Using Azure B2C with an MVC app gets into infinite

Question

So I've built and published a new website that uses Azure B2C as the authentication mechanism.

What I found was that the login and sign would work fine for a while. But after a period of time, say couple of hours after visiting the site post deployment, I would find that on login or signup, after successful authentication, instead of being redirected back to the return url set up in the b2c configuration, my browser would get caught between an infinite loop between the post authentication landing page that is protected with an authorise attribute and the Azure B2C Login page, before finally finishing with Http 400 error message with the message - Bad Request - Request too long.

I did some googling around this and there are number of posts that suggest that the problem is with the cookie, and that deleting the cookie should resolve the issue. This is not the case. The only thing I have found to fix this is restarting the application on the webserver, or waiting say 24 hours for some kind of cache or application pool to reset. Anyone has any ideas what's going on here?

Answer 1

Ok, I think I may have found the answer.

Looks like there is an issue with Microsoft.Owin library and the way it sets cookies. Writing directly to System.Web solves this problem according to this article.

There are three suggested solutions:

1. Ensure session is established prior to authentication: The conflict between System.Web and Katana cookies is per request, so it may be possible for the application to establish the session on some request prior to the authentication flow. This should be easy to do when the user first arrives, but it may be harder to guarantee later when the session or auth cookies expire and/or need to be refreshed.

2. Disable the SessionStateModule: If the application is not relying on session information, but the session module is still setting a cookie that causes the above conflict, then you may consider disabling the session state module.

3. Reconfigure the CookieAuthenticationMiddleware to write directly to System.Web's cookie collection.

I will opt for the third option, which is to overwrite the default Cookie AuthenticationMiddleware, as they have suggested below.

app.UseCookieAuthentication(new CookieAuthenticationOptions
        {
            // ...
            CookieManager = new SystemWebCookieManager()
        });

public class SystemWebCookieManager : ICookieManager
{
    public string GetRequestCookie(IOwinContext context, string key)
    {
        if (context == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("context");
        }

        var webContext = context.Get<HttpContextBase>(typeof(HttpContextBase).FullName);
        var cookie = webContext.Request.Cookies[key];
        return cookie == null ? null : cookie.Value;
    }

    public void AppendResponseCookie(IOwinContext context, string key, string value, CookieOptions options)
    {
        if (context == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("context");
        }
        if (options == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("options");
        }

        var webContext = context.Get<HttpContextBase>(typeof(HttpContextBase).FullName);

        bool domainHasValue = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(options.Domain);
        bool pathHasValue = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(options.Path);
        bool expiresHasValue = options.Expires.HasValue;

        var cookie = new HttpCookie(key, value);
        if (domainHasValue)
        {
            cookie.Domain = options.Domain;
        }
        if (pathHasValue)
        {
            cookie.Path = options.Path;
        }
        if (expiresHasValue)
        {
            cookie.Expires = options.Expires.Value;
        }
        if (options.Secure)
        {
            cookie.Secure = true;
        }
        if (options.HttpOnly)
        {
            cookie.HttpOnly = true;
        }

        webContext.Response.AppendCookie(cookie);
    }

    public void DeleteCookie(IOwinContext context, string key, CookieOptions options)
    {
        if (context == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("context");
        }
        if (options == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("options");
        }

        AppendResponseCookie(
            context,
            key,
            string.Empty,
            new CookieOptions
            {
                Path = options.Path,
                Domain = options.Domain,
                Expires = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc),
            });
    }
}

I will give that a crack, and post my results back here.