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Okta secure web apps on Azure Virtual Machines

Time:02-22

We have 2 web applications in production since several years. They are currently only accessible from the intranet of the company. Future changes in the company's organization require to make these applications accessible from the internet. It is planned to use Okta to reinforce security. I don't know nothing about Okta yet. As far as possible, the changes should have as little impact as possible.

Current situation:

Web App 1:

  • ASP.NET MVC solution secured with userid/password ASP.NET Membership with forms authentication. Userid is an internal user code like ADE465 for example.

Web App 2:

  • ASP.NET MVC solution secured with userid/password authentication through IdentityServer2 (Thinktecture). Userid is firstname dot lastname like john.doe for example.

All web apps are hosted on IIS on an Azure virtual machine named (let's say) FABVM03.

For the future Okta integration: no need to have SSO (Single Sign On). Would it be possible to simply secure with Okta everything accessed on the server FABVM03? Or everything accessed from a specific URL ?

For example, if someone tries to access https://example.com/webapp1/login.html Okta should comes up and ask for authentication (Okta verify) and if successful allow the user to access the requested url. In fact, the 'already in place' login/password should then be asked as it is already the case. I agree the user would have to enter credentials 2 times: first for Okta verify, next for login the specific web application. But that's okay. As you will have understood, no code modification in the web apps would be necessary in this scenario.

My question is to know if something like that is possible with Okta. If not what is the less impacting possible solution with Okta ?

CodePudding user response:

Okta is not to enforce your policies (PEP), it's mainly SSO and Access Management solution.

Okta has a component, called OAG (Okta Access Gateway), which can be used to reverse-proxy your on-prem applications (which will work in your situation too, as your VPC is effectively equal to "on-prem in a cloud"). Which can do something like you want (protect your application and ask for authentication/authorization), but it's an additional package on top of basic Okta costs.

What you may need is a level of protection added on Azure Network layer, not sure if there is something like that though. I've seen some modules for nginx, capable of intercepting traffic and redirecting it to Okta, if not accompanied with a token. So try to dig into these 2 directions...

CodePudding user response:

You need some proxy-based solution to talk to Okta and enforce the protection for your applications. There are open source tools:

Or you can checkout some commercial tools:

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