Login user with email password via REST API with Azure AD and MSAL

Question

I have a scenario where I have a react native app and a nodejs server. I need to authenticate users with Azure AD. I first thought of social auth using auth providers like Clerk, Appwrite, Supabase, Firebase, etc, but decided to instead do this: user enters their email and password and it will be sent to the backend nodejs api. This API will then use MSAL (or something better if we have it), and authenticate that user against the university's Azure AD and then send a token back to the RN app. When RN app hits the /getStudentData endpoint, it will validate the token and fetch the student's data from the database.

I couldn't find the exact docs or tutorial I was looking for. Does anyone have any experience with something like this? I need to protect my API routes with MSAL but also have the ability to signin user with email and pwd. Is this a good architecture? Any recommendations for me? Thanks.

Answer 1

Note that: If you want to use email and password to login or authenticate the user, you can make use of acquireTokenByUsernamePassword method.

• But acquireTokenByUsernamePassword is not recommended by Microsoft for security reasons.
• Personal accounts or MFA enabled user accounts are not supported in ROPC flow.
• Hence, you can also make use of acquireTokenByCode() method to authenticate the user.

Create an Azure AD application and grant API permissions based on your requirement:

Generated access token using below parameters via Postman:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/TenantID/oauth2/v2.0/token

grant_type:password
scope:api://xxx/test.read
username:user@xxx.onmicrosoft.com
password:***
client_id:ClientID

To do the same in msal-node, use the below code:

const msal = require("@azure/msal-node");

const msalConfig = {
    auth: {
        clientId: "ClientID",
        authority: "Authority",
    }
};

const pca = new msal.PublicClientApplication(msalConfig);
const usernamePasswordRequest = {
    scopes: ["scope"],
    username: "username", 
    password: "***",
};

pca.acquireTokenByUsernamePassword(usernamePasswordRequest).then((response) => {
    console.log("acquired token by password grant");
}).catch((error) => {
    console.log(error);
});

Otherwise make use of acquireTokenByCode() by referring this MsDoc.