Authentication and Authorization

Product versions:	EPiServer CMS 6.0 / R2
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Introduction

The authentication and authorization system in EPiServer CMS uses the default membership and role system as introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. See Scott Guthrie's blog for some background information: ASP.NET 2.0 Membership, Roles, Forms Authentication, and Security Resources. For more details on the provider model, see Introduction to the Provider Model.

Advantages of the Provider Model
Configuration of Authentication and Authorization
Administering Security and Access Rights in EPiServer CMS
Virtual Roles
Enterprise Configuration Issues

Advantages of the Provider Model

Conforming to a standard API
The provider model for membership and roles makes it possible to plug in a provider for any type of user database, even using third-party providers.
Separation of authentication and authorization
Authentication and authorization are done in two separate operations, thereby increasing flexibility.
Increased scalability
Since we call out to a provider it is possible to delegate security operations to a separate machine, i.e. if you have to support millions of users, you can use any type of system suitable for that volume and call out to that system from EPiServer CMS.
Support standard ASP.NET 2.0 controls
By using the built-in provider model it is possible to use the built-in controls such as System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login and LoginView.
Leverage existing knowledge and documentation
No need to re-learn a new security system if you already know how to work with ASP.NET 2.0

Configuration of Authentication and Authorization

Configuration of membership and role providers is done in web.config. Note that if you change providers, you may have to revise the security settings (ACLs) for your entire site, since it is highly likely that user names and role names changes when you switch providers.

An example web.config section:

The <membership> section controls which membership provider to use. Note that even though there are three providers listed in the <providers> section, only one is active at this time - the one specified in the defaultProvider attribute of the <membership> tag. I.e. in the example above the <add ...> lines for MultiplexingMembershipProvider and SqlServerMembershipProvider could be removed without affecting the functionality. There is one exception to this statement - if you have selected the MultiplexingMembershipProvider as the default provider, it will make use of additional providers as defined by the provider<n> attributes.

Similarly the <roleManager> section controls which role provider to use. The same basic principles of defaultProvider / Multiplexing provider as for membership applies here as well.

When you select the provider to use you are deciding which user store that EPiServer CMS authenticates its users against. As previously stated, it is possible to change the provider at any time, but this may cause problems forcing you to revise the security settings in EPiServer CMS.

Also note that the membership and role providers are configured separately, but a specific membership provider may require a certain role provider and vice versa. For the current set of providers you must have matching role and membership providers, i.e. if you decide to use WindowsMembershipProvider, you must use the WindowsRoleProvider.

Administering Security and Access Rights in EPiServer CMS

When you administer access rights to pages in EPiServer CMS, you use three distinct components that are tied very loosely together. The three components are:

Users (delivered by the current membership provider).
Roles (delivered by the current role provider and the virtual roles).
Access control lists (ACLs).

An ACL is simply a list of SecurityEntities and an access level. The security entity is a name and information stating if the name represents a role or a user. Once you have a security entity in an ACL, it will not be affected by changes in the membership or role provider. One aspect of this is that when you delete a role and then look at an ACL that had an access entry for this role, the role will still be displayed in the ACL.

Membership providers have APIs for creating, editing and deleting users, but not all providers support updates of the user store. The SQL membership provider allows you to modify the user store, but the Windows membership provider does not. This will be reflected in the UI when you browse users.

Note: If you are using the Multiplexing membership provider and want to create users, then the first provider in the multiplexing list (provider1) must support it. The same applies for role providers.

Virtual Roles

EPiServer CMS uses an extension of the Role concept called Virtual Roles. These are roles where the membership criteria is determined at runtime for each call to IsInRole. In other words, the virtual role membership is not stored in the database, but depends on programmatic criteria.

Virtual roles are controlled by the <virtualRoles> configuration section in EPiServerFramework.config. A typical configuration looks like this:

The EPiServer.Configuration.VirtualRolesElement.ReplacePrincipal attribute controls whether the current principal object gets replaced with a principal object wrapper that also supports Virtual roles. The current principal object can be accessed in several different ways. The recommended approach is to use EPiServer.Security.PrincipalInfo.CurrentPrincipal , but alternate ways such as System.Web.HttpContext.Current.User are also supported.

If replacePrincipal="false", virtual roles will only be evaluated when checking access rights based on ACLs in EPiServer CMS. Any principal.IsInRole calls for a virtual role will return false.

The <providers> section contains a series of <add...> tags. Each <add> defines a virtual role implementation (as identified by the type attribute) and gives the role a name with the name attribute.

Seven virtual roles are delivered with EPiServer CMS:

Anonymous
Authenticated
Creator
Everyone
Administrator
CmsAdmins
CmsEditors

In addition to the predefined roles, it is very easy to create new virtual roles to allow access based on business rules, such as only allow access during business hours. A common scenario is to define virtual roles that evaluate to true if the user is a member of role1 and role2. This can be used to reduce the number of groups needed for setting the required permissions in EPiServer CMS.

The built-in virtual roles are fairly self-explanatory. The few that may require a bit more in-depth explanation are Administrator and Creator.

Administrator is needed to support localized versions of Windows, where the Administrators group has been translated, for example in Swedish Windows versions, the Administrators group is named "Administratörer". The Administrators virtual role will do a localization-independent test for the Administrators group, thus eliminating the need to manually modify episerver.config or access rights in EPiServer CMS.

Creator is only used when evaluating AccessControlLists in EPiServer CMS and it will return true if the current principal is the same as the Creator for an ACL.

The CmsAdmins and CmsEditors virtual roles are of the MappedRole type - MappedRole is used to map existent or non-existent groups to several other groups. The roles attribute contains the names of one or more roles that are used to evaluate membership the the MappedRole. The mode attribute value can be either Any or All:

Any - membership in at least one of the roles listed in the roles attribute is required for membership in the mapped role.
All - membership in all of the roles listed in the roles attribute is required for membership in the mapped role.

Enterprise Configuration Issues

If you are running in an Enterprise configuration with multiple site definitions, there are some security-related issues you should be aware of.

The membership and role provider definitions cannot be configured on a per-site basis. If you must have separate provider definitions for each site, you cannot share the web.config file. This is a restriction in the Microsoft implementation of ASP.NET 2.0 and not a restriction in EPiServer CMS.

If you are using the SQL Server membership / role provider and want to use the same set of users / roles for all sites using the same web.config files (probably the most common scenario), you need to use a separate database for the user / role information.

Create a new database with the SQL Server management tools.
Prepare the new database with the aspnet_regsql tool (part of the Microsoft .NET Framework) to set up the schema needed for the SQL providers.
Add a new connection string to the <connectionStrings> section in web.config (it may be placed in a separate connectionStrings.config file) that points to the newly created database.
Change the connectionStringName attributes of the SqlMembershipProvider and SqlRoleProvider to point to the connection string added in step 3.

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