I'm trying to find a way to log my users from my portal to another service. I'm not very knowledgeable on how SAML SSO works but from what I gather the Portal is the IdP (i.e., us) and I should create a response with certain user-dependent attributes to send to the SP.
I'm using Symfony2 and I read about SimpleSAMLphp but I had troubles installing. The important part is, how should I construct my response? I don't think I should reauthenticate the user since he is already and using the portal.
Thank you and if you found anything illogical please let me know.
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I don't know if what I would like to do is possible. I'm trying to integrate the authentication mechanism of my university in an android application which uses Laravel as backend. I've decoded the SAMLResponse and in the XML file I found this
'SPNameQualifier' = 'https://sp-esse3-unimib-prod.cineca.it/shibboleth',
'NameQualifier' = 'https://idp-idm.unimib.it/idp/shibboleth'
which are the SP and IdP URI I think. In my Android app I want that users login without register because they can use their university account. In the SAMLResponse I've also the SignatureValue, X509Certificate and other data but I can't figure out how to configure everything.
Searching on Google, I found those packages laravel-saml2 and php-saml. Are those packages good to fit my problem? Can you help me to understand how to configure everything?
I'd look at SimpleSAMLphp. You application will be a "service provider" or SP. You'll need to generate metadata for your application, which you'll need to share with the IdP administrators at your university to enable the integration. The SSP quickstart link provided above gives details on obtaining metadata for your SP, and how to convert the Identity Provider-supplied XML metadata into a format that's readable by the SSP libraries.
Only after the exchange of metadata occurs and your application is trusted can you being to exchange SAML responses. SSP makes this process easy, as you'll just end up calling a few lines of code any time a resource needs to be protected, i.e.
require_once('../../lib/_autoload.php');
$as = new \SimpleSAML\Auth\Simple('default-sp');
$as->requireAuth();
$attributes = $as->getAttributes();
That's all that's needed to make sure the SAML flies back and forth... but integrating is a different story. There are surely policies and procedures that your university imposes that you'll need to follow, and you can't just integrate with the University without following their integration procedures, i.e. a proper IdP isn't going to provide a SAML assertion to just any old application that asks for it.
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.
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.