SharePoint is a popular document collaboration platform from Microsoft, capable of running multiple web applications which in turn consist of multiple web sites. SharePoint also comes with of the box support with other Microsoft products such as Office 365 and Active Directory.

But what if you want to use SharePoint with non-Active Directory accounts? Or have SSO across all of your applications, even on mobile devices? Even Azure AD B2C struggles with this, due to it’s lack of support for SAML 1.1 tokens. This is where traditional identity providers start to struggle and IdentityServer steps in.

I recently made the move to Cloudflare and have been talking to anyone who will listen about how great it is, both for simplicity and nerdy security features. Yes, even after the media sensation that was #CloudBleed.

One of the things I wanted to do once I moved to Cloudflare was ensure that I had TLS across the entire pipeline. Whilst Cloudflare will ensure you have TLS between the browser and their servers, but they’re a bit more permissive when it comes to TLS between their servers and your origin server (in my case Azure App Service). You’ll see these kinds of images floating around explaining this...

Default Password Hasher

The default password hasher that comes out of the box with ASP.NET Identity 2 ticks all the right boxes:

• It actually uses a hashing algorithm (for some reason this is still something we need to congratulate in 2017)
• It generates a per user salt
• It iteratively hashes a password (not just once like in vanilla ASP.NET Membership)
• It uses a derived key

The above can pretty much be summed up with "it uses PBKDF2", but that that didn’t read as nice.

Great, so that’s pretty good for an out of the box password hasher from 2014. But for some reason the password hasher contains the following line of code:

I can’t remember how many times I’ve had to generate a new self-signed certificate for token signing when developing IdentityServer solutions, always going back to the same Google Doc, that I wrote years ago, containing a makecert script I pieced together from a collection of other articles. So, even though there is a silly number of these articles already, I’ve decided to put it online where I don’t need Google Docs access to view it!

This approach is a lot more UI driven for passwords and export processes, but I’ve had consistent results doing this over trying to include passwords and export filenames within the commands.