What is the difference between Authenticate
and ValidateIsAuthenticated
attributes and what is the recommended way of securing the services serving the Razor Views, while using the ASP.NET Identity?
Explanation:
I am trying to migrate the authentication from the ServiceStack.Auth to ASP.NET Core Identity. The docs are saying to use the validation api (ASP.NET Core Identity Auth).
So far, our pages (Razor Views) were protected with the Authenticate attribute, that redirected unauthenticated users to the login page (when the Request.IsHtml()
). When switching to ValidateIsAuthenticated
the response throws the 401 instead of redirecting.
Our page is defined like so:
[Route(SiteMap.Dashboard)]
[Route(SiteMap.Dashboard_DashboardId)]
[ValidateIsAuthenticated]
// [Authenticate]
// [RequiredPermissionExt(Permission.CanViewDashboard, HtmlRedirect = "/forbidden")]
[Restrict(RequestAttributes.Html)]
[DefaultView("Dashboard")]
public class DashboardRequest
{
public int? DashboardId { get; set; }
}
public class PageService {
public object Get(DashboardRequest request) {
return someModelForRazorViewCreatedHere();
}
}
Hi @ramen-pipul ,
Since AuthenticateAttribute
is in the ServiceStack
pacakage, it is generally used on service implementations rather than Request DTOs which are usually in a low dependency project like the .ServiceModel
project that comes with the templates. Eg
[Authenticate]
public class MyServices : Service
{
public object Any(Hello request)
{
return new HelloResponse { Result = $"Hello, {request.Name}!" };
}
}
The ValidateIsAuthenticated
attribute is in the ServiceStack.Interfaces
library, so it can be more easily used on Request DTOs in the ServiceModel shared project, just as you have shown using it above, and uses SharpScript expressions to test different validation rules.
I’m not clear on what your RequiredPermissionExt
is doing, but assuming that is inheriting from RequiredPermissionAttribute
which is where your redirection is coming from.
Using the Authenticate
attribute will likely make more sense when you are securing endpoints designed to be interacted with via a browser since you will get that handling of redirection but API only endpoints can use the lighter Validate
range of attributes including ValidateIsAuthenticated
, which will make your DTO easier to share. Both are handled with the ASP.NET Core Identity Auth integration showed in our templates.
Hope that helps.
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Hello @layoric,
thanks for the clarification! It was very helpful. I am assuming then, the Authenticate
is not going anywhere and it’s safe to use for the pages and any static content.
The RequiredPermissionExt
was actually a re-implementation of the ServiceStack’s RequiredPermission
and it inherits directly from the Authenticate
attribute. Only it applies some query params to the HtmlRedirect
path, so once the permission is granted it will redirect the user to the page that was forbidden before.
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