Get the user's email address from Azure AD via OpenID Connect

Question

I'm trying to authenticate users to my site with their Office 365 accounts, so I have been following the guidance on using the OWIN OpenID Connect middleware to add authentication and successfully managed to authenticate and retrieve their profile.

I am now trying to get the email address of the user (so I can populate their system account with their contact details), but I can't seem to get an email claim back. I have tried making a request using the scope openid profile email, but the claim-set does not contain any mail information.

Is there a way to get the email of a user from Azure AD via the OpenID Connect endpoint?

Answer 1

I struggled with the same problem for a few days before arriving at a solution. In answer to your question: yes, you should be able to get the e-mail address back in your claims as long as you:

1. Include the profile or email scope in your request, and
2. Configure your application in the Azure Portal Active Directory section to include Sign in and read user profile under Delegated Permissions.

Note that the e-mail address may not be returned in an email claim: in my case (once I got it working) it's coming back in a name claim.

However, not getting the e-mail address back at all could be caused by one of the following issues:

No e-mail address associated with the Azure AD account

As per this guide to Scopes, permissions, and consent in the Azure Active Directory v2.0 endpoint, even if you include the email scope you may not get an e-mail address back:

The email claim is included in a token only if an email address is associated with the user account, which is not always the case. If it uses the email scope, your app should be prepared to handle a case in which the email claim does not exist in the token.

If you're getting other profile-related claims back (like given_name and family_name), this might be the problem.

Claims discarded by middleware

This was the cause for me. I wasn't getting any profile-related claims back (first name, last name, username, e-mail, etc.).

In my case, the identity-handling stack looks like this:

• IdentityServer3
• IdentityServer3.AspNetIdentity
• A custom Couchbase storage provider based on couchbase-aspnet-identity

The problem was in the IdentityServer3.AspNetIdentity AspNetIdentityUserService class: the InstantiateNewUserFromExternalProviderAsync() method looks like this:

protected virtual Task<TUser> InstantiateNewUserFromExternalProviderAsync(
    string provider,
    string providerId,
    IEnumerable<Claim> claims)
{
    var user = new TUser() { UserName = Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N") };
    return Task.FromResult(user);
}

Note it passes in a claims collection then ignores it. My solution was to create a class derived from this and override the method to something like this:

protected override Task<TUser> InstantiateNewUserFromExternalProviderAsync(
    string provider,
    string providerId,
    IEnumerable<Claim> claims)
{
    var user = new TUser
    {
        UserName = Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N"),
        Claims = claims
    };
    return Task.FromResult(user);
}

I don't know exactly what middleware components you're using, but it's easy to see the raw claims returned from your external provider; that'll at least tell you they're coming back OK and that the problem is somewhere in your middleware. Just add a Notifications property to your OpenIdConnectAuthenticationOptions object, like this:

// Configure Azure AD as a provider
var azureAdOptions = new OpenIdConnectAuthenticationOptions
{
    AuthenticationType = Constants.Azure.AuthenticationType,
    Caption = Resources.AzureSignInCaption,
    Scope = Constants.Azure.Scopes,
    ClientId = Config.Azure.ClientId,
    Authority = Constants.Azure.AuthenticationRootUri,
    PostLogoutRedirectUri = Config.Identity.RedirectUri,
    RedirectUri = Config.Azure.PostSignInRedirectUri,
    AuthenticationMode = AuthenticationMode.Passive,
    TokenValidationParameters = new TokenValidationParameters
    {
        ValidateIssuer = false
    },
    Notifications = new OpenIdConnectAuthenticationNotifications
    {
        AuthorizationCodeReceived = context =>
        {
            // Log all the claims returned by Azure AD
            var claims = context.AuthenticationTicket.Identity.Claims;
            foreach (var claim in claims)
            {
                Log.Debug("{0} = {1}", claim.Type, claim.Value);
            }
            return null;
        }
    },
    SignInAsAuthenticationType = signInAsType // this MUST come after TokenValidationParameters
};

app.UseOpenIdConnectAuthentication(azureAdOptions);

See also

• This article by Scott Brady contains a section on Claims Transformation which may be useful if neither of the above fixes it.
• This discussion on the IdentityServer3 GitHub account was a huge help to me, especially this response.