft® Windows Identity Foundation SDK

Microsoft® Windows PowerShell

Setup

In order to execute the exercises in this hands-on lab you need to set up your environment.

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

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c148b2df-c7af-46bb-9162-2c9422208504

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974405

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=186916

2. Double-click the Setup.cmd file in this folder to launch the setup process that will configure your environment and install the Visual Studio code snippets for this lab.

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

Note: Make sure you have checked all the dependencies for this lab before running the setup.

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 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. To do this, right-click the WebSiteACS solution and select Add | New Web Site, select Visual C# in Installed Templates section and then click ASP.NET Web Site. Change the Web location field to use HTTP and set the value with https://localhost/WebSiteACS and click OK.

Figure 2Add 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 3Solution 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 that it works as expected. If an alert about “Debugging Not Enabled” appears, select “Modify the Web.config file to enable debugging” and click OK.

Figure 4 “Debugging Not Enabled” Alert

Figure 5Running 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 Access Control Service and Creating the Service Namespace

You are now going to subscribe to ACS.

1. Navigate to https://windows.azure.com/. You will be prompted for your Windows Live ID credentials if you are not already signed in.

2. Click on the Service Bus, Access Control & Caching button on the lower left corner. You will land on the page below

Figure 6Portal Access Control Service

3. Now you will add a new Access Control Service Namespace. An Access Control Service Namespace is the unique component of the addresses at which all your endpoints on the Access

https://windows.azure.com/

Control Service will be available. To do this, ensure the Access Control root element is selected on the left pane and click the New button on the top left corner.

Figure 7Adding a Namespace

4. The portal displays a dialog. Type in a name for your Namespace, choose your Country/Region and click the Create Namespace 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 8Creating New Service Namespace

5. Please be patient while your service is activated. It can take a few minutes while all the necessary resources are provisioned.

Figure 9Active Service Namespace

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

1. With the Namespace selected, click the Access Control Service – Manage button on the top toolbar. Make sure that appservices.azure.com is allowed to show popups in your browser.

Figure 10Click the Access Control Service – Manage button

2. This launches (in another browser window or tab) the Access Control Service Management Portal, shown in the figure below.

Figure 11Access Control Service Management Portal

3. The Management Portal, and specifically the left-hand navigation menu, 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. Click the Identity Providers link in the Trust Relationships section of the menu. The main area of the management portal will display a page which helps you to manage the identity providers from where your application users will come from.

Figure 12Identity Providers

4. Click the Add link above the Identity Providers table, choose the identity providers you want to add in your Access Control Service namespace and click Next. Windows Live ID is there by default. For this exercise please pick Google and Yahoo! as well.

Figure 13Adding an Identity Provider

5. Leave the default settings and click Save.

Figure 14The Yahoo Identity Provider configuration page

6. You can follow the same steps to add Google as an Identity Provider. You’ll end up with the Identity Providers list shown below.

Figure 15Identity Providers configured

7. Click the Relying Party Applications link on the navigation menu 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.

Figure 16Relying Party Applications

8. Click the Add link on top of the Relying Party Applications table and fill the form with the following values:

◦ Name: WebSiteACS

◦ Mode: Enter settings manually

◦ Realm: https://localhost/WebSiteACS/

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

◦ Error URL: leave the field empty

◦ 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 (standard)

Figure 17Add Relying Party Application

9. Click the Save button.

10. In the Trust Relationships section of the navigation menu, click the Rule Groups link in order to select the default rule group for your application.

Figure 18 The current rule groups list contains just the default rule group

Figure 19An 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.

11. Click Default Rule Group for WebSiteACS, and then click the Generate link. Then select all three identity providers you want to automatically generate rules for, based on available claim types and click Generate. Different identity providers offer different claims: ACS knows that and generates the default rules accordingly. Finally click Save again.

