Is there a possibility to verify login+password in Perl via SAML at an Identity Provider (IdP)? If yes: how?
I am aware that this is not the usual way for SAML to work.
The background to this is that we have 4 different clients for our web application, which is supposed to enable a central password via SAML, which are implemented in completely different technologies.
Our product manager has decided that a SAML connection is too complex for the 4 clients and that authentication should therefore take place centrally in the web application.
The clients transfer login and password to the web application, just like without SSO, and the web application is supposed to verify the access data centrally.
Question 1: Is there a possibility to verify login+password in Perl via SAML at an Identity Provider (IdP)? If yes: how?
Answer:
Definitely No, from the cybersecurity perspective.
Question 2: I am aware that this is not the usual way for SAML to work.
Answer:
Yes. You are correct.
(I) The SAML specification defines three roles: a user, an identity provider (IdP), and a service provider (SP). In the primary use case addressed by SAML, a user requests to access a service or log in to a web application from a service provider. The service provider requests and obtains an authentication assertion from the identity provider. On the basis of this assertion, the service provider can make an access control decision for the user, that is, it can decide whether to allow the user to access the service or log in to a web application.
(II) Before delivering the subject-based assertion to the SP, the IdP may request some information from the user (such as a user name and password) in order to authenticate the user. SAML specifies the content of the assertion that is passed from the IdP to the SP.
(II.a) In SAML, one identity provider may provide SAML assertions to many SPs.
(II.b) Similarly, one SP may rely on and trust assertions from many IdPs. This will be the SAML scenario of your web application if your product manager decided to request all 4 different clients of your web application to develop their own SAML IdP. For example, some social websites allow their users to log in to their web account through identity authentication provided by the third-party IdPs such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn via OAuth 2 protocol or OpenID Connect protocol/OAuth 2 (instead of SAML).
Question 3: The background to this is that we have 4 different clients for our web application, which is supposed to enable a central password via SAML, which are implemented in completely different technologies.
Answer:
If 4 different clients for your web application are supposed to enable a central password via SAML, they can implement their own SAML IdP in completely different technologies or programming language such as Java, PHP, or Scala.
(I) For example,
We developed our former version of Zero-Password Authentication and Authorization System in Java and leveraged Java-based Shibboleth IdP to provide SAML SSO for enterprise applications.
We developed our current version of Zero-Password Authentication and Authorization System with scalability and high availability in Scala to provide SAML SSO natively for enterprise applications without Shibboleth IdP.
(II) No matter which technology or programming language are used by 4 different clients of your web application to implement their own SAML IdP, their SAML IdP only needs to authenticate their users using a central password data store/repository (such as OpenLDAP or MySQL) locally and then deliver the user info using SAML assertion/SAML response to your web application/SAML service provider. Your web application/SAML service provider just needs to map the user info carried by SAML assertion to a local user info of your web application.
Question 4: Our product manager has decided that a SAML connection is too complex for the 4 clients and that authentication should therefore take place centrally in the web application.
Answer:
If the user identity authentication needs to take place centrally in your web application instead of in the SAML IdP, then 4 different clients do NOT need to implement their own SAML IdP from the cybersecurity perspective.
Instead you just need to create and assign different sub-domain to all 4 different clients, that is, all 4 different clients of your web application access different sub-domain, such as client-org1.your-web-app.com, client-org2.your-web-app.com, client-org3.your-web-app.com, client-org4.your-web-app.com.
Note that different sub-domain of your web application displays the same login webpage. Example #1: client-org1.box.com, client-org2.box.com if your clients also subscribe Box account, or Example #2: client-org1.my.salesforce.com, client-org2.my.salesforce.com if your clients also subscribe Salesforce account.
Question 5: The clients transfer login and password to the web application, just like without SSO, and the web application is supposed to verify the access data centrally.
Answer:
Different sub-domain of your web application displays the same login webpage.
4 different clients of your web application access different sub-domain of your web application, users of 4 different clients submit their login and password to your web application (through different sub-domain URL), just like without SSO, and the data store/repository of your web application is supposed to verify the access data (i.e., login username/password) centrally. Then 4 different clients of your web application do NOT need any SAML IdP.
Related
We have in my organization an existing ASP.NET web application built in a SAAS model that our customers (users from different organizations) login through username/password authentication method. Users' credentials are hashed and stored in our database. We are currently working on adding a SSO feature to our application that would allow end-users from certain organizations to login with SSO using their own Identity Provider (Azure AD, Google, Okta, etc.) to perform the user authentication. We are using the OpenId Connect protocol to establish the SSO connection with IdP, and more specifically the Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) middleware. We have implemented the following:
Our SAAS application offers customers the ability to opt for SSO authentication through a setting. End-users from these organizations will be authenticating to our application via SSO AND using their own IdP
Our application supports SSO connection from different IdPs (Azure AD, Google, Okta, etc.)
Our application stores SSO connection settings for each customer that opt for SSO authentication (Client Id, Authority, Secret, etc.). All these settings are configurable in our application, they're available upon registration of the application on IdP side.
My question is about the app registration. I know that in order for our application to communicate with IdP and initiate SSO authentication it needs to be registered on related IdP, so that it can create a trust relationship. I am wondering which party should be responsible of the app registration:
My organization owner of the SAAS application? or
Our customers willing to use SSO authentication method?
With option 1, my organization will have to have an "account" on each of the IdPs our customers use for authentication (I feel this is not ideal for us), register our application and have a mechanism to invite our customers IdP to connect to the registered app.
I feel like option 2 would be the best approach for us as we won't have to deal with app registration, as customers will be responsible of registering the application on their own IdP. From my organization end we will just need to deal with SSO connection settings (Client Id, and other...) which will be provided to us by our customers upon app registration. I wanted to check if this is a common situation that some have already experienced, and what would be the best/recommended approach to go with. Thanks.
