Claims Identity anti-forgery exception with brand newly templated website with Individual User Authentication

Question

I used the MVC5 web template to create a new site with Individual User authentication and when I try to run it I get:

System.InvalidOperationException: 'A claim of type 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier' or 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/accesscontrolservice/2010/07/claims/identityprovider' was not present on the provided ClaimsIdentity. To enable anti-forgery token support with claims-based authentication, please verify that the configured claims provider is providing both of these claims on the ClaimsIdentity instances it generates. If the configured claims provider instead uses a different claim type as a unique identifier, it can be configured by setting the static property AntiForgeryConfig.UniqueClaimTypeIdentifier.'

I haven't changed anything in the code since it was generated. What could be causing this?

Answer 1

So the answer to this turned out to be to clear the cookies for the site.

As far as I can tell, the issue occured because I was also developing another MVC5 app at the same time, and that one was using a different set of authentication code (Active Directory based).

I worked out that the two apps were interfering with each other by commenting out the @Html.AntiForgeryToken() line in the _LoginPartial class and then the home page loaded without the error. What I then saw was that I was already logged in, even though this was the first run of the app.

Clearing the cookies sorted that issue, but I definitely wasn't expecting two different MVC apps to share a cookie. However, that is actually the expected behaviour, because by default the ASP.NET Cookie Authentication will create a cookie named .AspNet.ApplicationCookie for every app. If you inspect the cookies for your ASP site you can see this:

That's actually very easy to change, just modify the code in Startup.Configuration to set a specific CookieName:

public class Startup
{
    public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
    {
        app.UseCookieAuthentication(new CookieAuthenticationOptions
        {
            AuthenticationType = "ApplicationCookie",
            LoginPath = new PathString("/Account/Login"),
            CookieName = "yourCookieName"
        });
    }
}

Then, clear the cookies for the site, run it up again and you should see the Cookie has now been renamed.