Asp.net Core Web API - Current user & Windows Authentication

Question

We have following technical stack in our application AngularJS2 Asp.Net Core API SQL Server

Now we need to store User Name for the Logged in User in table during Create/Edit for given item i.e. in Core API.

We have tried with

WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name, it gives IIS APPPOOL\Asp.netCore
HttpContext.User.Identity gives null value

I get User Name with WindowsIdentity while working with Visual Studio, but with IIS, it gives value as Asp.Netcore i.e. pool name

Windows Authentication is enabled and Anonymous Authentication is disabled

Using IIS Version 6.1

Am I missing anything?

I have the same issue but with iis 7.5 in production. On my dev machine i get my ntId, but when i deploy to prod I still get the application pool name. There is no launchSettings.json file when you deploy. Do you have the same issue when deploying to production? — freddoo, Apr 13 '17 at 03:34
update - I changed my System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name to User.Identity.Name and now it works. I did not work previously. — freddoo, Apr 13 '17 at 03:47

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 10 '17 at 15:37

9

Do you have the forwardWindowsAuthToken set to true in the web.config?

<aspNetCore processPath="%LAUNCHER_PATH%" arguments="%LAUNCHER_ARGS%" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="true"/>

answered Feb 10 '17 at 15:37

Daboul

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score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 11 '19 at 12:43

I looked around and it was suggested to create Asp.Net Core WebApi application using Windows Authentication.

So when i created Asp.Net Core WebApi using Windows Authentication it worked and i got values in User.Identity objects.

So i created 2 applications i.e. one with Windows Authentication and one without, and then compared all files and found changes in following files

forwardWindowsAuthToken - true, this was tried before but issue was not solved and same was suggested by Daboul
launchSettings.json, Set windowsAuthentication: true & anonymousAuthentication: false

After doing this, I was able to values in User.Identity object.

The launchSettings.json file:

{
  "iisSettings": {
    "windowsAuthentication": true,
    "anonymousAuthentication": false
    }
}

The Web.Config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModule" resourceType="Unspecified" />
    </handlers>
    <aspNetCore forwardWindowsAuthToken="true" processPath="C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe" arguments=".\YourWebsite.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="true" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" />
        <security>
            <authentication>
                <windowsAuthentication enabled="true" />
                <anonymousAuthentication enabled="false" />
            </authentication>
        </security>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

In my case situation was revers, My launchsettings.json file was correct but IIS settings was not as per given answer after setting anonymousAuthentication = false at both place, It worked for me. Thanks for saving my time :-) — Rudresh Bhatt, Nov 08 '17 at 10:09
How did you achieve windows authentication on web API work with user.identity having the value. I am working on implementing the same with lit-html as front end which accesses the API for data and unable to get values into user.identity. — Hari Krishna Gaddipati, Oct 12 '19 at 05:22

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 06 '17 at 20:18

On Windows Server 2012 R2/IIS 8.0, even after setting forwardWindowsAuthToken=true in web.config, User.Identity.Name was not returning the user name but IIS APPPOOL so to resolve the issue I made below change;

Go to the web application in IIS
Open Configuration Editor
Change Section to system.webServer/serverRuntime
Change authenticatedUserOverride to UseAuthenticatedUser (for me it was set to UseWorkerProcessUser)

For further details refer to below link; https://blogs.iis.net/jaroslad/what-does-the-authenticateduseroverrideuser-do

Asp.net Core Web API - Current user & Windows Authentication

3 Answers3

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