ADFS WIA Support UserAgent strings for Chrome etc.

This is more as a note to myself. Out of the box ADFS does not have WIA enabled for most browsers. You need to add the UserAgent strings of browsers you wish to enable WIA for. Here is the cmdlet with the list of agents I currently use:

This is based on this & this Microsoft Docs plus some other blog posts I read over the years. I will keep updating this blog post with any updates. 

It might be better to replace “Chrome” above with “Windows\s*NT.*Chrome”. I found this in the comments of this article. Useful so it only targets Chrome on Windows and not iOS/ Android. 

Here’s the User Agent Strings from Safari on my iPhone, Mac Book, and Vivaldi on Windows. 

  • Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
  • Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_2) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.2 Safari/605.1.15
  • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.1.1337.36

Matching on “Windows\s*NT.*Chrome” (which I think is regex and so should translate to the string Windows followed by zero or more spaces, followed by NT, followed by zero or more characters, followed by Chrome) will thus only pick the last User Agent String. 

Some more things to be done for WIA to work. You must add your ADFS site to the Local Intranet zone of IE. Best to use Group Policy Preferences for this, pushing out a registry key. Under the HKCU hive you can push out a key “Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\adfs.fqdn\” (or replace adfs with a * if you want *.fqdn to be matched), with a value of https and data of DWORD 00000001 in hex. Chrome, and Chromium based browsers (such as Vivaldi, Edge, etc.) will use this list so WIA will work for them automatically. 

This link from the Chromium page also mentions the SPN issue I encountered previously. The SPN generated will use the CNAME name if that exists, so better to use an A record with an IP address. 

When a server or proxy presents Chrome with a Negotiate  challenge, Chrome tries to generate a Kerberos SPN (Service Principal Name) based on the host and port of the original URI. Unfortunately, the server does not indicate what the SPN should be as part of the authentication challenge, so Chrome (and other browsers) have to guess what it should be based on standard conventions. 

The default SPN is: HTTP/<host name>, where <host name> is the canonical DNS name of the server. This mirrors the SPN generation logic of IE and Firefox.