Question

I’m working with the Azure ACS Labs where they are using FederatedServiceCredentials to authenticate users for Active Federation. Now I want to access the claims of the user from within the WCF service.

According to this article, the claims are accessed by the request thread… Can anyone explain or demonstrate what that means?

Answer 1

The request thread is the thread which is executing your service API on the server. From that thread (aka within your service api), you can access Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity. This will be a ClaimsIdentity, which contains the claims granted to you by your STS. For example:

 class MyService:IService
 {
   // code running on wcf server
   bool AdminOnlyApi()
   {    
     var identity = Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity as ClaimsIdentity;

     // fail all non admin callers.
     if (!identity.Claims.Exists(c=>c.ClaimType=="role" && c.Value=="Admin"))
     {
        throw new SecurityException("Access is denied.");
     }
     return True;
   }  
 }