I am working with an existing legacy php authentication solution which works the following way:
Users put in their credentials
The code checks LDAP for authentication
If LDAP authentication is successful, the username is passed to a DB query to retrieve permissions
If LDAP authentication is not successful, the SQL DB is checked for authentication with the same credentials
If SQL Authentication is successful, the permissions are retrieved
If SQL Authentication is not successful, inform the user.
This is because many of our users are employees, and many are customers.
We now have a requirement from a secondary web provider to provide authentication via SAML. The request is to turn our existing auth method into a SAML Auth source. I've been experimenting with making a custom module in SimpleSAMLPhp but I'm not having any luck. The documentation for configuring an external auth source like this is lacking, and my existing code essentially inputs POST variables as arguments, which I haven't been able to shoehorn together. My difficulty in getting this to work is making me nervous about the overall security of the system if I did get it working.
What is a better solution to this problem?
From your question i have an impression that you are not very familiar with SAML protocol.
All i can do now is to give you some advices to get started.
First: Learn about protocol. Try to understand the SSO flow and differentiate which components in your company acts as "Service Provider" and "Identity Provider"
Second: Understand the scope of integration.Try to answer following questions:
- It's the application working in internal or external network ?
- Who have the access?
- Is there SAML authentication is already done for other applications in your company ?
- Is LDAP server is already controlled by Identity Provider, or you have to implement new one?
Once you get more familiar you can start thinking about development. There's many existing solutions and libraries available so once you get the concept of how protocol works it will be much easier to continue.
I will be happy to help you in your journey. This task will take you a lot of effort so be prepared.
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I have a scenario, we have an PHP based website through which the users login using credentials stored in a database. Now we have another SPA website with .NET CORE as API layer.We don't have an option of having a central authentication server like Azure. If I want to let the users of SPA to access the website since they have already been authenticated in PHP, What should I do? Can PHP generate a JWT to pass it to API? How does that JWT then gets to SPA and how do I validate it? Please be kind as I am a newbie to website programming.
Json Web Tokens are a very specific format for a Bearer token. There are protocols like OpenID Connect that provide more structure around the login and trust process but at their heart, JWTs are just BASE64 encoded json with a verification hash.
You can roll your own SSO with JWT but as with everything in security, rolling your own comes with significant risks of making a bone head mistake and compromising your security. So research research and research some more if you take this route.
I did a very similar thing but stayed purely in the .net world. I used a .net library to build the JWT (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/dn464181(v%3Dvs.114)) and ASP.NET Core Identity to handle verification of the JWT (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.JwtBearer) so I didn't write the code to actually generate the JWT. There is also only SSL connections made between the servers so some of the risk of the token getting sniffed is mitigated.
There are libraries for PHP to generate JWT or you could stand up your own JWT token provider in any language.
There also may be the possiblility of finding an OpenId Connect provider that could hook into your existing database. Identity Server 4 is one for .net but there may be one to be found in the PHP world. This introduces some overhead but does solve the problem of not having the ability to have a third party OpenId Connect provider.
Its not too terrible but security is one place where you wnat to be absolutely sure you get things right.
Authenticating from another server is SSO. There are lots of ways you could do this, but SSO protocols like OpenID Connect and SAML are specifically designed for what you're trying to do.
However, those protocols are anything but simple. You should try to see if you can find existing libraries to have your PHP application act as an Identity Provider (IdP), and your SPA to act as a Service Provider (SP) using the same protocol.
An idea that's a stretch - you didn't explain WHY you can't use a central authentication server. You might consider something like Keycloak (there are other options - that's the one I've used), which you can self-host, and can serve as either an IdP or an SP using OpenID-Connect or SAML 2.0.
You definitely shouldn't build this from scratch on your own (unless this is a hobby project). Authentication is full of security pitfalls that can trip up even the most experienced programmers.
I am learning about SAML and already read many articles and forums but I still having confusion about setup IdP.
I am using "https://simplesamlphp.org/"
For example, I have 3 websites "example.com", "one.example.com", "two.example.com";
All are on three different server.
Now, I want to setup single sign on login using SAML then on which server I need to setup IdP.
As "example.com" is main domain which has all the information about user.
As I learn, when I login to "example.com" then it sends request to IdP.
But I don't get any idea where I have to set IdP and what Idp contains?.
Its on same server where "example.com" hosted OR its different server and what logic I have to write on that server?
It's simple login function OR I need to setup "simplesaml" for this and set login logic to there.
After setting up IdP, what I need to do on other server "one.example.com", "two.example.com"?
Do I need to install again "simplesaml" to both server and set SP and IdP?
In sort, which server has IdP and SP? And on which server I need to install "simplesaml"?
Thanks in advance
simpleSAMLphp is the IDP.
You don't need to write any code, just setup the config.
You will also have 3 SP = the three websites.
They can all be on the same server or you can have one server for the IDP and one server each for the websites. It doesn't actually matter.
The simpleSAMLphp web site shows you the changes you need to make to each of the SP in order to communicate with the IDP.
Identity provider is the one who supplies info about users. You'd create one, let's call it idp.example.com.
You'd install simpleSAML there and configure it so it can read info about your users, be it in MySQL, LDAP etc. (this is the tricky part with IdP setup).
Now, your websites would be service providers and if user isn't authenticated, they'd redirect the user to idp.example.com, user logs in, idp.example.com returns the user to service provider with the XML document containing assertions.
That means your SP needs to be able to consume the SAMLResponse which IdP sends to your site.
You can consume this with simpleSAML, which you'd configure in SP mode now.
Bear in mind that SSP (simplesamlphp) isn't the only option in PHP to deal with SAML. There's also Lightsaml - a proper library. SimpleSAML isn't just a library, it's a complete solution and quite honestly - a super SUPER terrible one at that, it's the epitome of crap code one can type out and make a system that actually works (much like wordpress).
