Use group claims in for easy authorization in Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory application manifest by default do not populate claims pertaining to user group membership to save on network traffic and possible group bloat. In a lot of cases it’s not a major concern for well managed Azure Active Directory environment.

Enabling groupClaims along with other claims greatly simplify Authorization which otherwise would require use of Microsoft graph for user authorization.

Example below is showing how to enable group claims in Azure Active Directory enabled application on example of Azure Function but can also be used for any other type of application.

To start create Azure function app

Navigate to newly created function and choose “Authentication/Authorization” link.

Enable App Service Authentication and choose Azure AD and settings below.

Add new Function by pressing + sign choose “Custom Function” link

Choose “HTTP Trigger – C#” type, name your function and choose Authorization level of “Function”

Paste following code into function

Click on “Get Function URL” and paste resulting URL in new browser window with no cookies etc (Incognito mode in Chrome)

Login with your AD account and resulting page will contain no group information since default claim set does not include group memberships.

Navigate to your Azure Active Directory/Application Registration pane and choose your application

Click on “Manifest” on top verify that your groupMembershipClaim​ is set to default null

Click “edit” and change it to one of 2 values: SecurityGroup or All

First one returns only security groups while setting of All returns both security groups as well Distribution Lists. (http://www.dushyantgill.com/blog/2014/12/10/authorization-cloud-applications-using-ad-groups/)

Save the file and navigate in new incognito window to function URL and authenticate again. This time you shall be able to see GroupSIDs populated.

You can find SID to actual group mapping inside your Azure Active Directory.

This setup allows you to perform Role based authorization without resorting to complicated steps of calling Graph API etc.

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Using Windows Authentication in ASP.NET core via HTTP.sys server

 

Previous article ASP.NET core and integrated windows authentication in nanoserver container showed how to use integrated Windows authentication in docker windows container via IIS which requires a lot of prep steps and pretty cumbersome to implement. Another option is to use WebListener which as renamed to HTTPSYS in ASP.NET core version 2.0. Solution is hosted in following Github repo https://github.com/artisticcheese/ContainerWindowsAuth.

You have to prepare your Windows AD environment as per this Enabling integrated Windows Authentication in windows docker container article as a prerequisite.

You startup.cs file shall have following entry in ConfigureServices method which will enable both anonymous and Windows Authenticated access.

services.AddAuthentication(Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.HttpSys.HttpSysDefaults.AuthenticationScheme);

Your Program.cs need following entry in BuildWebHost method

This will allow to use both Windows and Anonymous authentication side by side. Now your home controller can specify which actions will require authentication and which not as per below.

Dockerfile below is using multi stage build and publish process

Final step is to run built image on Container host which was prepped earlier

docker run -d -h containerhost –security-opt “credentialspec=file://win.json” -p 8888:80 artisticcheese/winauth:nano-httpsys

Accessing this URL from domain joined machine via name only will not require users entering password and will automatically log them in, accessing via IP address will prompt for password and will allow login, accessing action which does not require authentication as expected will not require password. See below.

ASP.NET core and integrated windows authentication in nanoserver container

 

 

Below is overview of steps required to use integrated Windows Authentication in ASP.NET core application inside nanoserver container.

Completion of this instructions will allow you to run nanoserver container in windows AD environment and authenticate users based on their Windows desktop credentials or externally by providing Windows username/password to AD environment. This setup also RBAC access using Windows Groups as explained below.

Entire project with source code located on following github repo (https://github.com/artisticcheese/ContainerWindowsAuth)

High level overview of steps required to complete this scenario

1. Complete first 7 steps in following article (Enabling integrated Windows Authentication in windows docker container)
2. Build docker container based off github repo above
3. Launch docker container in AD environment with GMSA account (step 8 in Enabling integrated Windows Authentication in windows docker container)

Detailed instructions

 

Completion steps 1-7 from following article Enabling integrated Windows Authentication in windows docker container will prepare your AD environment to host windows container with integrated windows authentication.

Add following snippet to startup.cs of your .NET core project which will enabled integrated windows authentication to be used in .NET core

Add .UseIISIntegration() to your  BuildWebHost method of Program.cs

HomeController has just 2 methods below. Windows requires authentication and allows only members Domain Admins, Users allow only Domain Users group and Anonymousis allowing to be accessed without authentication

So accessing URL on your running container at http://container/home/windows will require authentication and http://container/home/anonymous is allowed to be accessed without authentication.

