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

Modern protocols

The protocols that we described previously were mostly used in an era where internet usage was not as high as it is nowadays. These days, in a lot of countries, almost everyone has a smartphone, tablet, and/or computer and uses the internet. As we are spending more and more time online, and we are using more and more different websites and applications, the need arose to combine different services into a single workflow.

For instance, let's say you are a big social media user and you have several social media accounts. You only want to publish your messages once across these different social media channels. For this to work, an application should be able to sign in to these different accounts and post content on your behalf.

This was originally implemented by the most infamous antipattern in history, known as the password-sharing antipattern, as shown in the following diagram:

Fig 4.2 – The password-sharing antipattern

Let...