Provisioning "new" users with multiple trusted STSes

When using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) with multiple Security Token Services (STS), is it possible to provision users before they first access the application?

For example, let's say I have a web site called BufferOverrun where users can login and ask/answer questions and I want to support authentication with external Google accounts. When a user first accesses the page, they have to authenticate with their Google account, then they can access the web application. In this scenario, there are two STSes, Google (for identity authentication) and a custom one for my application (for authorization).

How can I assign claims to a user before that users accesses the system?

Since the identity is owned externally to my application, I cannot assign claims directly to that identity (and I wouldn't want to anyway, as they would be application specific). But since the user has not accessed the system, I do not have an internal identity to assign claims to. I see two possible solutions:

1. Wait for a user to access the system (creating some default application-specific claims), then use some internal provisioning tool to modify those claims as desired.
2. Have the provisioning tool allow users to manually map a default identity claim (email address, for example) before that identity authenticates by manually typing it in, so that on first access if the identity asserts that claim, a specific set of application claims are granted.

I see a few issues with both 1 and 2. For 1, all users have some implicit access to the system, even if the default application claims allow no functionality. This seems to work great for something like stackoverflow where the initial account has a certain permission set, and as the user uses the systems, new claims are granted. However, this is likely not desirable for all applications. 2 is error prone, as it requires an admin to manually specify a claim.

In both cases above, how do I provision the identity which has access to actually use the provisioning tool (i.e., an admin account)?

For this, I envision that during application installation time, I require a user to authenticate and set the applicaton claims for that identity to be such that they have "administrative" privileges. Is this a good implementation?

Historically (I am now referring to an existing application), the application specifically interfaced with Active Directory only. The way this was handled was that there was a built-in admin account (not affiliated with AD) that allowed the admin user to first login. After authenti开发者_JAVA技巧cating with the admin application, that user could search AD for users/groups and provision them individually. Any user/group not provisioned by the admin would not have access to the system at all. I don't see this paradigm being applicable to using an external STS like Google, etc, so I am trying to conceive an architecture that would enable external STS systems. Retaining the ability to search the STS is desired, though not required. In practice, the two STSes involved would likely both be Active Directory using federated services.

Note: This is similar to this question and this question.

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When using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) with multiple Security Token Services (STS), is it possible to provision users before they first access the application?

The answer is yes, if you have a way of identitfying those users (e.g. their e-mail)

In this scenario, there are two STSes, Google (for identity authentication) and a custom one for my application (for authorization).

This is frequently used, but not necessarilly always the case. If you rely just on Google, then you could simply have the authorization code in the app itself (e.g. "AuthorizationManager" classes, etc). The value of another STS is that it can be a broker for multiple identities (e.g. Google, LiveID, Yahoo!, whatever) and you can do some authorization related transformations.

Since the identity is owned externally to my application, I cannot assign claims directly to that identity (and I wouldn't want to anyway, as they would be application specific).

Why not? You can define a rule that says:

"Anyone authenticated with Google is a 'reader' in App BufferOverrun". You can even say:

"someone@gmail.com is a 'reader' on BufferOverrun", before someone accesses the app.

You can still use the original approach (an out of band admin account for setup). Or you can also "bootstrap" config during provisioning defining which is the claim that will identify admin users.

Take a look at sample "Federation with Multiple Partners and ACS" (sample 7) in http://claimsid.codeplex.com We do exactly that.