HOWTO: Change IIS User Impersonation Token

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Question:

Hi,

We are using our third party component for doing authentication and authorization with IIS6 web server on win2k3 X64 EE. Here we are using IMPERSONATION concept for this integration.

Can anybody describe the required configuration which are needed at IIS 6 for successfully impersonation of users with third party component?

Should we need to set Anonymous authentication explicitely for this kind of configuration?

Answer:

Third party code will not be able to directly impersonate and have IIS use that user token. IIS will:

  • Strip off the impersonation token after ISAPI Extension returns control to it
  • Ignore and re-apply IIS's desired impersonation token if ISAPI Filter changed it

Thus, the only way for you to impersonate users with IIS is to change IIS's desired impersonation token. The following are the methods, in no particular order, that ISAPI can change IIS's desired impersonation token and hence control impersonated user. The method you choose depends on your authentication protocol's requirements.

  • ISAPI Filter - SF_NOTIFY_PREPROC_HEADERS event - change the "Authorization" request header value to be: Basic [base64 encoding of username:password] . Requires Basic Authentication enabled in IIS.
  • ISAPI Filter - SF_NOTIFY_AUTHENTICATION event - change pszUser and pszPassword fields on HTTP_FILTER_AUTHENT. Remember to SET your values into the provided buffers (and change the cbUserBuff/cbPasswordBuf values) because those are the actual buffers IIS will use. Requires Anonymous or Basic Authentication enabled in IIS.
  • ISAPI Extension - HSE_REQ_EXEC_URL configured as Wildcard Application Mapping - change hImpersonationToken field on HSE_EXEC_URL_USER_INFO to be the actual NT User Token used by IIS for request impersonation. Requires Anonymous Authentication enabled in IIS.

//David