Creating your own OpenID Connect server with ASOS: introduction

Development

This post is the first part of a series of blog posts entitled Creating your own OpenID Connect server with ASOS:

  1. Introduction
  2. Choosing the right flow(s)
  3. Registering the middleware in the ASP.NET Core pipeline
  4. Creating your own authorization provider
  5. Implementing the resource owner password credentials grant
  6. Implementing the authorization code and implicit flows
  7. Adding custom claims and granting scopes
  8. Testing your authorization server with Postman
  9. Conclusion

What's ASOS?

AspNet.Security.OpenIdConnect.Server (codenamed ASOS) is an open-source OAuth2/OpenID Connect server middleware for OWIN/Katana and ASP.NET Core 1.0 (previously known as ASP.NET 5), designed to work on both the full .NET desktop framework and the new .NET Core platform. It is part of the aspnet-contrib initiative, that's also behind the OAuth2 social providers for ASP.NET Core.

Forked from Katana's now deprecated OAuth2 authorization server middleware, ASOS shares the same same low-level, protocol-first approach but comes with many new OpenID Connect features (e.g provider configuration discovery, client-initiated logout or userinfo support) and implements some of the recent OAuth2 specifications like token revocation or token introspection (kudos to Michael Ciarlillo for his great contribution!).

How is it different from the other identity servers?

Unlike other identity server projects, ASOS only focuses on the OAuth2/OpenID Connect protocol part and acts as a thin layer between your application and the protocol details: it comes with no membership feature, implementing the consent pages is left as an exercise and adding a CORS policy must be done by the developer depending on his/her own needs.

Though it requires a solid knowledge of the OAuth2/OpenID Connect specifications and generally needs more work than turnkey solutions (like the famous IdentityServer or OpenIddict), ASOS offers the most flexible approach and can be easily integrated to any existing environment.

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