Using bearer tokens and cookie authentication together

Question

I have a single page app - more or less based on the MVC5 SPA template - using bearer tokens for authentication.

The site also has a couple of conventional MVC pages which need to be secured, but using cookie authentication.

In Startup.Auth I can enable both types of authorisation:

app.UseCookieAuthentication(new CookieAuthenticationOptions()); app.UseOAuthBearerTokens(OAuthOptions); 

However, this seems to have a side-effect in that whenever an AJAX request is sent from the SPA, it sends both the bearer token in the header and the cookie.

Whereas the behaviour I really want is that only the bearer token is used for WebAPI calls, and only the cookie for MVC calls.

I'd also like the MVC calls to redirect to a login page when not authorised (set as a CookieAuthenticationOption), but obviously I don't want this to happen when making an API call.

Is there some way to have this type of mixed-mode authentication within one application? Perhaps through a path/route filter?

Answer 1

I think I worked this out:-

Startup.Auth is wiring up the OWIN pipeline, so it is right to include Cookies and Tokens there. But one change to the cookie options specifies the authentication type it should apply to:

CookieOptions = new CookieAuthenticationOptions {   AuthenticationType = DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie    }; 

Then I needed to configure WebAPI to only use tokens:

public static void Configure(HttpConfiguration config) {    // Configure Web API to use only bearer token authentication.    config.SuppressDefaultHostAuthentication();    config.Filters.Add(new HostAuthenticationFilter(OAuthDefaults.AuthenticationType)); } 

This seems to achieve what I want. WebAPI just uses bearer tokens and no cookies, and a few conventional MVC pages use cookies once logged in (using the AuthenticationManager).