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.
Related
slightly losing my mind here and I would really like some help to get me pointed in the right direction.
I'm using a shared Linux server on GoDaddy where I have two PHP websites with separate user logins authenticating with two separate MySQL databases. What I'd like is for a user to log into Site 1 and then be automatically logged into Site 2. And when they logout out of either site, they should be logged out of both sites.
I currently have SimpleSAMLphp installed and I'd really appreciate some guidance on how to setup the IdP and SPs. Am I right in thinking that the Site 1 and Site 2 are the SP's?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated, this is my first ever SSO setup and I'm just a little lost.
To implement single sign on you need somthing common in both website to authenticate. Cookies won't help as there are two different site and it is not good to expose your cookies to a another website.
In general, SSO is implemented using a central serevr basically which handles the authentication data.
Basic steps are as follows:
For login, user is redirected to the common server and credentials get verified.
Central server sets the cookie for the login.
When your other website needs a login it checks the central server again using redirection.
Then, central server check the cookies and authenticates or redirect to login if not aythenticated before.
So, you can configure a central authentication server which check authentication and provide the appropriate response and both websites handle it accordingly.
But, Central server needs a common user database which in your case you clearly lack. So you can declare one of the websites as central or principle resource and expose APIs for other website which will expose its user base to verify the details.
Let one website handle the login process. If other needs authentication to be done it will redirect user to the main website and then handle the return response.
There is a lot to cover in theory but hope it would help.
Useful links:
Building and implementing a Single Sign-On solution
Basics of Single Sign on (SSO)
My website is used by multiple companies. These companies want to implement SSO. So they log into their company portal and click a link to my website. They go to my website's home page without logging in. My website is in php. The different companies can have their website in any language. We want this to be as general as possible so all companies can use it. It also needs to be secure for obvious reasons and also because we are a health company with phi.
I've read through a lot on simpleSAMLphp, but I'm just not sure if I'm right about how to implement this.
Do I just set up my website as an SP with simpleSAML and say to other companies "this is what I use make yourself an Idp and send me the correct data" ? Is there another way to go about this ?
Well, if you wanna provide a good service, guess you would have to support multiple SSO protocols, and let the clients choose. Beside SAML there are OAuth OpenID Connect and JWT I would mention as relatively simple and well adopted. I find JWT especially simple and easy to use.
Regarding SAML PHP implementation, I have tried with simpleSAML but it turned out to be too complicated to integrate it into an existing app. I prefer the lightSAML library, which is actually v2 of aerialship/lightsaml, especially because my app was in Symfony and lightsaml had a security bundle.
Yes - pretty much.
You send the companies your SP metadata and they import it and then they send you their IDP metadata and you import it.
The trick is the "primary key" i.e. how does the user in another system match a user in yours. NameID is usually used for this and it can have a number of formats.
Again, this is all in the metadata.
Another very useful part of being the Service Provider (SP) in a SAML integration, is to have a IdP Discovery Service. Since each one of your partners will exchange metadata with your organization, each is essentially a point-to-point SAML connection. The IdP Discovery Service uses something in the request to identify the partner and invoke a SAML SP-Initiated SSO transaction. One of the common strategies is to use URL naming such as yourpartner.company.com. Then the IdP Discovery Service detects the subdomain "yourpartner" in the URL and then invokes the proper SP transaction. There are other strategies, but I find this one works best for most organizations.
So my scenario goes like :
I have two sites a.com and site b.com and one authentication server cauth.com.
what client wants is ...
When user lands on a.com or b.com user fills in the login form on respective site , but the action of form will be on cauth.com (cauth.com/authenticate). when user is authenticated on cauth he is loggined on the both sites.
I am thinking to implement SAML to achieve the same and flow is like
after authentication iDP(cauth.com) will send SAML response to the both the service providers and user will be given access to both the sites .
I am novice in SAML and unable to get proper documentation and comprehension for the same.
What I want to know is :
Is my solution to the problem worth implementation ?
Is it possible to make site (cauth.com) as identity provider.I have looked at thread Making your PHP website into SAML Identity Provider but not able to get proper solution.
SimpleSamlPHP should be pretty easy to set up. You'll want to make a copy of the folder modules/exampleauth/ and then alter the file modules/<yournewmodule>/lib/Auth/Source/External.php to work for your site. The documentation is good though and it's definitely the easiest thing for your need, and the right one.
I should add that following the instructions to set up SimpleSamlPHP should give you a basic understanding of which metadata files are most important and where they live and how things interact.
I am not sure which technology you are using for your application. If you are free to switch to JAVA then I can suggest you Spring-Saml because its very easy to implement and fulfill your requirement. Spring-Saml has good documentation and online support as well being it as open-source project.
You can refer this link for Spring-saml and for code-repo use this link
You can integrate spring-saml in your abc.com and xyz.com application to make it Service provider(SP) and you can deploy it on different domain as well. Then you need to have one IDP (identity provider server) for your SPs. So you can use either ADFS with Active directory or LDAP to act as IDP.
We had similar requirement for our customer. I recently integrated spring-saml in my project.
Please let me know for any help
A federated Single Sign On (SSO) mechanism like SAML or OpenID Connect will give you what you want.
