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

First-generation protocols

The first claims-based protocols appeared in the early 2000s. Two of these protocols are still supported and heavily used by Azure Active Directory and Windows Server Active Directory. These two protocols are SAML and WS-Federation. Both are used to provide cross-domain Single Sign-On (SSO), which is a scenario that the authentication protocols that were popular at that time didn't handle very well, such as username and password authentication. To handle these scenarios, cookies, a very popular and widely used mechanism, were used.

In the next section, we are going to look at SSO in more detail.

Single sign-on

With SSO, users can sign into several related but independent systems or applications by using a single username and password. True SSO allows the user to sign in only once and then access services without re-entering their authentication credentials, such as their username and password. The simplest form of SSO can be achieved over IP...