TL;DR:
create an IdP -> idp.example.com -> configure or create the module that authenticates users against your user source (LDAP, ActiveDirectory, relational database etc.)
configure your 3 websites to authenticate using idp.example.com
configure your 3 websites to be able to consume responses from idp.example.com
It's all doable with simplesamlphp. If you want to take it further and implement or play with SAML on your own - you can use the library I linked. It'll take way, way, way longer to do it via Lightsaml library though since you have to take care of single logout and single sign-on, encryption, digital signatures, endpoints, metadata etc.
I am a newbie in SSO implementation. We are looking at implementing SSO for a client that uses a php application (supported by us), for their employees to login to the application. We are in the process of setting up Simple SAML for this .. I have been reading articles on SSO, many of which are helpful. Pardon me for asking this, I know it is dumb. In this scenario, who is the IDP and who will be the service provider. The client apparently uses SSO for other applications as well. Can someone throw some light on what all I need to setup from our end.. I will research on how to do each of them..could someone please help by mentioning the things that need to be implemented.
who is the IDP and who will be the service provider.
IDP (Identity Provider) is the one who creates, stores, maintains and authenticates the identity of the user or principal in saml terms. So in your case it is the clients application.
SP (Service Provider) is the one who provides the service or resource to a user (authenticated by IDP) so in your case it is your application.
could someone please help by mentioning the things that need to be implemented.
As you can see in the above diagram when user will try to access a resource on your site you will have to redirect them to IDP to confirm whether this user is authenticated and if you should return them the resource/response they are looking for. The SSO url and other details are exchanged between IDP and SP through Metadata.
Once IDP has authenticated the user it will POST a response on your application url. This response contains an assertion through which you will know user details and whether user is authenticated or not. You will have to parse this response (xml). Also, these assertions are generally signed with certificate and are encoded base 64.
You will also have to think about SLO so when a user clicks on logout in your site you might have to clear their session from your application and redirect them to the IDP so they get logged out from there as well.
As suggested by smartin you can use some library which will make it easier to implement SAML. I am also learning about SAML as we are working on converting our current application into IDP :)
I found this SAML official documentation and some of the diagrams very helpful. http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/Post2.0/sstc-saml-tech-overview-2.0-cd-02.html
Your app is the SP, and the customer will provide to you the IdP metadata to register on your SP.
In order to add SAML support to a PHP application, you have 2 alternatives:
simpleSAMLphp
php-saml
LightSAML
All of them are well documented, you will need to spend some time reading/learning.
We have an app hosted on our domain. All users are required to first log in through a POST form. Once login has happened, then form redirects to dashboard page on our site automatically.
Is it possible to allow some clients to host their own login forms (on their site), that POSTS to our app? Is cross-domain posting considered bad practise in any way? Are there any pitfalls to be aware of? And lastly, how is SSL taken care of given that our site always runs on HTTPS, but client sites may not? Can this be circumvented with an iframe?
What you are trying to reinvent is called openid.
What you need to do is provide a openid service, and then users can make there own login forms that connect to your open id server.
I have a great example of such a site: http://www.stackoverflow.com that uses google and others as openid service to log in, making there own login form.
What you're trying to do is generally referred to as Single Sign-On (SSO). This can be implemented using a variety of technologies.
The general idea is to separate the Service Provider (SP) (also sometimes called Resource Provider), which is what provides the actual service the user is going to use, from the Identity Provider (IdP), which is where the user's identity is verified.
The simplePHP library provides implementations for both IdP and SP authenticating layer using a number of SSO standards: SAML, Shibboleth (also SAML-based), OpenID, ...
Note that if you're using a standard, the IdP shouldn't need to be implemented using the same implementation as the one you've chosen for your service. It could be possible to have an IdP implemented in Java using the Shibboleth libraries and use it in conjunction with an SP that uses simplePHP, for example.
Which of these techniques you use will depend on the kind of information your require after authentication, for example if extra attributes are required, and how trust is managed between the IdPs and the SPs.
Typically, a simple OpenID system will be rather straightforward to integrate, from an SP point of view, but it will be quite limited in what it can assert about the user. In contrast, Shibboleth has a number of options to specify which SP can see which user attributes and what IdPs are meant to release or not, but it requires a more substantial infrastructure: this is typically done in a federation, where all the parties exchange a set of metadata configuration that comprises X.509 certificates they use to trust each others' assertions.
Since the authentication will happen outside your administrative boundaries, you can't really control how the users will have authenticated (unless this is part of a more formal agreement, such as in a Shibboleth federation). The OpenID provider could potentially let users authenticate over plain HTTP even if your service requires HTTPS. (This being said, most serious OpenID providers do it securely, and it's up to the user to pick one their trust anyway.)
Never embed the IdP page in your service: make the user go to a their IdP page instead. For an authentication system to be secure (as far as the user is concerned), it is essential that the user be able to see what they're typing their passwords in. By using an iframe, you would effectively hide the real site behind (and logos are easy to grab/forge). (The StackExchange OpenID provider has some problems in that respect.)
we have main server and sub-servers. and we can consider these sub server as separate applications. when user want to login at their application, the authentication must be perform at main server and it should return true or false. then user session is created at application side.
my problem is, just sending true or false is not safe. i want to generate token like how facebook does. I am not getting how to develop secured authentication system. pls can any one help me
You do not have to develop your own system.
Take a look at http://php.net/manual/en/book.oauth.php
and search for some oauth tutorials.
oauth is a token based system used by many webservices including
the services provided by google.
I recommend using a CAS server if you need to authenticate in one place to use a service in another, especially if you have several applications that need to authenticate from it. You can learn about it here: http://www.jasig.org/cas