Linking External Identity Users With Existing Users

Question

I'm adding an external identity provider, Azure multi-tenant, as a login option. I have local accounts right now and they know nothing about Azure AD users.

I want to create an Azure Enterprise App that other tenants can use to set up SSO using OpenID Connect. Also I want the app to support User Provisioning by setting up a SCIM API.

I can't really find any documents on how to handle linking Azure AD users with the existing accounts in my IDP. I've seen examples where users can login using their local account, authenticate with Azure, and then their local account is updated to have the Azure AD User ID. This approach still seems pretty manual. Another thought was to have a step in the login journey, where if no local account has the Azure AD User ID then find a local account with the same email. I don't like this approach either since the emails might not always match. Is there an approach where an admin can automatically link all accounts with a sync or upload?

Answer 1

SYSTEMS

First it's worth clarifying roles:

Role	Details
Authorization Server (AS)	Your UIs and APIs receive tokens from this. It is where accounts and linked accounts are stored. It is where you use SCIM to update account records. It is where you apply account linking logic.
Identity Provider (IDP)	There can be multiple of these. When your apps call the AS it manages connections to them, and exchanges IDP tokens for AS tokens that are returned to apps. It is not usual to use SCIM against an IDP.

You are using IdentityServer as the AS so your UIs and APIs will continue to use IdentityServer tokens and remain simple. Meanwhile Azure AD will become an alternative IDP. So on the data side of things your architecture is in a good place.

AUTHENTICATION ACTIONS

I would aim to solve your problems via custom authentication actions , and to design this in a vendor agnostic way. Not all providers support these concepts, but IdentityServer has some pretty good extensibility features, so hopefully it has what you need.

A bit of code, configuration and technical investigations in IdentityServer feel like the correct direction, with no complexity added to your applications. I will describe techniques in terms of Curity (where I work), but the same principles can apply to any system.

USERNAME AUTHENTICATOR

A great way to deal with user specific differences is to make the initial screen prompt only for an email. See this example for how that looks. Later, when authentication has completed, you could set a cookie so that this screen is not shown on subsequent logins.

Then, before asking for credentials, apply some scripted logic, eg to look up existing account attributes, and decide how the user should authenticate. You might decide to route unknown users to Azure AD or do something based on business partner email suffixes.

DATA UPDATES

Something simple that might work in advance of adding Azure AD support is to assign all users a Tenant ID, and perhaps existing users get a Tenant ID of 1. Only those users are allowed to sign in with Identity Server - all others have to use Azure AD.

SCRIPTED LOGIC AND ACCOUNT LINKING

For a worked example of how this looks, see this Account Linking with Facebook tutorial. In this example the objective is to update the main account with a new linked account. This account linking doc may give you some additional ideas for your scenario. It should be possible to run custom logic before triggering authentication or once your have the Azure IDP attributes.

INVOLVE THE USER IF NEEDED

It may also be useful to present a custom screen to ask the user if they have an existing account when they first login via Azure AD. If not then an Azure AD login can create the primary account in IdentityServer data in addition to a linked account.

USERS AND PARTNERS

How users onboard is interesting, and discussed in this detailed article . I always start by getting a feel for the type of assets involved:

Type	Description
Personal Assets	You allow any user to sign up and they only have access to their own assets
Corporate Assets	Users are provisioned by an administrator, eg a banker is granted access to financial data according to business rules

In your case it feels like users are from the second category, so to enable a user to fully sign up you need data from the partner, either fed in manually or by getting them to call your API, before you can assign the user the correct tenant ID. This might eventually result in TenantID=23 , but there is nothing to stop you initially allowing users to onboard and placing them in a default TenantID=0 bucket.

Ultimately this all comes down to data, claims and API authorization. Eg APIs could return certain data to TenantID=0 users but only return privileged data to users whose tenant ID has been asserted by an administrator. Not sure if these thoughts of mine match your scenario but hopefully they provide a useful hint or two.

SUMMARY

Reliable account linking is tricky, but it should be solvable via the building blocks of the Authorization Server, using the above techniques. The end result should be deterministic user data, with no duplicate users.