- How to register an application in AAD
- How to use the OpenID Connect protocol for authenticating an user
- How to receive an
id_token
with basic profile information about the authenticated user
Here is an high-level overview of the authentication process:
In short:
- We show the user a sign-in button
- The sign-in button forwards to the
.../oauth2/v2.0/authorize
URL, including the ID of our application and the ID of our AAD tenant - The user logs in and consents to letting us access his or her profile
- Our AAD tenants forwards us to the callback URL and includes an
id_token
, which contains basic profile information of the user in form of a JWT (JSON Web Token) - Lastly, we could validate the returned
id_token
using its signature (not shown here, most libraries do this for us)
Before we can authenticate an user we have to register an application in our AAD tenant. We can either use the PowerShell Module Az or the Azure CLI.
New-AzADApplication -DisplayName ChallengeIdToken -IdentifierUris https://challengeidtoken -ReplyUrls http://localhost:5001/api/tokenecho
Note: The IdentifierUris
needs to be unique within an instance of AAD.
Now, retrieve the ID of your current AAD tenant via:
Get-AzContext
az ad app create --display-name challengeidtokencli --reply-urls http://localhost:5001/api/tokenecho --identifier-uris https://challengeidtoken
Note: The IdentifierUris
needs to be unique within an instance of AAD.
Retrieve the ID of your current AAD tenant via:
az account show
Note the appId
value in the response - this is the id under which your AAD application has been registered. In the Azure Portal, we can see your new app registration under AAD --> App Registrations --> Owned applications
:
Open another shell and run the Token Echo Server from apps/token-echo-server
in this repository. This helper ASP.NET Core tool is used to echo the token issued by your AAD and "simulates" our website or server backend that would receive the id_token
.
The tool is listening on port 5001 on your local machine. Tokens are accepted on the route http://localhost:5001/api/tokenecho
. This is why we initially registered an AAD application with a reply url pointing to http://localhost:5001/api/tokenecho
.
dotnet run
Replace TENANT_ID
with your AAD Tenant Id and APPLICATION_ID
with your Application Id. Open a browser and paste the modified request.
https://login.microsoftonline.com/TENANT_ID/oauth2/v2.0/authorize?
client_id=APPLICATION_ID
&response_type=id_token
&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A5001%2Fapi%2Ftokenecho
&response_mode=form_post
&scope=openid%20profile
&nonce=1234
For explanation, openid
scope allows the user to sign in, and profile
scope allows us to read the basic profile information of the user.
Copy the id_token
value from your browser output, go to https://jwt.ms and paste the token. Take a minute and have a look at the decoded token.
If you need further information about the issued claims take a look here.
Remove-AzAdApplication -ApplicationId <applicationid> -Force
az ad app delete --id <applicationid>
This challenge showed how to create a new application in AAD and how user can be authenticated using the Open ID Connect protocol. The full process is described here.