Tag: Identity Provider

ForgeRock OpenAM Federation Using SAML v2

If you experience Deja Vu by looking at the illustration just below, chances are that you’ve hit my blogs before, in particular on this entry, where we looked at ForgeRock OpenAM as an Identity Provider and ForgeRock OpenIG as a Service Provider.

A friend asked me if I could demonstrate a very simple configuration of Federation using two ForgeRock OpenAM instances, one acting as an Identity Provider (a.k.a IDP) and another one taking up the role of a Service Provider (a.k.a SP). It wasn’t difficult to do one, so here we have it embedded towards the end of this post.

OpenAMFederation

So what do we have here:

– A Circle of Trust which has two OpenAM instances, one of which acting as an Identity Provider and another one as Service Provider
– User always authenticates against the Identity Provider
– The authentication process is intiated either by the IDP (known as IDP initiated SSO) or by the SP (SP initiated SSO)
– Once the user is authenticated successfully, IDP sends across a piece of security information to the SP (known as assertion) that could contain user attributes
– SP then gives the user access to protected resources

In the demonstration that follows, because ‘Auto Federation’ is not enabled, during the first login the user will be prompted for credentials both by the IDP and the SP. Once the account linking is done, it’s only the IDP who would challenge the user.

If the illustration and the briefing above hasn’t given you the complete picture, the video below might give a better one.

Enjoy!

ForgeRock OpenIG as SAML 2.0 Service Provider

This post is based on the ForgeRock Documentation on configuring OpenIG as SAML 2.0 Service Provider. The video logs embedded just below this write up is a visual representation of what is already there in the document that I mentioned above. For a detailed study, please read through the documentation and then sit back, relax and watch the demonstration in the screen-cast below

SAML 2.0 as you probably know is a standard to exchange information between a SAML authority (a Identity Provider a.k.a IDP) and a SAML Consumer (a Service Provider a.k.a SP). In the demonstration that follows ForgeRock OpenAM acts as an Identity Provider and ForgeRock OpenIG acts as a Service Provider. So the authentication of a user is done by the IDP, who will then send a piece of information (Assertion) to the SP that could contain the attributes of user from the user’s profile in the IDP DataStore. SP will then use the information thus obtained (Assertion) to take further action (like giving access to the user etc.)

There are two ways of getting this done:
(i) SP initiated SSO
(ii) IDP initiated SSO

In simple words, in a SP initiated SSO, the user contacts the Service Provider, who in turns gets in touch with the Identity Provider, who would validate the user credentials and then exchange a piece of information (Assertion) that could contain the user attributes to the Service Provider. Whereas a IDP initiated SSO, the IDP will authenticate the user, and would then send an unsolicited message (Assertion) to the SP, who would then take further action (like giving access to the user etc.)

The following two illustrations might give a rough idea:

SAM2UsingOpenIG

In our story (above in the illustration and below in the video), a user authenticates against ForgeRock OpenAM (IDP), who will send then an assertion (containing user’s mail and employeenumber attribute) to ForgeRock OpenIG (Service Provider), who will apply filters (like extracting the attributes from assertion and posting it as username and password) to post the user’s credentials to a protected application (Minimal HTTP Server)

If you’ve got a vague picture on what’s discussed above, I’d believe it’ll be clearer after watching the video below:

Enjoy!