Overview of Identity in ASP.NET Core 2.0

ASP.NET Core Identity, a membership system, or login provider, is used by Dot Net apps to access login functions. Whenever we install an application, we know that almost all applications ask our identification; this login information (confidential information) is stored in the identity racks of application. And nowadays due to access use of social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google), some apps make use of external login providers, that make use of OAuth or OpenID. Names, passwords, phone numbers, addresses are stored in the persistent layer database such as MS-SQL by performing basic steps of configuration or the use of Tokens are done to just authenticate and authorize them. Besides this, other objectives of using identity in ASP.NET Core 2.0 are as follows.

• Authentication of users before giving them complete access.
• Registration of new users, authorization of user’s data
• Security policy implementation such as Renewal of passwords or resetting identification in case of forgetting the old one.
• Rich set management services and cookie configuration.
• Maintaining the user profile, data, and other personal information.

The Need and Purpose of Identity in ASP.NET Apps

Let’s get down to more explanation

1   Importance of Identity for Security

With in-built Identity library in ASP.NET, developers can maintain the security of their application. The identity parameter enables programmers to store insightful secrets of coding, these parameters separate the confidential information from the coding context and thus security is maintained.  Furthermore, apps can also overcome vulnerability attacks and security breaches.

2   Using ASP.NET Core Identity Model

The big picture of using the identity model entails EF core model, an entity framework model, which has various entities for representing a user, a role, claiming process, authentication token for the user, creates a relationship between user and login, granting multiple claims and establishing join entities as presented by Microsoft documentation.

The context classes are innate from Dbcontext for performing configuration of the model and EF core code platform is used to supervise the whole configuration. After adding default identity calls, identity options (class) are used to configure the identity of the system. All the default value settings are used for lockout, password identity and cookie configuration.

3  The Architecture Model of ASP.NET Core 2.0 Identity

The default architecture of ASP.NET Core primarily consists of two classes;

• Managers (high-level classes)

The managers are also named as a high-level class, used by developers to create identities or other higher operations. Moreover, these operations are not associated with lower classes.

• Stores (low-level classes)

The low-level classes interact with the data access layer and pursue the repository pattern.

4  Customized Model for Application

On top of that, ASP.NET Core Identity architecture is a large system that gives customization. Customize architecture carries different templates, interfaces, styles for developing applications. For example, when you prefer different database template (i.e. Dapper or Azure table storage) for your project, the default architecture doesn’t work for you. But thanks to custom storage providers, which helps to do writing, editing, and creation of customized provider and then also provide a plug-in tool.

Hope this short article explains the Identity in ASP.NET Core 2.0 version. Check out Ansibytecode website and learn a range of technologies with us.