Multistage build is used to build .NET core project and put in resulting container along with all neccessary prerequisites (IIS and ASP.NET core). For detailed instructions you can read in this article (Using multistage docker build to create IIS + ASP.NET Core image + nanoserver).

Dockerfile for entire project is below. It shall be pretty self explanatory.

Building final image puts together container image consisting of 3 intermediate images used to:

• Build ASP.NET core project
• Copy ASP.NET executables to final image
• Install ASP.NET IIS module to servercore image and copy it over to final image

Once image is built you can deploy to production container host which was prepared earlier in step 1 above.

Launch docker image with following parameters

docker run -d -h containerhost --security-opt "credentialspec=file://win.json" -p 88:80 artisticcheese/winauth:nano-iis

Parameters specify which GMSA account is being used to authenticate to AD and location of JSON file with details.

Accessing URL http://containerhost:88/Home/Windows on container host from domain joined client will automatically log you with current user credentials with no prompt like below. While accessing http://containerhost:88/Home/Anonymous will allow you to access it without username/password.

Accessing with user account which is not part of Domain Admins will return HTTP 403 on /home/windows as expected but will succeed on /home/users

See screenshots below. If you don’t want to automatically log in with default credentials you can access page via IP address which will prevent IE/Chrome from using them. http://192.168.1.235:88/Home/Windows, please note that your authentication switches to NTLM instead of Kerberos authentication in such case.

Using multistage docker build to create IIS + ASP.NET Core image + nanoserver

Kestrel webserver (server which serves ASP.NET core exe) does not support integrated Windows authentication and requires external proxy server to handle this. One of the those proxy servers is IIS. Problem is that there is no docker image provided by Microsoft which have IIS + ASP.NET core + nanoserver. Further complicating things are the fact that there is no easy and straightforward way to install IIS on nanoserver image which has ASP.NET core, neither it’s easy to install ASP.NET core on IIS image build on nanoserver. There is multitude articles and script which are doing little parts here and there but none provide complete solution in part due to requirement to have ASP.NET core module to be first installed on full server core image before DLLs can be extracted for use in nanoserver IIS image.

Thanks to 17.05 docker options to build multistage image this entire pretty easily accomplished with single docker file.

Dockerfile below is using 2 middleware images to pull relevant files into final image which contains ASP.NET core + IIS on top of nanoserver.

Image microsoft/aspnetcore:2.0.0-nanoserver  is used for extraction of .NET core installation.

Image microsoft\iis based off WindowsServerCore is used to install .NET core webhosting package (EXE which upon execution places required ASP.NET core module and schema into middleware container) and later extract 2 necessary files (module itself and schema file) to be used in final image.

Final image is built from 2 middleware images above with some additional configuration necessary for ASP.NET core module to work in IIS and path to DOTNET core is added to environment Path variable.

Enabling integrated Windows Authentication in windows docker container

Walk through below will enable integrated Windows Authentication for windows docker container in Active Directory environment.

Overview of steps are below

1. Create Global Security group Container Hosts  in Active Directory
2. Add container host servers to group which is allowed to decrypt password GMSA account
3. Reboot container host so computer account have proper group membership
4. Create GMSA account in Active Directory
5. Install GMSA account on container host
6. Add SPN record to GMSA account
7. Generate credentialspecs file to be passed to docker daemon during container startup
8. Launch docker container with proper parameters

Detailed implementation steps are below

Create Global Security group Container Hosts  in Active Directory

Add computer account for container host to Container Hosts group

Reboot container host computer

This step is required so computer account will have proper AD group associated with it

Create GMSA account in Active Directory

On domain controller execute

Install GMSA account on container host and test it

Output shall not contain any errors and will look like below

Path : 
Online : True
RestartNeeded : False

DistinguishedName : CN=containerhost,CN=Managed Service Accounts,DC=ad,DC=local
Enabled : True
Name : containerhost
ObjectClass : msDS-GroupManagedServiceAccount
ObjectGUID : 12941984-5fd3-4095-96f9-cbd96902eb36
SamAccountName : containerhost$
SID : S-1-5-21-3914853822-719528391-929614657-1606
UserPrincipalName :

True

Add SPN record to GMSA account

This step is required if for kerberos authentication to work and for automatic login in Chrome/IE. Without it authentication will still work but will always prompt for username/password since it will fallback to NTLM.

