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

Evolution of identity protocols

In this chapter, we are going to cover how authentication has evolved, the different authentication protocols that were used in the past, and what we are using now. Not much code is going to be shown in this chapter, but for newcomers in the identity field, this will give you some more context about how we got here, what the shortcomings are of older technologies, and how we got to where we are now.

The identity landscape, as we currently know it, is the result of a couple of decades of protocols and technologies evolving to address the needs of application architectures.

Older technologies, such as passwords and integrated authentication, still play a key role in enabling modern scenarios such as SSO from a mobile application or accessing an OAuth 2.0-protected web API in Azure AD.

Many of the protocols and standards that are going to be covered in this chapter are still heavily used in the market. For this reason, it is important to cover...