to make long story short. Customer has both SP (referred as SP1) and an IDP. We are integrating our application (referred as SP2) to serve a protected resource. The resource will be available after the principal identity has been verified at IDP - typical SSO service. The following scenario would like this:
1. Pricipal enters SP1.
2. No security context has been created for the user yet, so he logs to IDP.
3. After a sucessful login, the user tries to access a resource on SP2 from SP1.
4. Request comes to SP2, which needs to verify principal identity.
5. SP2 tries to log in to IDP (HTTP Redirect Binding).
6. IDP verifies there is a security context and does not offer a login form but strikes back with assertion.
7. Resource is served.
Question 1 - For testing I am using shibboleth IDP and oiosaml java libraries for SP2. How does IDP (step 6) verify that use is logged in? Is it checked via presence of some cookie? Is it vendor specific check?
Question 2 - SP2 IP is not external so we would need to create a tunnel between SP1 and SP2 and between SP1 and SP2. Is there any standard scenario to verify principal authority without hitting IDP (step 5)?
As far as I know it is not specified how the IDP keeps track of security contexts. But I have never seen anything else than cookies.
I'm not sure you need the tunnel. There will not be any direct communication between SP1 and SP2 only between the SPs and IDP. And provided you use POST binding to deliver the SAML assertion there will not be a direct communication there either. In this case all communication would go over the browser.
This means that the browser must be able to connect to all of the nodes but the nodes does not need connectivity to eachother. Provided you use POST binding and not Artifact Binding.
Related
Assume we have the following entities:
User Agent (Browser)
IDP
Web Application (SP1)
Resource Portal (SP2)
The goal is to have the Web Application (SP1) being a "Front End" for the User, allowing them to access Resources through the Web Application (SP1) from the Resource Portal (SP2), without the user directly interacting with SP2. SP1 would therefore act as a kind of "Proxy" for SP2 and impersonate the logged-in user for the proxied requests.
Does SAML support this kind of use case? Is there any way to propagate the Security Context which was established on SP1 to SP2 (or any other mechanism that would allow the impersonated requests)? Based on my current understanding, the user would still need to establish a security context for SP2.
SAML doesn't really care what you do with the assertion. As the SP, you can choose how you wish to use that assertion, and how to communicate it further upstream.
If it were me, I would use a standard SP token provider (Ping, Okta, etc.) to consume the IdP's SAML. Switch SP1 and SP2 to use OIDC and OAuth respectively, and then use the access token from the OIDC flow on the backend API calls.
After successfuly authenticated via IDP, you have to perform a local authentication based on the assertions you received.
If you are are working on asp.net core application, you can use shared cookie concept and share the auth cookie which is created by local SP1 login with SP2. You can use Data Protection Service to store the shared key.
I've just configured Shibboleth IdP3.2 with my web application that authenticates the users against an LDAP server at the backend.
I could test this authentication process at the local machine. But, while deploying the code on CI server, I realized that the authentication process could not be completed successfully.
The reason behind this failure is that the Service Provider (SP) cannot access the (IdP). From our initial investigation, We chose SAML as the authentication protocol over other protocols like CAS because it did not need a back channel communication. As long as the user has access to both SP and IdP,the authentication process would still work.(SP and IdP need not interact with each other)
On testing we found that the attribute resolution is successful, but the subsequent artifact resolution is failing. In artifact resolution, IdP directly contacts the SP and expects a response. SP cannot send a response to IdP as it is inaccessible. Hence, the authentication fails. (Tomcat logs show: unknownHostException)
Some SAML flows in Web Browser SSO do not require direct communication between SP and IdP as seen from flow diagram in this link.
Does Shibboleth IdP make provisions for such implementations? Is there a work around for implementing Shibboleth IdP without any back channel communication?
SOLUTION:
As Stefan mentioned, there are alternative bindings like HTTP-Redirect and HTTP-POST that do not use back channel communication. You can read more about these bindings here
I changed the SP metadata to make HTTP-POST as the default binding, referring this link.
I did not have to make any changes to Shibboleth IdP configuration as these alternative bindings were already being supported, as substantiated by the metadata file.
According to this documentation, you can set the outgoingBindings attribute to set the preferred binding to use.
I would also recommend removing the HTTP-Artifact binding from the SP metadata.
We are trying to federate our application, so that our customers can gain access to our application using their respective corporate identities.
Well, I understand the mechanism of federation process, I’ve been able to setting up ADFS and I’ve modified the code of our application for accepting claims into my lab environment and all work fine.
In the next weeks I’m going to build a federation trust between ADFS and our customer’s product (Ping Identity) and I need your help to understand what kind of information I’ll have to exchange with customer’s IT department to complete that step.
I’ve never been experience with Ping Identity products.
Appreciate any help.
Many Thanks
I am going to make a couple of assumptions about your application, mainly that it is .NET application hosted on IIS. This type of application integrates Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) using tags in the web.config and then reads the authenticated users identity information via the Claims Identity object passed to your application. In this case your application is referred to as the Service Provider (SP).
