Trouble getting ClaimsPrincipal populated when using EasyAuth to authenticate against AAD on Azure App Service in a Asp.Net Core web app

I've created a custom middleware that populates the User property until this gets solved by the Azure Team.

It reads the headers from the App Service Authentication and create a a user that will be recognized by the [Authorize] and has a claim on name.

// Azure app service will send the x-ms-client-principal-id when authenticated
app.Use(async (context, next) =>
{

    // Create a user on current thread from provided header
    if (context.Request.Headers.ContainsKey("X-MS-CLIENT-PRINCIPAL-ID"))
    {
        // Read headers from Azure
        var azureAppServicePrincipalIdHeader = context.Request.Headers["X-MS-CLIENT-PRINCIPAL-ID"][0];
        var azureAppServicePrincipalNameHeader = context.Request.Headers["X-MS-CLIENT-PRINCIPAL-NAME"][0];

        // Create claims id
        var claims = new Claim[] {
        new System.Security.Claims.Claim("http://schemas.microsoft.com/identity/claims/objectidentifier", azureAppServicePrincipalIdHeader),
        new System.Security.Claims.Claim("name", azureAppServicePrincipalNameHeader)
        };

        // Set user in current context as claims principal
        var identity = new GenericIdentity(azureAppServicePrincipalIdHeader);
        identity.AddClaims(claims);

        // Set current thread user to identity
        context.User = new GenericPrincipal(identity, null);
    };

    await next.Invoke();
});

Yes, this is a compatibility issue. ASP.NET Core does not support flowing identity info from an IIS module (like Easy Auth) to the app code, unfortunately. This means HttpContext.User and similar code won't work like it does with regular ASP.NET.

The workaround for now is to invoke your web app's /.auth/me endpoint from your server code to get the user claims. You can then cache this data as appropriate using the x-ms-client-principal-id request header value as the cache key. The /.auth/me call will need to be properly authenticated in the same way that calls to your web app need to be authenticated (auth cookie or request header token).

I wrote a small basic middleware to do this. It will create an identity based off of the .auth/me endpoint. The identity is created in the authentication pipeline so that [authorize] attributes and policies work with the identity.

You can find it here:

https://github.com/lpunderscore/azureappservice-authentication-middleware

or on nuget:

https://www.nuget.org/packages/AzureAppserviceAuthenticationMiddleware/

Once added, just add this line to your startup:

app.UseAzureAppServiceAuthentication();