Protecting and consuming REST based resources with ACS, WIF, and the OAuth 2.0 protocol

ACS (Azure Access Control Service) recently added support for the OAuth 2.0 protocol. If you haven’t heard of it, OAuth is an open protocol that is being developed by members of the identity community to solve the problem of allowing 3rd party applications to access their data without providing their passwords. In order to show how this can be done with WIF and ACS, we have posted a sample on Microsoft Connect that shows an end-to-end scenario.

The scenario in the sample is meant to be as simple as possible to show the power of the OAuth protocol to enable web sites to access resource on behalf of a user without the user providing his or her credentials to that site. In our scenario, Contoso has a web service that exposes customer information that needs to be protected. Fabrikam has a web site and wants users to be able to view their Contoso data directly on it. The user doesn’t have to log in to the Fabrikam site, but gets redirected to a Contoso specific site in order to login and give consent to access data on their behalf.

The Contoso web service requires OAuth access tokens from ACS to be attached to incoming requests. The necessary protocol flow for the Fabrikam web site (in OAuth terms – the web server client), including redirecting the user to login and give consent, requesting access tokens from ACS, and attaching the token to outgoing requests to the service is taken care of under the covers. The sample contains a walkthrough that describes the components in more detail.

Try it out here, and tell us what you think!