ASP.NET Forms Authentication and WIF Session Authentication (which has *nothing* to
do with ASP.NET sessions) are very similar. Both inspect incoming requests for a special
cookie that contains identity information, if that cookie is present it gets validated
and if that is successful, the identity information is made available to the application
via HttpContext.User/Thread.CurrentPrincipal.
The main difference between the two is the identity to cookie serialization engine
that sits below. Whereas ForsmAuth can only store the name of the user and an additional UserData string.
It is limited to a single cookie and hardcoded to protection via the machine key.
WIF session authentication in turn has these additional features:
Can serialize a complete ClaimsPrincipal (including claims) to the cookie(s).
Has a cookie overflow mechanism when data gets too big. In total it can create up
to 8 cookies (á 4 KB) per domain (not that I would recommend round tripping that much
data).
Supports server side caching (which is an extensible mechanism).
Has an extensible mechanism for protection (DPAPI by default, RSA as an option for
web farms, and machine key based protection is coming in .NET 4.5)
So in other words – session authentication is the superior technology, and if done
cleverly enough you can replace FormsAuth without any changes to your application
code. The only features missing is the redirect mechanism to a login page and an easy
to use API to set authentication cookies. But that’s easy to add ;)
FormsSessionAuthenticationModule
This module is a sub class of the standard WIF session module, adding the
following features:
Handling EndRequest to do the redirect on 401s to the login page configured for FormsAuth.
Reads the FormsAuth cookie name, cookie domain, timeout and require SSL settings to
configure the module accordingly.
Implements sliding expiration if configured for FormsAuth. It also uses the same algorithm
as FormsAuth to calculate when the cookie needs renewal.
Implements caching of the principal on the server side (aka session mode) if configured
in an AppSetting.
Supports claims transformation via a ClaimsAuthenticationManager.
As you can see, the whole module is designed to easily replace the FormsAuth mechanism.
Simply set the authentication mode to None and register the module. In the
spirit of the FormsAuthentication class, there is also now a SessionAuthentication class
with the same methods and signatures (e.g. SetAuthCookie and SignOut).
The rest of your application code should not be affected.
In addition the session module looks for a HttpContext item called “NoRedirect”. If
that exists, the redirect to the login page will *not* happen, instead the 401 is
passed back to the client. Very useful if you are implementing services or web APIs
where you want the actual status code to be preserved. A corresponding UnauthorizedResult is
provided that gives you easy access to the context item.
The download contains
a sample app, the module and an inspector for session cookies and tokens. Let’s hope
that in .NET 4.5 such a module comes out of the box.
HTH
