How do you create a custom AuthorizeAttribute in ASP.NET Core?

Question

I'm trying to make a custom authorization attribute in ASP.NET Core. In previous versions it was possible to override bool AuthorizeCore(HttpContextBase httpContext). But this no longer exists in AuthorizeAttribute.

What is the current approach to make a custom AuthorizeAttribute?

What I am trying to accomplish: I am receiving a session ID in the Header Authorization. From that ID I'll know whether a particular action is valid.

Answer 1

The approach recommended by the ASP.Net Core team is to use the new policy design which is fully documented here. The basic idea behind the new approach is to use the new [Authorize] attribute to designate a "policy" (e.g. [Authorize( Policy = "YouNeedToBe18ToDoThis")] where the policy is registered in the application's Startup.cs to execute some block of code (i.e. ensure the user has an age claim where the age is 18 or older).

The policy design is a great addition to the framework and the ASP.Net Security Core team should be commended for its introduction. That said, it isn't well-suited for all cases. The shortcoming of this approach is that it fails to provide a convenient solution for the most common need of simply asserting that a given controller or action requires a given claim type. In the case where an application may have hundreds of discrete permissions governing CRUD operations on individual REST resources ("CanCreateOrder", "CanReadOrder", "CanUpdateOrder", "CanDeleteOrder", etc.), the new approach either requires repetitive one-to-one mappings between a policy name and a claim name (e.g. options.AddPolicy("CanUpdateOrder", policy => policy.RequireClaim(MyClaimTypes.Permission, "CanUpdateOrder));), or writing some code to perform these registrations at run time (e.g. read all claim types from a database and perform the aforementioned call in a loop). The problem with this approach for the majority of cases is that it's unnecessary overhead.

While the ASP.Net Core Security team recommends never creating your own solution, in some cases this may be the most prudent option with which to start.

The following is an implementation which uses the IAuthorizationFilter to provide a simple way to express a claim requirement for a given controller or action:

public class ClaimRequirementAttribute : TypeFilterAttribute
{
    public ClaimRequirementAttribute(string claimType, string claimValue) : base(typeof(ClaimRequirementFilter))
    {
        Arguments = new object[] {new Claim(claimType, claimValue) };
    }
}

public class ClaimRequirementFilter : IAuthorizationFilter
{
    readonly Claim _claim;

    public ClaimRequirementFilter(Claim claim)
    {
        _claim = claim;
    }

    public void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationFilterContext context)
    {
        var hasClaim = context.HttpContext.User.Claims.Any(c => c.Type == _claim.Type && c.Value == _claim.Value);
        if (!hasClaim)
        {
            context.Result = new ForbidResult();
        }
    }
}


[Route("api/resource")]
public class MyController : Controller
{
    [ClaimRequirement(MyClaimTypes.Permission, "CanReadResource")]
    [HttpGet]
    public IActionResult GetResource()
    {
        return Ok();
    }
}