Figure 20Generating Rules

Figure 21Default Rules Generated

12. Under the Development section of the navigation menu, click the Application Integration link. Here there are various URIs that come in handy when configuring your application to take advantage of ACS.

13. 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 22Copying 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 23Welcome

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 Endpoint Reference, WS-Federation metadata field and click Next.

Figure 24Use an Existing STS option

c. On the STS signing certificate chain validation error page select Disable certificate chain validation and click Next.

Figure 25Disable certificate chain validation option

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

Figure 26Security Token encryption

e. On the Offered claims page click Next.

Figure 27Offered 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.

f. 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 28Choosing your Favorite Identity Provider

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

Figure 29Login 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 30User 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 Ex02-EasyAuthorizationWithACS\Begin.

Figure 31

Offered Claims

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.


3. Open the WebSiteACS.sln solution file (copied in step 1) located inside the 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 32Security 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 Setup again and restart Visual Studio.

6. Open Web.config file and add the saveBootstrapTokens attribute to the service element 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 33Security 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). Depending on the Identity Provider you picked in previous step, the value of the identityprovider claim might vary.

Figure 34Copying the nameidentifier claim


Task 2 – Creating Authorization Rules


2. Select the Access Control in the navigation pane and click the Service Namespace you have created in the first exercise.

3. Click the Access Control Service button located in the ribbon bar to manage your service.

4. In the Trust Relationships section of the navigation menu, click the Rule Groups link.

Figure 35Rule Groups

5. Click the Default Rule Group for WebSiteACS.

6. Click the Add link above the Rules table to configure a new 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.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier

(And) Input claim value / Enter value: Claim value taken from Task 1 – Step 10

◦ Then…

Output claim type / Select type: http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/role

Output claim value / Enter value: Administrator

◦ Rule information

Description: Administrator claim rule

Figure 36Adding Rule

8. Click Save button.

Note: 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" />

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

(Code Snippet – Introduction to ACS2 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 ACS2 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:


2. Select the Windows Live ID Identity Provider and put your credentials. The usual sequence of redirects occurs, and the user is authenticated.

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

Figure 37Administrator Role Seeing Secret Content


5. Start debugging again by pressing F5.

6. Select another Identity Provider or use a different Windows Live ID account.

7. The secret content section is no longer visible.

Figure 38Other 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 Ex03-CustomSignInExperience\Begin.

Figure 39Copying 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.


3. Select the Access Control in the navigation pane and click the Service Namespace you created. Click the Service Namespace you created in the first exercise. Click the Access Control Service button located in the ribbon bar to manage your service.

4. Go to Development section and click the Application Integration link.


Figure 40Application Integration

5. Select your relying party application (WebSiteACS).

Figure 41Login Page Integration

6. In the Option 2: Host the login page as part of your application section, click Download Example Login Page.

Figure 42Login Page Integration

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

Note: If you don’t have permissions to save the file, proceed to download it into My Documents folder instead, and then move it to %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot\WebSiteACS. If Destination Folder Access Denied prompt is shown, click the Continue button.


9. Open the WebSiteACS.sln solution file (copied in step 1) located inside the Ex03-EasyAuthorizationWithACS\Begin folder of this Lab.

10. 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) and click Add.

11. Double-click the HTML file that you downloaded in step 7 (WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html) to open it in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

12. 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>

13. 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;}

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

15. Add the following section inside <configuration> node:

(Code Snippet – Introduction to ACS2 Lab - Ex03 Location - XML)

XML

<configuration> <configSections> ... </configSections> <location path="WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html"> <system.web> <authorization> <allow users="*"/> </authorization> </system.web> </location> <location path="FederationMetadata">

… </location>

16. Go to microsoft.identityModel/service/federatedAuthentication/wsFederation section and update the issuer attribute with “https://localhost/WebSiteACS/WebSiteACSLoginPageCode.html”.

The web.config should look like 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>

17. Save and close Web.config file.


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


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

Figure 43Custom 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 Windows Azure 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.