I have a Single Page Application for non-/mobile html5 browsers getting data from a RESTful HTTP API with asp.net web api. We use OWIN self hosting running in a windows service.
I do not want cookie based authentication. I would like to authenticate the user and give him a json based access token with its claims/permissions to edit/create/delete/show certains things in the UI.
I do not need external login provider. Our user will authenticate with username and password not their google email...
Now I askmyself should I go in direction thinktecture and identyserver, or asp.net identity or...OWIN and ExternalBearer authentication, I am lost here.
What would be your recommendation basing on my information?
IdentityServer is suitable for scenarios where you have multiple applications and want them to authenticate against a single STS, basically if you want SSO. The scenario you described is achieved in IdentityServer by OAuth. That is you define an application you wish to use IdentityServer to authenticate, and then create an OAuth client to get access tokens for accessing that application. If that's not the case then you're probably better off avoiding the complexity of introducing a 3rd party component to do that work. We're using IdentityServer to authenticate users of 3 different apps 2 SPAs and an MVC application. Also, you realy can't seperate OWIN and ASP.NET identity in this case. The OWIN middleware will give you the tokens and it will be using ASP.NET Identity as a user repository to authenticate users, so OWIN is just doing the job of providing tokens and using ASP.NET Identity to authenticate users.