Storing Identity Claims in Session or Redis

ASP.NET Core Identity by default uses cookies to store claims. If your authorization is very granular then you will end up using many claims. With all these claims stored in cookie, the cookie size gets bigger and you can exceed the cookie limit.

We can achieve the authorization granularity without exceeding the cookie limit and impacting the way ASP.NET Identity authorizes users by storing the claims in session, Redis or any other memory storage.

Below are the steps I implemented to store the claims in session.

First let’s store the claims in session (assuming that the ASP.NET Core Session is already configured). During authentication, Identity system uses SignInManager for creating principal object of the logged in user. While creating the principal object, Identity populates the claims. We can override this SignInManager and store the claims as shown below:

public class ApplicationSignInManager : SignInManager<ApplicationUser>

{

    private IHttpContextAccessor contextAccessor;

    public ApplicationSignInManager(UserManager<ApplicationUser> userManager, IHttpContextAccessor contextAccessor, IUserClaimsPrincipalFactory<ApplicationUser> claimsFactory, IOptions<IdentityOptions> optionsAccessor, ILogger<SignInManager<ApplicationUser>> logger)

        : base(userManager, contextAccessor, claimsFactory, optionsAccessor, logger)

    {

        this.contextAccessor = contextAccessor;

    }

    public override async Task<ClaimsPrincipal> CreateUserPrincipalAsync(ApplicationUser user)

    {

        var principal = await base.CreateUserPrincipalAsync(user);

        ClaimsIdentity identity = (ClaimsIdentity)principal.Identity;

        // storing claims in session and removing them. These claims will be added by Transformer

        List<ClaimModel> sessionClaims = new List<ClaimModel>();

        List<Claim> identityClaims = identity.Claims.ToList();

        foreach (var claim in identityClaims)

        {

            sessionClaims.Add(new ClaimModel() { ClaimType = claim.Type, ClaimValue = claim.Value });

            identity.RemoveClaim(claim);

        }

        this.contextAccessor.HttpContext.Session.SetString("IdentityClaims", JsonConvert.SerializeObject(sessionClaims));

        return principal;

    }

}

The Identity system should be configured to use our ApplicationSignInManager instead of the default one. For this we need to define the dependency injection in the Startup under ConfigureServices

services.AddScoped<SignInManager<ApplicationUser>, ApplicationSignInManager>();

As you see with above code claims are removed from the principal identity and stored in the session. These claims should to be added back to the principal identity for every request. This done through the claims transformer as shown below:

public class ClaimsTransformer : IClaimsTransformer

{

    public Task<ClaimsPrincipal> TransformAsync(ClaimsTransformationContext context)

    {

        ClaimsPrincipal principal = context.Principal;

        ClaimsIdentity identity = (ClaimsIdentity)principal.Identity;

        string claimString = NTContext.HttpContext.Session.GetString("IdentityClaims");

        if (claimString != null)

        {

            List<ClaimModel> sessionClaims = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<ClaimModel>>(claimString);

            identity.AddClaims(sessionClaims.Select(sc => new Claim(sc.ClaimType, sc.ClaimValue)));

        }

        return Task.FromResult(principal);

    }

}

This ClaimsTransformer class is configured in the Startup under Configure section as shown below:

app.UseClaimsTransformation(new ClaimsTransformationOptions()

{

    Transformer = new ClaimsTransformer(),

});

app.UseIdentity();

With the above setup now the claims are stored in session when the user logs in. At every request from the user these claims will be copied from session to the identity object. Now we have overridden the default approach of using cookies with session J