Food for thought those who do not know, Have you ever think about or know an attacker can be present on a network for more than 200 days before being detected? Imagine the damage that can be done to an organization during that time: Accessing sensitive data about your company, products, employees, and clients. Altering the operating system on every computer in your network. Causing irreparable damage to your company – both in terms of dollars and damaged reputation – before you even know the attacker’s there. Hackers typically gain con07ol of a network using a privileged account (e.g., domain admin) within 24-48 hours of initiating the attack. They move silently through the network, avoiding actions that would alert IT to their presence. If they are discovered, it’s usually by chance or an external notification. Do you know how a security breach actually happens? How hackers get a foothold, and what they do once they’re in? Most importantly: Are you as secure as you think you...

Yesterday I was 07ying to configure my application for Azure ACS and I was not able to find the option “Identity and Access…” for my web role application. To get this menu option enabled for a web site, web role project   you need to install Identity and AccessTool . This tool can be installed for Visual Studio 2012 from the link or it can be installed as a part of Extension and Updates from visual studio 2012.   I installed it and restarted visual studio got below mentioned error – The ‘IdentityAndAccessVSPackage’ package did not load correctly When I went to the location mentioned in above screenshot found following specific error – SetSite failed for package [IdentityAndAccessVSPackage] Following are the steps to be taken to resolve the error – 1.      Uninstall IdentityAndAccessVSPackage if already installed. This can be uninstalled from Extension and Updates menu as shown below. 2.      Change...

Implementing Claim Based Authentication As we all know, Claim based authentication is the future authentication s07ategy; the obvious question which comes to mind is - How to implement Claim based authentication? Or How to implement Claim based identity? Or how to configure claim based identity? However, before going forward I will highly recommend that, you should understand the terminology like Identity Providers, Secure Token Services, Identity and access management and Claim based authentication . T oday I will discuss the generic steps to implement Claim based authentication. I am referring Microsoft Pattern and Practices – A Guide to Claim-based identity book for explanation. Total there are 4 generic steps to be followed for implementing claim based authentication – 1.    Add logic in your application to for supporting claims – When you are planning to build claim based application, application needs to know how to validate security token coming from security token...

What is Identity Provider I have already given a good insight on the concepts in following link. What are identity providers? Claim based authentication and secure token services. Request you to follow the above link to know more details about identity providers. Cheers… Happy Programming!!

Identity providers, security token service and claim based authentication concept Security in IT field is vast topic. Today I just decided to discuss some of the basic terminologies that are used in the context of “identity and access management”. I will address following questions (of course according to my understanding) – 1.      Why we need identity providers? 2.      What are identity providers? How it helps in identity and access management? 3.      What is claim? 4.      What is claim based authentication? How it is different from certificate based authentication and integrated windows authentication? 5.      What is claim based identity? 6.      How to implement Claim Based Identity? 7.      What is relying party? 8.      What is an STS (security token service) 9.      How to es...