Building a simple custom STS using VS2012 & ASP.NET MVC

In my previous post, I walked through how “easily” one can take advantage of claims based authentication in ASP.NET. In that post, I switched out the good old forms authentication stuff for the new FedAuth stuff. In this post, I want to take it a step further and actually federate my security, but instead of just using the Windows Azure ACS’s built in identity providers, I want to build a very simple one of my own.

A lot of the solution is based on the STS project that we could get by using VS2010 and the WIF SDK. However, this project was a Web Site project using Web Forms, and I really wanted a MVC version for different reasons.

If you are fine with using VS2010 and the WIF SDK, adding a custom STS is really easy. Just create a new web project, right-click the project and choose “Add STS Reference…” and then, walking through the wizard, there will be a step that offers you to select an STS. In this step, you choose “Create a new STS project…”, which will generate a custom STS project that you can modify to your needs. Unfortunately, that option isn’t available in VS2012. Using the “Identity and Access” add-on, you are only allowed to connect to an existing STS, the ACS or a local test STS, not an STS project.

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HttpRequests using HTTP verbs, headers and cookies in Silverlight

When working with Silverlight, we often end up communicating with some form of services. They might be SOAP-based WCF services, which Silverlight handles fine, but lately REST-like services have become a lot more popular, and Silverlight doesn’t always handle them as nicely… They often rely on headers and HTTP verbs other than GET and POST, which Silverlight doesn’t handle very well by default.

In my world, I am currently spending a lot of time working with a Silverlight client that is used in a situation where we use federated security. This requires the client to carry around a token that tells the service who he/she is, and what claims are being made.

In this case, we are using the thinktecture IdentityServer, which after a bit of configuration works very well. It makes it very easy to integrate with using Silverlight, which is nice. All you need to do is do is to make an HTTP GET call to the identity server, passing along the credentials in the form of a basic authentication header. The identity server in turn replies with a token that identifies the client (at least if the credentials are valid). The client can then POST that token to the the service (relying party) who will then use that token to authenticate the client. And after that, everyone is happy, and the service can trust the client being who he/she says he/she is…

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