This comes with the important distinction that the login form would not be presented on a.com or b.com but those sites would rather redirect to cauth.com and the user would authenticate there. cauth.com would then send a verifiable "assertion" to a.com and b.com that the user has authenticated successfully. This constitutes one of the major goals of federated SSO, namely that the user credentials should not be presented/stored-by foreign websites and makes the means of authentication independent from the target websites ("Relying Parties").
So what you should be looking for is a suitable implementation of SAML or OpenID Connect for your platform (don't write it yourself!) and leverage that.
Shibboleth is open source and one of the most popular SSO solutions. It includes a SAML Identity Provider which you can download here: https://shibboleth.net/downloads/identity-provider/latest/ .
If your client is willing, one approach would be to use a cloud SSO provider like Okta which has a developer program and could make things easier.
I think there is a subtle misunderstanding in your description. For SAML authentication, if a user at site a.com either clicks a login link/button or tries to access a secure page, that user will receive an http 305 redirect to cauth.com. There the user will enter their credentials, and the user will be redirected back to a.com. If that user then goes to site b.com and tries to access secure content, b.com sends the user to cauth.com with the same http 305 redirect. This time, as there is an active session for the user's browser at cauth.com, the user does NOT see the credential form. Instead, the IDP returns the user with a successful authentication to b.com. It appears to the user that they are automatically logged on to site b, but in truth a SAML authentication flow has occurred.
Hans Z's answer elides the fact the that IDP only sends the assertions on the request of a or b (the Relying parties or RPs, also known as Service Providers or SPs). It is not a broadcast to all RPs.
I'll reinforce that SAML does NOT support a.com receiving the credentials from the user and then passing them to the authentication engine. This is a pattern one may be familiar with from LDAP.
Take a look at the sequence diagram in the wikipedia entry on SAML.
Follow below instruction to get SAML implimentation with PHP.
SAML login setup is very easy in php.
First register on onelogin server
https://www.onelogin.com/signup and create demo app on it. After
it follow all instruction to set Idp (Identity provider setting ) and
sp (service provider setting) to settings.php
https://developers.onelogin.com/saml/php
It worked perfect for me with CI and and php
I'm trying to make a Client portal (IdP) in PHP.
That portal links to several SP's (like Magento, Google Analytics and Wordpress)
Seeing how this needs to works my IdP needs to initiate authentication. when clicked on a link to an SP the authentication needs to start.
So it needs an IdP first application. I try to set it up with SimpleSAML, the only problem is the initial explanation on the simpleSAML website isn't clear enough for me (https://simplesamlphp.org/docs/stable/simplesamlphp-idp) can someone give me some better or in depth explanation about IdP first?
this is a new client portal but the clients already have accounts with the mentioned sites and other sites, sometimes more than 1 account. Is it possible to connect those accounts without doing it myself but let the clients connect them?
If there are better solutions than SAML to this problem please don't hesitate to mention them
4.5 IdP initiated login
If you use a simpleSAMLphp IdP, and you want users to be able to bookmark the login page, you need to test IdP initiated login. To test IdP initiated login from a simpleSAMLphp IdP, you can access:
https://.../simplesaml/saml2/idp/SSOService.php?spentityid=<entity ID of your SP>&RelayState=<URL the user should be sent to after login>
Note that the RelayState parameter is only supported if the IdP runs version 1.5 of simpleSAMLphp. If it isn't supported by the IdP, you need to configure the RelayStateoption in the authentication source configuration.
As for account linking, it's my understanding that simple doesn't do this (it's getting out of the simple realm). To use it, you'll have to clean up accounts.
[edit]Actually, I suppose you could - though you'd have to build a structure to do it. You would need to somehow build a mapping of accounts from the corporate ID to the SP accounts at Wordpress, Google, etc.
What would be recommended as an authentication solution for a Software-as-a-service product?
Specifically, my product would have clients that would typically have low information technology skills, potentially not even having an IT department within their organization. I would still like to have my application authenticate against their internal directory service (eDirectory, Active Directory, etc.). I don't want them, however, to have to open/forward ports (for instance, opening up port 636 so I can do LDAPS binds directly to their directory service).
One idea I had was to have an application installed on a server within their organization's network that would backconnect to my service. This would be a persistant socket. When I need to authenticate a user, I send the credentials via the socket (encrypted) - the application then performs a bind/whatever to authenticate against the directory service and replies with OK/FAIL.
What would you suggest? My goal here is to essentially have the client install an application within their network, with very little configuration or intervention.
This vendor, Stormpath, offers a service providing exactly what you are asking for: user authentication, user account management, with hookups to your customers’ on-premise directories (if need be, as is your case).
I think in your case, it'd be necessary to drop an agent on to their network which performs the authentication locally, then creates a signed token which "proves" to your SaaS app that it has done so; this can be passed on by the browser in a query string or form post (for example).
The agent might be an IIS-installable web app which can just authenticate the user and then direct them on to your servers in the cloud. This should not be a major hassle to install, but will create tech support issues. In particular, you need to get this component right first time, as users are not going to update it on a regular basis.
Making it work securely may be interesting.