The OWIN authentication pipeline, and how to use Katana middleware correctly?

Question

I\'ve recently started looking at the new ASP.Net Identity framework and the Katana middleware, there\'s a surprising amount of code and documentation out there, but I\'m se

Answer 1

As @Tratcher said, the AuthenticationType parameter is used by Microsoft.Owin.Security as a key to do lookups of authentication middleware instances.

The code below will use the following simple helper method to require that all requests are authenticated. In practice you're more likely to use an [Authorize] attribute on sensitive controllers, but I wanted an example that doesn't rely on any frameworks:

private static void AuthenticateAllRequests(IAppBuilder app, params string[] authenticationTypes)
{
    app.Use((context, continuation) =>
    {
        if (context.Authentication.User != null &&
            context.Authentication.User.Identity != null &&
            context.Authentication.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
        {
            return continuation();
        }
        else
        {
            context.Authentication.Challenge(authenticationTypes);
            return Task.Delay(0);
        }
    });
}

The context.Authentication.Challenge(authenticationTypes) call will issue an authentication challenge from each of the provided authentication types. We're just going to provide the one, our WS-Federation authentication type.

Correct Code

So first, here's an example of the "optimal" Owin Startup configuration for a site that's simply using WS-Federation, as you are:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
    app.SetDefaultSignInAsAuthenticationType(CookieAuthenticationDefaults.AuthenticationType);

    app.UseCookieAuthentication(new CookieAuthenticationOptions());

    app.UseWsFederationAuthentication(new WsFederationAuthenticationOptions
    {
        AuthenticationType = "WS-Fed Auth (Primary)",
        Wtrealm = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["app:URI"],
        MetadataAddress = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["wsFederation:MetadataEndpoint"]
    });

    AuthenticateAllRequests(app, "WS-Fed Auth (Primary)");

    app.UseWelcomePage();
}

Note the use of the "WS-Fed Auth (Primary)" AuthenticationType to uniquely identify the WS-Federation middleware instance we've configured. This means that you could, for example, use a "WS-Fed Auth (Secondary)" with a separate WS-Federation server as a fallback, if you had that requirement.

This configuration will do the following:

1. First, tell the Owin security pipeline that by default we want to authenticate requests with the default CookeAuthentication AthenticationType value. (That's just a constant string on that CookieAuthenticationDefaults class, and it's the default value used by the CookieAuthenticationOptions.AuthenticationType property.)
2. Next, register a cookie authentication middleware instance with all default options, so it corresponds to the AuthenticationType key that we set as the default in step 1.
3. Next, register a WS-Federation authentication middleware instance with options that we define in the Web.config file, and with a custom AuthenticationType value so we can refer to it later.
4. After all the authentication middleware registrations are done, we tell the pipeline to authenticate all requests (via our custom helper method that calls the Microsoft.Owin.Security methods for issuing challenges to any unauthenticated request)
5. Finally, if the user has been authenticated, show the welcome page!

Wrong Code

So there are a couple ways you can go wrong here.

Not providing a default authentication type

To experiment, I tried doing this, and you'll see right away what the problem is:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
    var x = app.GetDefaultSignInAsAuthenticationType();

    app.SetDefaultSignInAsAuthenticationType(x);
}

That first call will give you the exception you mentioned in your first comment:

"A default value for SignInAsAuthenticationType was not found in IAppBuilder Properties. This can happen if your authentication middleware are added in the wrong order, or if one is missing."

Right - because by default the Microsoft.Owin.Security pipeline doesn't assume anything about the middleware you're going to use (i.e., Microsoft.Owin.Security.Cookies isn't even known to be present), so it doesn't know what should be the default.

Using the wrong default authentication type

This cost me a lot of time today because I didn't really know what I was doing:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
    app.SetDefaultSignInAsAuthenticationType("WS-Fed AAD Auth");

    // ... remainder of configuration
}

So, that's going to keep trying to authenticate the caller with WS-Federation on every call. It's not that that's super-expensive, it's that the WS-Federation middleware will actually issue a challenge on every request. So you can't ever get in, and you see a whole lot of login URLs fly past you. :P

Possibilities

So what's great about having all this flexibility in the pipeline is that you can do some really cool things. For instance, I have a domain with two different web apps inside of it, running under different subpaths like: example.com/foo and example.com/bar. You can use Owin's mapping functionality (as in app.Map(...)) to set up a totally different authentication pipeline for each of those apps. In my case, one is using WS-Federation, while the other is using client certificates. Trying to do that in the monolithic System.Web framework would be horrible. :P