Authenticating connections to SignalR is not as easy as you would expect. In many scenarios authentication mechanisms use the Authorize header in HTTP request. The problem is, that SignalR does not explicitly support headers, because Web Sockets — one of the transports used in browsers — does not support them. So if your authentication mechanism requires any form of headers being sent, you need to go another way with SignalR. In this post I would like to describe a way to use the OAuth Bearer Token authentication with SignalR by passing the token over a cookie into SignalR pipeline. The application requires user to authenticate in order to send messages. If not authenticated, the user can see only fragments of messages sent by other people, and he is not able to see who the sender is. When anonymous: After signing in: You can find. NET Identity libraries for this sample. The easiest way to get started is to create new ASP. NET project in VS 2013 and include the WebAPI and Individual Accounts security option. Then add SignalR NuGet package. OnConnected ; } private void AssignToSecurityGroup if Context. OnDisconnected ; private void RemoveFromSecurityGroups Groups. So basically we replicate the functionality of validating the identity, while including additional token lookup in cookies. The ValidateIdentity method is not relevant for the presented scenario Now, to use the new component, in Startup. UseOAuthBearerTokens OAuthOptions ; app. UseOAuthAuthorizationServer OAuthOptions ; app. You may want to leave it on for MVC support. Then we turn off external sign in providers, as this is not supported by the sample. In order to pass our own instance of OAuthBearerAuthenticationProvider, we have to ommit the UseOAuthBearerToken helper method, as it uses the private class implementation I mentioned earlier by default. What about the client side? If login fails, we get HTTP 400 status. OWIN Security components will take care of authenticating connections based on the token. That may case some internal HTTP 403 errors in SignalR since it detects change of authentication status on an existing connection. However this error is not surfaced to the user. In order to get rid of this, you need to implement waiting for the disconnect to complete. And this is pretty much it. We have an authenticated connection to SignalR using a OAuth Bearer Token. The same token can be used to authenticate WebAPI calls in this case you can use the Authorization HTTP header. Please bear in mind, that in this sample I used the default token expiration time, which is 14 days this is what new project wizard generates in VS 2013. Also refresh token is not supported in this sample. For more advanced scenarios you may want to implement refresh token support and shorten the expiration period. You can find the. The code in the sample is mimicking default behavior of OWIN components. By default the OAuthBearerAuthenticationProvider implementation responsible for local authentication will reject context if any of the claims is issued by external system. After giving this some thought, that behavior may not be relevant in the scenario presented in the sample as there is no possibility to use external login here. I think I need to investigate further. Thanks for pointing this out. Hi Marcin, Your sample app + this blog is gr8. I am new to SignalR and was looking for a way to integrate 3 legged oauth 1. I wanted to understand your sample app to see how I can modify it to use OAUTH 1. As far I understand, we need to create a DB with the models you have provided on the API page? Thanks, Nimisha Hi Ting-Yang Lin, As mentioned in one of previous comments, the ValidateIdentity doesn't seem to be relevant for this scenario no external login. If you want to authorize users based on roles, you need a ClaimsIdentity containing role claims. Identity is created in ApplicationOAuthProvider. GrantResourceOwnerCredentials in the sample. QueryString property when in ApplicationOAuthBearerAuthenticationProvider. But as I say in the post, query string is discouraged for passing sensitive information. Thanks for fast the answer. My data has not really to be secure. Is cookie the really better approach? I tried to extract the query string with an owin middleware component. Path ; if context. Invoke context ; Console. You have to add all relevant roles to the ClaimsIdentity, based on which bearer token is issued. When authenticating with such token, the bearer middleware will take care to create appropriate principal and associate it with current request. Then you can use the attribute-based security. If you are using ASP. NET Identity to manage your users, please refer to the documentation to find a way for associating role with a user. When I'm debug the Requesttoken method the bearer token is successfully received. But when my signalr client calls an authorized method then he isn't authenticated. Caller is not authorized to invoke the Send method on Hub. UseOAuthAuthorizationServer OAuthOptions ; map. IsNullOrEmpty value context. FromResult null ; Frank Sevenhuysen: I had similar problems - 401 signalR's client errors when having cors environment. To allow your signalR to work via cross-domain environment assuming you are basing the implementation given this entire article authenticating via cookie token you have to explicitly set the cookie's domain property to the subdomain '. Not sure if it is possible to set a cookie property for diffrent tld if your owin is under different domain tough. Hi, this example looks great, I ran it locally, thanks for your time and knowledge! Let's say I want users to login with their Google account and OAuth, would this example be a good starting point? I do not want the users database because I do not need to store and manage them, I only need to know if they succesfully logged in with their Google account. Could you point me to the major points I would have to look for this please? Thanks for your time : ibiza420 You'll still need a sort of user database, for keeping association between your application's logical users with a profile, user settings, permissions, etc. The process of authenticating a user with external provider and issuing a local token is actually quite complex. See links below to get you started. Also, a lot of code is generated for you if you create a Web Application in VS from template. This works in development on localhost:xxxx as the webapp and localhost:yyyy as the api, but when I deploy to Azure the cookie is not sent with any of the requests to signalr. I have set the cookie domain to api. I turned of ARR Affinity, just to ensure that was not the cause. If anyone who came across this previously on Azure has found a fix I would be very grateful for it. Hi Marcin, Thank you for the great article. Do you have eventually also a SignalR client sample as. NET console application as SignalR client. The problem I would like to discuss is an API call, where you need to send binary data for example multiple images and some metadata information together. There are various ways you can approach this, and I will describe them briefly. Approach 1 — Send metadata and files in separate requestsThe steps could be this:Send metadata to server Server stores metadata and generates an unique URL, to which files should be uploaded. Sends the URL in response. This enables the client to upload some initial files, then later add some more. This could be a good approach if you are creating a new photo album metadata , then adding photos to it. Approach 2 — Send metadata and files together in one requestThere are some cases ho… is a great Azure based service for developers, similar to New Relic, that allows you to monitor an application, analyze its performance and get a deeper look into errors that occur in production. All of that without having to care about the infrastructure and management of the monitoring tools. Here, I'll describe how to deal with correlating all telemetry data gathered within one request to an OWIN based application. CorrelationWhen you're diagnosing a problem on production, you want to get as much information as possible about what was actually going on, when the issue occurred. Correlation of all telemetry data, that was gathered within a single operation that resulted in the error, may be very helpful. Application Insights provide you with the concept of the OperationId. It's an identifier, that you assign to all telemetry reported for a certain operation. When analyzing the telemetry data, you can then search by this identifier, to get all telem….
