Book Image

Azure Active Directory for Secure Application Development

By : Sjoukje Zaal
Book Image

Azure Active Directory for Secure Application Development

By: Sjoukje Zaal

Overview of this book

Azure Active Directory for Secure Application Development is your one-stop shop for learning how to develop secure applications using modern authentication techniques with Microsoft Azure AD. Whether you’re working with single-tenant, multi-tenant, or line-of-business applications, this book contains everything you need to secure them. The book wastes no time in diving into the practicalities of Azure AD. Right from the start, you’ll be setting up tenants, adding users, and registering your first application in Azure AD. The balance between grasping and applying theory is maintained as you move from the intermediate to the advanced: from the basics of OAuth to getting your hands dirty with building applications and registering them in Azure AD. Want to pin down the Microsoft Graph, Azure AD B2C, or authentication protocol best practices? We’ve got you covered. The full range of Azure AD functionality from a developer perspective is here for you to explore with confidence. By the end of this secure app development book, you’ll have developed the skill set that so many organizations are clamoring for. Security is mission-critical, and after reading this book, you will be too.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with the Microsoft Identity Platform
5
Part 2: Authentication and Protocols
9
Part 3: Azure AD B2C

Public client and confidential client applications

In the previous chapter, we briefly touched on confidential client applications. In this chapter, we are going to cover them in more depth.

Public client and confidential client applications are part of the OAuth 2.0 framework. Applications can either be confidential or public. The main difference is that a confidential application can hold credentials (such as the client ID and client secret) securely. We will cover this in more detail in the following subsections.

Confidential client applications

Confidential client applications can store credentials securely. They are typically run on servers and are considered difficult to access because they run in a secure environment. For that reason, they can keep a secret. They are capable of holding configuration-time secrets and each instance has a distinct configuration, which includes the client ID and client secret. The client ID and client secret are stored securely and can...