Extend forms authentication to use a custom http header for ticket

Question

I have a wcf webhttp service which uses forms authentication to authenticate users. This works fine if the ticket comes in the cookie collection or in the url.

But now I want to send the string of the forms auth ticket in a custom http header and change the forms auth module to check for that header instead of the cookie.

I think it should be easy to extend forms auth to achive this, but could not find any resources of how to. Can you point me in the right direction ?

here's how my authentication flow would work,

1. A client calls the authenticate method with the username and pwd
2. Service returns the encrypted ticket string
3. Client send the received ticket string in a http header with every subsequent request
4. Service checks for auth header and validates the auth ticket

Answer 1

FormAuthentication module is not extendible, but you could write your own authentication. It is very simple:

Authentication(2):

var formsTicket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(
    1, login, DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddYears(1), persistent, String.Empty);
var encryptedFormsTicket = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(formsTicket);
//return encryptedFormsTicket string to client

Service call with attached ticket(4):

var ticket = FormsAuthentication.Decrypt(encryptedFormsTicket)
//extract authentication info from ticket: ticket.Name

Answer 2

I am not sure this is the way to go (elegance-wise), but what about adding an event in global.asax.cs for Application BeginRequest and taking the string from the header and injecting a cookie into the Request yourself (Forms authentication should then pick that up).

Something like:

protected void Application_BeginRequest()
{
    // Your code here to read request header into cookieText variable
    string cookieText = ReadCookieFromHeader();

    var cookieData = FormsAuthentication.Decrypt(cookieText);

    if (!cookieData.Expired)
    {
        HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies.Add(new HttpCookie(cookieData.Name, cookieText));
    }
}

DISCLAIMER: Please note that I didn't test this, just throwing a possible approach your way!