Windows identity foundation only for internal apps/sites?

Question

I have spent quite some time now looking at the Windows Identity Foundation . I even read a few chapters of a book on it on MSDN.

But I'm still confused about one thing. Is WIF appropriate for a public facing web site authentication or is this mainly targeted towards intranets/sharepoint sites, something that deals with internal domain where users are identified by integrated windows auth/active directory or something like that. Currently, we have many web sites for our company where people log in and are authenticated against a data store using forms authentication/custom asp.net membership provider . Is it possible to replace this mechanism with WIF? if so, does anyone have a link to such a tutorial.

I have tried looking for any information along these lines but it has been hard to find.

Answer 1

In principle, there's nothing about Windows Identity Foundation that makes it inappropriate for use on a "public-facing" website and WIF isn't in-itself tied to a particular authentication mechanism either. However, if you were considering using Active Directory Federated Services as your Identity Provider the problem would be that authenticating users against AD would be your only option since that's all it supports (although you can plug in a custom attribute store that retrieves claim values from some other datastore). Your WIF relying-party (ie your website) doesn't necessarily care how the user was authenticated, though, only that they were authenticated by an IDP that it trusts.

So your problem might not be that of "WIF-enabling" the websites as such, it may be more a question of finding a compatible IDP that supports authenticating against something other than Active Directory so that you can use the data store you currently use to authenticate users. It is possible to use ADFS as a "bridge" (a Relying-Party Security Token Server) between your WIF relying party and a SAML2 IDP like Shibboleth which can use a database to authenticate users, but configuring such a system is a significant challenge so you'd have to weigh up the benefits that your users might gain from single sign-on to your applications against the considerable effort it would take to set up and maintain such a system.

Answer 2

Yes - WIF appropriate for public facing web site authentication. ADFS v2.0 only authenticates against AD. However, you can write a custom STS that authenticates against anything you like. In your case, with a data store, have a look at Identity Server which authenticates against a SQL DB.

Have a look at:

• http://claimsid.codeplex.com/

• Identity Training Kit

• How to: Build an ASP.NET STS