If your customer is using PingFederate, the integration is straightforward in that a WS-Federation SP Connection would be configured on their server referred to as the Identity Provider (IdP). If your customer is using PingOne, then the integration will be tricky.
The information to exchange for PingFederate is driven by the configuration in the configuration in web.config. You need to configure the thumbprint which is based on the digital signing certificate of the WS-Federation response containing the SAMLv1.1 token. Your customer will be able to provide the thumbprint value. You will also need to configure the federated authentication URL, issuer, and realm, which is the information about PingFederate IdP server. The issuer is the URL for your SP application to redirect to the PingFederate IdP server, along with the realm which equates to the PingFederate SP Connection. Be sure that you configure the audienceUris to be the same value as the realm. The PingFederate administrator will need to know your Service URL endpoint which is your SP application endpoint to receive the WS-Federation response with the SAMLv1.1 token.
I installed PingFederate on an AWS EC2 running Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-Base-2014.04.09. I have a Java application that is using Spring Security for authentication.
I have read about how with PingFederate, I can set up an Identity Provider(IdP) and a Service Provider(SP). I have gathered that the IdP would be the Application User providing login credentials(the Identity) and passing this to the SP which has the Target Application apart of the SP in this diagram on this page here:
http://documentation.pingidentity.com/display/PF66/Service+Providers+and+Identity+Providers
This image also shows the Federated Identity Software on both sides of the IdP and the SP.
I have created an IdP and SP with my local PingFederate server just to see what the configuration options are and I am confused on which parts of this I actually need to be able to have a SSO for my Spring Security application.
My questions are:
Do I need an IdP and SP to implement that I am trying to do.
Right now our usernames and passwords are stored in a SQL Server, would I leverage this for PingFederate to use to authenticate the users?
Should I even be using Spring Security SAML for this or would another route be more appropriate?
Thanks for any help, I have reached out to PingFederate but my Regional Solutions Architect happens to be out until Friday.
I also apologize if I am completely off in my thinking, I am trying to wrap my mind around what is needed.
Presuming your goal is to establish federation between Ping and your application (in order to e.g. externalize authentication or enable single sign-on), your thinking is correct.
The Ping Federate serves as an Identity Provider (IDP) and you can configure it to connect to your SQL server, so that it can authenticate your existing users from there. IDP communicates with other applications which are called Service Providers (SP).
In order to connect to Ping your application therefore needs to be able to act as a SAML 2.0 Service Provider and using Spring SAML is a very good way to enable it to do so.
The typical flow of data between SP and IDP for single sign-on is similar to:
User accesses SP application which requires authentication
SP creates an AuthenticationRequest and sends it to IDP (using redirect in user's browser)
IDP processes the request and authenticates the user
IDP responds back to SP with an AuthenticationResponse message
SP processes the response and creates a session for the user based on the included data
There is an assumption being made that you need SAML between your Spring app and PingFederate. That is not true depending on how it is deployed and if you (see Andy K follow-up questions). You should check out the OpenToken Integration Kit for Java or perhaps the ReferenceID Int Kit from Ping as a possible solution. Much simpler to integrate than trying to hack together another SAML solution that may not be needed. However, I would recommend talking to your RSA who can give you the best approach for your scenario.
I have a requirement for cross domain sso. So, i chose OpenAM with SAML. I have two applications hosted in different servers and host for which i need to implement SSO.
Now i read about OpenAM with SAML but could get the core idea about the setup. LDAP is used as user data store.
Now i have something in mind and want to verify if it meets my requirement.
Since i have two applications(AppA and AppB) in need of SSO implementation. I need two OpenAM configured as service provider? and should be deployed in different tomcat containers? Should the each service providers be deployed in AppA and AppB?
I need another separate tomcat container for identity provider OpenAM?
The sp should be registered to idp and idp should be registered to sp within same Circle of trust?
Do i have to do anything else? Again do i have to configure separate LDAP for each idp and sp ? Anyway, what can be the ideal setup in my case?
You need one IdP, your apps have to implement the SP. If your apps are Java based you could leverage OpenAM's Fedlet or use Spring Security SAML extension (works like a charm).
There's also a PHP SAML SP and even an Apache http server SAML module ...
Or you could use OpenIG as a reverse-proxy (but it's a java web app) which also implements a SAML SP.
-Bernhard
One more possible solution in which you can use OpenAM out of the box is by using OpenAM identity federation:
Use the standard OpenAM Identity federation setup (with IDP and SP) as explained in this post: http://fczaja.blogspot.com/2012/06/idp-initiated-sso-and-identity.html
You will need to have an IDP for AppA and SP for AppB or vice versa. IDP will be connected to your user store.
On SP side create a dummy user store using something like OpenDS.
Import all the users from IDP to SP (using a scheduled daily batch job)
Implement auto federation based on one or more of the user attributes.
Use OpenAM authorization features on SP side to give access to SP side App