ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core Password Options and Custom Validators

ASP.NET Core provides a lot of identity feature out of the box when individual user accounts is selected during project creation. Using the default settings a user’s password is required to be at least 6 characters and contain a number, a lower case letter, an uppercase letter and a special character. This post is going to cover changing the the above options as well as creating custom validators.

Password Options

The following is the default registration of identity in the ConfigureServices  function of the Startup  class with the default settings mentioned above.

services.AddIdentity<ApplicationUser, IdentityRole>()
    .AddEntityFrameworkStores<ApplicationDbContext>()
    .AddDefaultTokenProviders();

AddIdentity  can accept options part of which allows control over the basic characteristics of what is required for user passwords. Here is the same AddIdentity but with all the options for passwords listed.

services.AddIdentity<ApplicationUser, IdentityRole>(options =>
{
    options.Password.RequireDigit = true;
    options.Password.RequireLowercase = true;
    options.Password.RequireNonLetterOrDigit = true;
    options.Password.RequireUppercase = true;
    options.Password.RequiredLength = 6;
})
    .AddEntityFrameworkStores<ApplicationDbContext>()
    .AddDefaultTokenProviders();

All the options do what you would expect. One thing to note is if you change the required length by setting options.Password.RequiredLength then the new setting will only be validated on post back to the server, which is the case of most password validation anyway, but for pre-post validation on length then the string length data annotation needs to be updated on RegisterViewModel.PasswordResetPasswordViewModel.PasswordChangePasswordViewModel.NewPassword and SetPasswordViewModel.NewPassword.

Custom Password Validators

The above is great for changing simple aspects of password validation, but we all know password rules for organizations are not always simple enough to be covered by the above. Thankfully Microsoft has provided the AddPasswordValidator  extension method to the IdentityBuilder class which is what is returned by AddIdentity.

AddPasswordValidator takes a type that implements IPasswordValidator. The custom validator only has to implement the  ValidateAsync defined by IPasswordValidator. The following validator checks to make sure that all the characters of the password are not the same and returns an IdentityResult based on the conditions passing. Forgive the contrived example, but I wanted to keep the class as simple as possible.

public class SameCharacterPasswordValidator<TUser>: IPasswordValidator<TUser> 
       where TUser : class
{
    public Task<IdentityResult> ValidateAsync(UserManager<TUser> manager, 
                                              TUser user, 
                                              string password)
    {
        return Task.FromResult(password.Distinct().Count() == 1 ? 
            IdentityResult.Failed(new IdentityError
            {
                Code = "SameChar",
                Description = "Passwords cannot be all the same character."
            }) : 
            IdentityResult.Success);
    }
}

If validation failed is the result then is added to the list of validation messages the user sees just like with the built in password validations.

Here is registration of identity with the custom password validation which is on the last line.

services.AddIdentity<ApplicationUser, IdentityRole>(options =>
{
    options.Password.RequireDigit = true;
    options.Password.RequireLowercase = true;
    options.Password.RequireNonLetterOrDigit = true;
    options.Password.RequireUppercase = true;
    options.Password.RequiredLength = 6;
})
    .AddEntityFrameworkStores<ApplicationDbContext>()
    .AddDefaultTokenProviders()
    .AddPasswordValidator<SameCharacterPasswordValidator<ApplicationUser>>();

Potential Use

Imagine you have a requirement to make sure a user doesn’t reuse the same password for a period of time. This would be a great place for a custom password validator. You could use dependency injection to get reference to a history of password hashes and use that to verify the user is not repeating the same password. Of course would have to first write the password hash history.

ASP.NET Core Password Options and Custom Validators Read More »

Dependency Injection Conditional Registration in ASP.NET Core

Now that I know emailing and SMS are working I wanted a way to get the information from the out going messages without actually hitting a third party service or having to use break points. To do this I wrote a new class that implemented IEmailSender and ISmsSender that wrote the messages to a file instead of hitting Mailgun and Twilio.

Dependency Injection (DI)

ASP.NET Core comes with dependency injection built-in the details of which are described in the docs and the code can be found here. The docs article does a great job of explaining DI so I am going to keep my description limited to the example at hand.

In ASP.NET Core services are registered in the ConfigureServices of the StartUp class. When an application first starts running the StartUp constructor runs followed by ConfigureServices and finally Configure.

Configuration Based Services

One potential way to handle decisions on which services to register is via configuration settings.  Using the following configuration as an example if WriteToFile is true then the file writer version of the email service should be used instead of the version that actually emails users.

{
  "EmailSettings": {
    "WriteToFile": true,
    "Path": "C:\Email\"
  }
}

With this configuration in place ConfigureServices uses the following to load the proper service based on the config value.

if (Configuration.Get<bool>("EmailSettings:WriteToFile"))
{
    services.AddTransient<IEmailSender, AuthMessageSenderFileWriter>();
}
else
{
    services.AddTransient<IEmailSender, AuthMessageSender>();
}

Environment Based Services

ASP.NET Core’s IHostingEnvironment defines an EnvironmentName which automatically gets loaded by the host from an environment variable. To quote Visual Studio’s Object Browser on EnvironmentName:

Gets or sets the name of the environment. This property is automatically set by the host to the value of the “Hosting:Environment” (on Windows) or “Hosting__Environment” (on Linux & OS X) environment variable.

I found this post by Armen Shimoon which clued me in on the fact that ConfigureServices is only called ASP.NET Core if no Configure{EnvironmentName}Services is found. This means that if EnviromentName is set to Development then ConfigureDevelopmentServices will be called instead of ConfigureServices. Extensions are provided out of the box to help support Development, Staging and Production values.