Launch adsiedit.msc on domain controller and add SPN of HTTP/containerhost1.ad.local to GMSA account

Generate credentialspecs file to be passed to docker daemon during container startup

Execute powershell below to generate your GMSA configuration file which will be used by docker to enable Windows Authentication

 

Launch docker container with proper parameters

Launching docker with parameters specifying GMSA account name as well as credential specs file

docker run -d -p 8080:80 -h containerhost --security-opt "credentialspec=file://win.json" artisticcheese/winauth:servercore

You can use my image artisticcheese/winauth:servercore to test if this solution works. Image has just plain vanilla IIS with windows authentication enabled and default page showing which account are you logged on with

Now if you access your container host on port 8080 on any domain joined machine you shall be automatically authenticated. If you try to access your containerhost via IP address then you will be prompted for username/password since IE/chrome will assume you are accessing external computer and hence will not automatically log you on.

Integrating docker release management in TFS with webtests

TFS express 2017 provides free and fully integrated environment for continious integration and release management for docker windows containers. Post below only focuses on release management for docker containers via TFS and webtests produced by Visual Studio Enterprise edition.

My current setup of TFS build produces following artifacts available for release management.

• docker-stack.yml

This file presented below provides information about build version of container image and in imagetag and additional information for running environment

• tests folder with 3 files
  • local.testsettings
    • This file provides information which server webtest have to be running against

• • webtest1.webtest
    • This file provides actual steps which is tested

• runtest.ps1
  • This file which performs 2 functions: waits for swarm manager to bring latest version of image up and then run webtests tests on those.

Release pipeline itself contains of 3 steps for each environment. Screenshot below for staging environment.

First step is pushing newly built image to staging docker swarm. This step is using built-in Docker command tasks in TFS and passing information about swarm location and registry connection via built in TFS properties along with docker-stack.yml file above.

Second step is powershell script named runtest.ps1above. Variables  are passed to script to specify which server needs to be checked against as well current version of new build version of docker image

Last step is publishing results of those tests

Below is screenshot what failure in webtest looks like. Along with failure also attached webtestresult file which you can open in Visual Studio to inspect details of what has failed.

Please note to enable test run you need to have mstest.exe installed on TFS agent as part of Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 installation. You can use Evaluation Version to install it. Test will fail otherwise with File extension specified .webtest is not a valid test extension.

Another thing to note is that there is currently a bug in TFS 2017 U2 which does not properly pull results form TRX file and hence additional logic was added to powershell script to put results in correct location to Publish Test Results tag can find results.

 

Comparing windows containers CPU perfomance vs alternatives

When presenting containers solution to wider audience question of perfomance invariably comes to place (the same sort of discussion everybody had 10 years ago during virtualization craze). I decided to do unscientific test of running Windows containers vs alternatives. Specifically windows containers are compared against running the same application on physical hardware, inside Hyper-V VM on the same hardware as well as windows containers in process and hypervisolation modes.

You can check results by yourself as image is posted at artisticcheese\iis on docker hub.

Code which is used for testing is designed to return PI number calculates to certain number which is very CPU intensive operation. In my specific run I was calculating to 8000s place with total of 100 requests in multithreaded client.

Client code is below, which is powershell code relying on runspaces via PSParallel module

#requires -Modules PSParallel
Measure-command {1..100 | Invoke-Parallel -ScriptBlock
{Invoke-WebRequest http://localhost/service.svc/pi/8000 -UseBasicParsing}}

Below are results of running this tests against 4 different environments

Test environment	Hyper-V	Hardware	Process Isolation	HyperV isolation
	96.47	90.12	90.77	91.4
	97.12	90.13	90.86	90.24
	97.87	89.27	90.49	91.3

Conclusion may be surprising or may be not but running Windows containers introduce virtually no overhead from CPU point of view on application perfomance.