UserCookieAuthentication in Mono 3.4.1

Question

When ever I add the line below to my Startup class I get the exception below. This is a self hosted exe running from mono (Ubuntu). It works fine in windows. I\'ve narrowed it d

Answer 1

Okay this is happening because OWIN uses DpapiDataProtector by default and DPAPI is a windows API (Data Protection API) and does not work in mono. Luckily you can override the default in your cookie options. Below is an example where AesDataProtectorProvider is a custom IDataProtector that I found here: Using Oauth tickets across several services?

        app.UseCookieAuthentication(new CookieAuthenticationOptions
        {
            TicketDataFormat =
                new SecureDataFormat<AuthenticationTicket>(DataSerializers.Ticket,
                    new AesDataProtectorProvider("testing"), TextEncodings.Base64)
        });

With this code my project starts in Mono again.

UPDATE:

You can also have a custom IDataProtectionProvider and have all of owin use that with this:

app.SetDataProtectionProvider(new CustomIDataProtectionProvider());