I am expecting app registration to be performed on customers side.
I would usually recommend that your internal services and APIs only need to trust tokens from one Identity Provider, and in your case you have one openid connect provider inhouse. That then supports your users to authenticate to and optionally authenticate using an external provider, like how the image below tries to show:
In my experience, having your applications trust and handle tokens from multiple sources will be a pain, as many of the external tokens might look slightly different.
Say I'm a small application (www.example.com) and I'm integrating with a much larger enterprise (www.acme.com).
In this scenario I am the service provider and they are the Identity provider.Their request is that I integrate into their auth ecosystem using SSO (specifically SAML 2.0).
For the standard IdP-initiated flow, users will sign in on their end and they will POST an XML assertion to my application, which will then verify the user and sign them in to my application (i.e. set a browser session).
The enterprise uses PingFederate as their identity server, and they are curious what implementation my application uses. At this time I have none.
If my application is a single monolith (e.g. a small Ruby on Rails app), do I even need a federated server? Ultimately they are just looking for a place to POST SAML data to, so I can set up an endpoint and go from there right?
What are some general benefits of a federated server? Why wouldn't every service provider application (small and large) just set up an endpoint to ingest SAML data and call it a day?
Thanks!
You don't necessarily need a Federation server. However, if you decide in the future to divide/expand your application into micro-services or integrate your service with other 3rd Parties, a server will allow you to scale without disrupting your current customers (great CX) and not have to manage separate security endpoints.
I think we should move this to software engineering
How do users authenticate with your service? Having a federated identity guarantees that the whole user management process it's someone else's problem. They're looking for a way to integrate your service into their authentication system, so you need to set up an endpoint not only to consume but to be able to send SAML request to their identity server as well.
I use my Google Account credentials to access almost all my social networking sites (including Stack Exchange), that means among other things that all sites know me as the same entity plus I just have to remember the one password.
Don't know about SAML but almost everybody is using OpenId or OAuth.
Our company maintains a Web App composed of a front-end and a back-end in (Node.js), and we support the standard username/password login authentication. A couple of our partners have requested we support SAML SSO, so their end-users can access our web app through a link on their respective portals without the need to login again.
Question: Do we need to turn our app into a full-fledged service provider (SP) by implementing a SAML sdk/library in our front-end and back-end?
Or is it possible to use a 3rd party authentication provider like Okta to handle the SAML nitty-gritty behind the scenes and then redirect the end user to our app, with possibly a token (JWT?) so we can retrieve the user info from Okta?
I've read everything I could find on Okta's site, and here, and couldn't find a definitive answer, either yes it's possible (with example) or no you can't do that.
Like you already mentioned in your question, there are 2 possible ways to do it.
Update your application to support SAML login flow with your app as SP, in which case you will not need to use any 3rd party auth provider
If you don't want to get into the SAML nitty-gritty, you can use a 3rd party provider like Okta as an intermediary that will consume the SAML responses from the IdP (used by your external customers) and then convert that assertion into an Open ID token (JWT). In this case, Okta will act as an IdP (Authorization server) to your web app and generate ID tokens.
Your app will then need to implement the Open ID connect login flow.
You can refer to http://developer.okta.com/code/javascript/okta_sign-in_widget_ref for this.
We want to deeply integrate OneDrive with our web app in order to handle document and storage data. However, we want the users not to log in twice. I'm not sure whether this is possible, but I've been reading about SSO and SAML and it seems like it's the way to go.
Is it possible, and if so, is Single Sign On the way to go?
Single Sign-On (SSO) is a great solution for user experience when web applications are hosted on different domains. SAML as a standard was developed for cross domain authentication to solve this use case. You will need an Identity Provider (IdP) server that handles authentication of users to your web application and then the IdP Server issues SAML assertions to your web application and OneDrive. Your application in this architecture will be a Service Provider (SP) that will consume SAML assertions, as well as OneDrive is a SP that consumes SAML assertions. There are a number of SSO/Federation vendors that provide the IdP Server.
As far as implementation, once you have chosen and installed the IdP Server, you will need to implement your web application to consume the SAML assertion and configure the IdP Server as a connection. OneDrive will simply be a configuration as it already supports SAML and WS-Federation.
In addition to SAML as a protocol, there are other standards with respect to SSO/Federation such as OpenID Connect (OIDC) and OAuth2. When choosing a IdP Server solution you may want to look at these other protocols that can solve additional use cases. SAML works well for web applications and the use case you have described. OIDC and OAuth2 are better suited for secure APIs and native mobile applications.
Another consideration when looking at an IdP Server is how authentication is to be performed. Options for authentication could be using Kerberos/IWA if all clients are on a common domain, or authentication using a Login Form. You may also want to look at MFA support when looking at an IdP Server as part of the SSO solution.
I need to implement a SAML based authentication module and I am looking for answers to some basic question related to SAML. I tried searching for answers but couldn't find detailed information.
Resources to be protected is a SaaS based web application. Design I have received require4s building an authentication module using OpenAM, Ping, etc. Any access to web application will get authenticated through authentication system via SAML.
Questions that I have in this regard are:
If I understand correctly, SAML request contains a username. When someone first access web application, application has no information about user, how will it generate an SAML request then?
Once a SAML response is received by application, do subsequent access of web application by user also need to be routed and validated via authentication system?
Web application can interact with other sub-systems via web services or api calls. How can authentication context be passed to those systems.
No, the AuthnRequest does not have to contain a user name. It may, but in most cases it doesn't.
No, once the SAML response is received, the application typically set a cookie to create a local session.
The SAML Assertion can be passed to other services that the application uses. This is a non-trivial setup, but possible.