ASP.Net web application trying to use Impersonation and Delegation to connect to SQL Server

Question

I\'m trying to use Impersonation and Delegation in an intranet ASP.Net web-app in order to pass authenticated users\' credentials onto a SQL Server.

The web server and S

Answer 1

I've discovered the answer:

The Windows Authentication provider in IIS7 must be set to Negotiate:Kerberos, not NTLM. This means that the Kernel-mode authentication setting must be disabled. This seems to be fine. I think I'm right in saying that Kernel-mode authentication is required when using a custom identity, i.e. one specific identity. Delegation can use an arbitrary number of identities. So all is well.

I've written a blog post about this too, which goes into a bit more detail.

Answer 2

No - it is not accurate to say you need Kerberos, an SPN, to trust the server for delegation, and that this is the ONLY way to do it. Yes, this is one way to do it (and you do need all of it to make it happen via Kerberos), but it is not the ONLY way, or even technically the most secure way or easiest way. Do you really want to have to do extra configurations and create a login for every web user to your DB in SQL? What if any one of those accounts is compromised? More accounts, more vulnerabilities.

No, create a Domain service account, instead, and let that access SQL. If your security guys lock down things, give that user these rights: Logon as a service, Logon as a batch job, and Allow logon locally. Or, if this is just to develop and test the theory or you don't care or can't find the settings or are still getting errors later on, and this might not get a large following, but give it local Admin (sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do - some security pros lock down things tighter than I would care to write about - can always troubleshoot security later to lock it back down). Then set that account as the custom account on the app pool and give that account a login in SQL. Give it dbo on just THAT ONE database.

On the website in IIS, set the authentication type as Windows. I've seen them say "Basic" in other blogs so Kerberos will work, but NTLM uses Windows authentication. In IIS 7, you may also want to enable ASP .NET impersonation. Personally, I've only tried this on IIS 6, but the principal is the same.

In the web.config, add this under <configuration>, which is a "peer" to <system.web>:

<connectionStrings>
  <add 
     name="NorthwindConnectionString" 
     connectionString="Data Source=serverName;Initial 
     Catalog=Northwind;Integrated Security=SSPI;User 
     ID=userName;Password=password"
     providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"
  />
</connectionStrings>

And in <system.web>:

<authentication mode="Windows"/> 
<identity impersonate="true"
      userName="domain\user" 
      password="password" />

Then read the string into your app like this:

using System.Configuration;

string connString = String.Empty;
if (ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings.ConnectionStrings.Count > 0)
{
    connString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["NorthwindConnectionString"].ConnectionString; 
    if (connString != null) // do DB connection stuff here
        Console.WriteLine("Northwind connection string = \"{0}\"",
        connString.ConnectionString);
    else
        Console.WriteLine("No Northwind connection string");
}

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178411.aspx.

If it will not connect with the service account after filling in that account in the web.config for the impersonate tag and the SQL connection, you can then use impersonation methods using WindowsImpersonationContext (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.principal.windowsimpersonationcontext.aspx). Specifically, you want wic.Impersonate() and wic.Undo() after getting their token. You can read in the service account domain, name, and password from the web.config, in the form of AppKeys.

In short, there are ways around the issues. You can even encrypt the password in the web.config - both in the ConnectionString, and if you want to store it in an AppKey instead of directly in the "impersonate" tag, if you don't want plain text passwords in there (which I'd recommend against), and so you can have it for the creation of a Logon token, if you need to use the Impersonation methods (as I did).