[C#] Authenticating with a Flight Server instance

[AlexRutledge1]

Describe the usage question you have. Please include as many useful details as possible.

In the C# package is there a mechanism available for authenticating similar to the client.authenticate(ClientAuthHandler) that is available in pyarrow? I am able to perform a handshake in the C# package with client.Handshake() and see that the authentication mechanism successfully fires on the server but I'm unsure of how to attach authentication metadata to GetInfo or GetStream calls.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

Component(s)

C#

[amoeba]

Hi @AlexRutledge1. I'm not familiar with the C# implementation but I took a look. For the C# Flight implementation, it seems the idea was to delegate auth to AspNetCore rather than build it into the transport like was done for Python/C++. I gleaned this from our Implementation Status page. I don't think that means adding an API similar to Python/C++ wouldn't be welcome but I think doing auth with AspNetCore is your only option.

I'm also not familiar with AspNetCore but I found an example, https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/main/csharp/examples/FlightAspServerExample/Program.cs, and it seems like you might be able to adapt that to include auth.

Does this help at all?

[CurtHagenlocher]

My world doesn't really intersect with the use of AspNetCore either, but I took a look at the code and each of the methods on FlightClient seem to take a Metadata argument that can be used to supply authentication headers. There may be a way to do this more globally once #45451 is implemented; or at least, it looks that way based on a very superficial read of how the gRPC code works.

For the server side, you could probably start with https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/?view=aspnetcore-9.0.