Can a Silverlight application authenticate versus a local LDAP/ActiveDirectory Server

Question

If I have an externally hosted application (www.outside.com) outside the firewall but users within a company wanted to be able to enable LDAP authentication against their local (behind the firewall) AD server (acting as LDAP) or other LDAP server (call it ldap.inside.com), how would this be done.

It seems technically possible in that when a user tried to login to outside.com through a client-side silverlight interface, that the SL app could connect to the outside.com login service and be told to authenticate that user against ldap.inside.com. The SL app would make the calls to ldap.inside.com to authenticate the user.

Of course, there is the issue of how the server is notified securely that the client authenticated itself...Has anyone done this?

Answer 1

Mmmm... can it be done on a normal ASP .net / Web app if the asnwer is true, then you can inherit the context from the ASP .net app, if not... I guess not SL 2 is quite limited when talking about security (maybe version 3 has something).

HTH Braulio

Answer 2

One way might be to: 1). Add a service reference to your Silverlight application that points to your web server where a process is running that will run the LDAP authentication. 2). Return from the service success or failure notification. 3). Read the service return value and act on it in your Silverlight app.

This article talks about LDAP query from a web application: link text

Answer 3

I think your best bet is to make use of ASP.NET's membership mechanism. This can be configured to go against the Active Directory.

The following link discusses how to configure the membership to `Active Directory: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998360.aspx

The following article discusses ASP.NET's membership and role service in Silverlight: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/05/03/accessing-the-asp-net-authentication-profile-and-role-service-in-silverlight.aspx

Additionally, you may want to look at the latest version of RIA services. They have a template to use the ASP.NET membership in your Silverlight application.