IdentityServer offers multiple diagnostic possibilities. The logs contain detailed information and are great for troubleshooting, but we’re seeing a shift toward using OpenTelemetry to collect metrics, traces, and logs to help monitor and troubleshoot applications.

This post will examine OpenTelemetry, its use within Duende IdentityServer, and how to surface all necessary telemetry signals in the .NET Aspire Dashboard. Combining these powerful technologies gives you a world-class development experience that helps you rationalize and implement solutions correctly.

Many IdentityServer users are upgrading their deployments to the latest version of .NET and Duende IdentityServer. Most upgrades are uneventful and fair, with many users pleasantly surprised by a smoother-than-expected process. Successful deployments are excellent news! We love to hear that our care and attention to building a secure and stable product have led to a great developer experience.

Developers choose Duende IdentityServer over other commercial offerings because of its flexibility and almost infinite configurability. With great power comes great responsibility, and as developers, we all need to understand the consequences of our decisions. While these options are good in most cases, they can make performance investigations bespoke and time-consuming.

During the upgrade process, a handful of users reported a particular kind of performance degradation, which led our highly skilled and experienced customer success team to investigate.

The investigation has taken a few weeks of back-and-forth with customers, jumping on calls, and deep-diving into the Duende IdentityServer code and the .NET codebases. In this post, we’ll describe what our customers saw, the cause of the instability, and the solution.

ASP.NET Core web application development can span from entirely server-side rendered UIs to front-end single-page applications dominating the user experience. More often than not, you’ll likely have some client side code that fetches information from a backend resource, whether an endpoint or a multipurpose API. As the .NET Identity company, Duende recommends securing these calls, but you may be asking, how?

Security recommendations have evolved with the popularity of JavaScript and the initial explosion of single-page application frameworks. As of this post, the best current practices recommend developers secure their browser-based application with Backend For Frontend (BFF) and adopt a “no tokens in the browser” policy. Realizing that a browser client’s storage is a potential attack vector means malicious parties can target high-value resources such as refresh and access tokens stored locally, leading to compromised security models.

In this post, we’ll briefly recap the BFF pattern and then proceed to a sample of revealing your OpenAPI specifications to users either with Swagger’s UI or client SDK generators.

But first, let’s talk about BFF for folks who are first learning about the pattern.

While it has been around for a while, today is a good day to officially launch the Duende Developer Community! Whether you use Duende IdentityServer, BFF, or our open source tools, the Community is a place where you can connect with peers, share your knowledge, showcase your projects, participate in discussions, and more.

Let’s take a look.

An essential part of ASP.NET Core’s authentication and authorization implementation is the ClaimsPrincipal class. Duende IdentityServer issues claims using the OpenID Connect protocol, and your ASP.NET Core applications transform the results into a ClaimsPrincipal instance used throughout your web applications.

Once you have an authenticated user, the fun starts, as you’ll want to make logical decisions about which resources the user can access. One of the more important places to make decisions is your user interface, where you may want to show elements based on authorization policies in your solution.

In this post, we’ll look at implementing an AuthorizationPolicyTagHelper to keep your Razor Views free of noisy C# flow constructs and discuss performance considerations that can make your pages feel even snappier.

At Duende Software, we value open-source software and the contributors who dedicate their time and passion to providing solutions for the development community. Many of our engineering team contribute to .NET’s open source software (OSS) ecosystem, with over 50+ million downloads and counting of packages directly authored by our team members.

As a community, sharing reusable functionality helps the community succeed. Still, it comes at a cost to maintainers that can make it unsustainable, whether in time spent, financial costs, or other burdens.

We want to help those maintainers ease the burden of developing OSS software and managing a growing community because when they succeed, we all succeed in delivering solutions. This is why, next to directly contributing to .NET projects, we also want to sponsor and promote Open Source projects actively. Each quarter, the Duende team nominates and votes on projects they wish to support.

We’re happy to announce the first recipient of such sponsorship: Shouldly.

At Duende Software, we are using Shouldly in the test suites of all our products, including IdentityServer and the Backend For Frontend (BFF) Security Framework - we’re big fans! Let’s look at how you can get started with Shouldly.

When building web applications, single-page framework applications have become one of the dominant forms of user experience creation. Developers have many choices, including React, Angular, Vue, and many more. While plenty of frameworks exist, only a few options exist for securing these applications.

At Duende, we recommend that developers adopt the Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern to maintain a high-security posture and protect their users and data from malicious attacks.

In this post, we’ll look at the basic architecture of a BFF solution, the responsibilities of each component, and how it all fits together.

In today’s web applications, security is a top priority. One of the common attacks that web developers need to guard against is Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). ASP.NET Core provides built-in support to protect against such attacks using Anti-Forgery tokens.

Let’s explore what CSRF is, look at the default settings in ASP.NET Core, and how to implement Anti-Forgery in MVC, Razor Pages, and Minimal APIs. We will also cover handling Anti-Forgery tokens when using XHR or fetch requests originating from JavaScript and considerations for load-balanced scenarios.

A busy week here at Duende! After yesteday’s release of Duende BFF Security Framework V3, we’re happy to announce the release of Duende IdentityServer 7.2.0, which includes enhancements, bug fixes, and new features. This post will discuss some of the most notable changes and how you might want to use them in your current deployments.

Good news! We are happy to share a new major version of the Duende Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) Security Framework V3 with you.

When building applications with SPA frameworks like React, Angular, VueJs or Blazor, Backend-For-Frontend (BFF) makes it easier and more secure to integrate and manage OAuth/OpenID Connect interactions.

In this post, let’s explore what’s new in Duende BFF v3.