For development runs of the application to write to a file instead of emailing I added a ConfigureDevelopmentServices.

public void ConfigureDevelopmentServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    ConfigureServices(services);
    services.AddTransient<IEmailSender, AuthMessageSenderFileWriter>();
}

The first thing this function does is to call ConfigureServices since that is where the majority of service registrations is done. ConfigureServices registers an IEmailSender with AuthMessageSender, but that registration is overwritten with AuthMessageSenderFileWriter in ConfigureDevelopmentServices after the ConfigureServices function returns.

Final Thoughts

I have presented a couple of ways to handled varying registrations with ASP.NET Core’s built in dependency injection. I see using the ability to run different version of ConfigureServices to be the one I will get the most use out of, but I am sure basing the decision off of configuration could come in handy as well.

If you know of other options please leave a comment.

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SMS using Twilio Rest API in ASP.NET Core

A couple of weeks ago I went over using email in ASP.NET Core which left the provided MessageService class half implemented.  This post is going to cover the implementation of the other MessageService function that is used to send SMS as part of two-factor authentication.

View

In Views/Manage/Index.cshtml uncomment the following to enable the UI bit associated with phone numbers.

@(Model.PhoneNumber ?? "None")
    @if (Model.PhoneNumber != null)
    {
        <br />
        <text>[&nbsp;&nbsp;<a asp-controller="Manage" asp-action="AddPhoneNumber">Change</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;]</text>
        <form asp-controller="Manage" asp-action="RemovePhoneNumber" method="post" role="form">
            [<button type="submit" class="btn-link">Remove</button>]
        </form>
    }
    else
    {
        <text>[&nbsp;&nbsp;<a asp-controller="Manage" asp-action="AddPhoneNumber">Add</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;]</text>
    }

And this as well.

@if (Model.TwoFactor)
    {
        <form asp-controller="Manage" asp-action="DisableTwoFactorAuthentication" method="post" class="form-horizontal" role="form">
            Enabled [<button type="submit" class="btn-link">Disable</button>]
        </form>
    }
    else
    {
        <form asp-controller="Manage" asp-action="EnableTwoFactorAuthentication" method="post" class="form-horizontal" role="form">
            [<button type="submit" class="btn-link">Enable</button>] Disabled
        </form>
    }

Twilio

I spend a lot of time trying to find a services that allows sending of SMS for free and had zero luck. I ended up going with  Twilio as they do provide free messaging with their trial account. The usage section of the web site will make it looking like you will be changed, but that is just to provide an idea of what the service would cost and will not actually be charged.

Storing Configuration

Just as a couple of weeks ago for EmailSetting I created a SmsSettings class that will be loaded from user secrets in the StartUp class of the application. For more details on general configuration in ASP.NET Core check out this post and then this post for more details on user secrets. The following is my SMS settings class.

public class SmsSettings
{
    public string Sid { get; set; }
    public string Token { get; set; }
    public string BaseUri { get; set; }
    public string RequestUri { get; set; }
    public string From { get; set; }
}

And this is the config file looks like with the curly braces needed to be replace with values from your Twilio account. For example if your Twilio phone number was 15554447777 then the from line would be: “From”: “+15554447777”

{
  "SmsSettings": {
    "Sid": "{TwilioAccountSid}",
    "Token": "{TwilioAuthToken}",
    "BaseUri": "https://api.twilio.com",
    "RequestUri": "/2010-04-01/Accounts/{TwilioAccountSid}/Messages.json",
    "From": "+{TwilioPhoneNumber}"
  }
}

Then in ConfigureServices function of Startup.cs add a reference to the SmsSettings class to make it available using dependency injection.

services.Configure<SmsSettings>(Configuration.GetSection("SmsSettings"));

Message Services

In Services/MessageService.cs there is an empty implementation for sending SMS base on ISmsSender which defines a single SendSmsAsync function which is called when the application wants to send a SMS.

Add a constructor to the class if it doesn’t already have one so that the SmsSettings can be injected by the framework and add a field to store the settings in. I have removed the email related items from the constructor but you can look at this post if you want to include the email related bits a well.

private readonly SmsSettings _smsSettings;

public AuthMessageSender(IOptions<SmsSettings> smsSettings)
{
    _smsSettings = smsSettings.Value;
}

Then the SendSmsAsync function which uses the HttpClient with basic authentication and form url encoded content to make a post request to the Twilio API looks like the following.

public async Task SendSmsAsync(string number, string message)
{
    using (var client = new HttpClient { BaseAddress = new Uri(_smsSettings.BaseUri) })
    {
        client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic",
            Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes($"{_smsSettings.Sid}:{_smsSettings.Token}")));

        var content = new FormUrlEncodedContent(new[]
        {
            new KeyValuePair<string, string>("To",$"+{number}"),
            new KeyValuePair<string, string>("From", _smsSettings.From),
            new KeyValuePair<string, string>("Body", message)
        });

        await client.PostAsync(_smsSettings.RequestUri, content).ConfigureAwait(false);
    }
}

Now you application is capable of sending SMS.

ASP.NET Docs

As I was writing this I came across Rick Anderson’s post in the official docs that covers two-factor authentication. I highly recommend you read Rick’s post as he covers the UI portion in more depth than I did. Another note Rick is using the Twilio helper client were I am using the HttpClient in order to maintain dnxcore50 compatibility.

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