Authentication for hybrid flow for ASP.NET MVC client

Question

I'm learning identityserver4 and can't understand some stuff.

Shortly: I want to authorize end-users with email and password on ASP.NET MVC client side (it will send user credentials to the token server to get tokens), and I don't want third-party clients to retrieve data from my API resources.

As I understood from the documentation:

implicit flow is used for SPA (js clients) and uses id_token to authorize users. I can store id_token in my browser.
client credentials flow is used for trusted apps (like ASP.NET MVC client) to authorize clients and uses access_code. I can store access_code inside my app.

So looks like I need a hybrid flow.

In the documentation I read that I need to use AddOpenIdConnect() method and

Technically the tokens are stored inside the properties section of the cookie.

So my questions:

If the id_token can be stored in the browser, why is it not safe to store the access_token there too ?
As the docs state, the tokens are stored inside the properties section of the cookie. It's confusing, because some guides says, that it's not safe to store access_token there. So where I should store access token in my ASP.NET MVC client?
Am I right, that AddOpenIdConnect() configures my ASP.NET MVC app to retrieve access_token automatically from the token server? And if yes - in which moment should I authorize users with email/password and how to combine all tokens inside one JWT on my ASP.NET MVC client's backend when I will send requests to api resources ?

Tore Nestenius Tore Nestenius · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-24T08:05:53

Today you should not use the Implicit Flow and it has been deprecated as of Oauth 2.1. What you should use is the authorization code flow with PKCE. PKCE is a security enhancement for the authorization code flow.

So as of OAuth 2.1 you only have two main flows:

Authorization code flow, for a MVC client to login a user to the client
Client credentials flow, for API->API communication where no human is involved.

To answer your questions:

If the id_token can be stored in browser, why it's not safe to store access_token there too ?*

The ID-Token is only used to create the initial user session and after that you can throw it away. It also only have a short life time of 5 minutes by default in IdentityServer.

As the docs state, the tokens are stored inside the properties section of the cookie. It's confusing, because some guides says, that it's not safe to store access_token there. So where I should store access token in my ASP.NET MVC client?

The tokens can be stored in your session cookie in ASP.NET Core and that's secure. It's protected / encrypted using the Data Protection API. However, the cookies can grow in size quite a lot if you do that.

Am I right, that AddOpenIdConnect() configures my mvc app to retrieve access_token automatically from the token server? And if yes - In which moment I should authorize users with email/password and how to combine all tokens inside one JWT on my ASP.NET MVC client's backend when I will send requests to api resources?

AddOpenIdConnect only handles the initial login and retrieving the first ID and access token. It does not handle refreshing of the access token using refresh tokens. For that you can add the IdentityModel library.

Today when you use the auth code flow, you redirect the user to IdentityServer and you let the user login there instead of passing the username/pwd from you browser to identityserver.

Authentication for hybrid flow for ASP.NET MVC client

1 Answers