Our c8y tenant has single sign-on configured with an external openid connect provider. Users can login via the SSO and access c8y UI apps - cockpit, etc.
However, when a user tries to access an endpoint of a microservice(e.g. the /health endpoint of a custom microservice), a pop-up appears asking for credentials.
My question is regarding this scenario - a user signs in via SSO and loads a custom c8y web app, where JavaScript code calls an endpoint on a back-end microservice. What needs to be done so that the microservice authenticates the user correctly, and is able to extract data about the user - username, roles, tenant(in the case of a multi-tenant MS).
If the user is logged in as a regular c8y user, the Java microservice SDK handles this - how does it work with SSO?
Mihail please take a look at the documentation part here. Microservice SDK will take care of it automatically since 9.20. Thus please make sure your microservices implement the right version.
Related
I have to design an IAM solution for a NodeJS microservice using Auth0. Objective is to allow third party mobile application users to access this microservice.
I understand OAuth and OpenID connect solution and one simple solution is third party application accesses APIs as a client using client credentials workflow.
Solution I have to design is allowing users to login and authenticate using their Enterprise IdP connected to our Auth0 Server. So that we can implement authorization and access control at user level.
At the same time customer application needs to be kept agnostic of Auth0 service.
What I mean by it is client should not be required to add any logic in their application for accommodating our Auth0 domain like we have in first party React application. user once logged in to customer application should get access to our API also by using SSO capability. I have read some documents about configuring customer IdP with our Auth0 server acting as a SAML SP. Still I could not understand hows of it and will Auth0 create an OAuth access token in this scenario.
I realise this requires an app to intermediate between customer's mobile app and our API service. Still, I am not able to understand data flow and communication between various components.
Also, I am not sure it is a common situation or requirement? If it is is there any technical term for it? This not seem like a standard B2B scenario.
have to design an IAM solution .. , I am not able to understand data flow and communication between various components ..
Before answering, the answer will points the asked specific questions, may not fit al your needs. SO is not really intended for writing tutorials or searching the documentation. Implementing an IdP (effecively a security module), one needs to do his homework and learn the details.
Maybe using an ready / out of box solution could be interesting. Using an open source IAM such as KeyCloak, WSO2IS could be a quick start. Or cloud services such as AWS Cognito, IBM AppId, Azure AD, .. could be a feasible solution too
a client using client credentials workflow .. access toked received by our API should be for user logged in
The client credentials grant is intended to authenticate only applications. That's it.
To authenticate users, other grant type is needed. For the user authentication the most common option is the authorization code or the implicit grant. The implicit grant is has its weaknesses and is being replaced by the code grant with PKCE (just search it).
End requirement is users of 3rd-party application not required to login again while 3rd-party application fetches data from our API .. Configuring their IdP (most probably Active directory) and our Auth0 servers for the same is all I need to understand
I see most common two options in use:
1. federated SSO authentication
This is the most commonly used option. The external (3rd party) IdP is configured as a "trusted" federated IdP. You often see the scenario when you have a service provider allowing to login with other IdP, often social networks (FB, Google, ...)
The login flow is as follows:
The client authorizes with the provider's (yours) IdP (let's call it IdP1).
IdP1 now acts as as Service Provider with IdP2 (IdP of the partner) and asks for the authorization (redirects the user to the IdP2).
User is authenticated and authorized with IdP2. If the user is already authenticated, the IdP2 doesn't need to ask the user's credentials again, this is how SSO works on this level
IdP2 returns to IdP1 (acting as a service provider).
IdP1 reads the user information (using the id_token, userinfo service - assuming using the OAuth2/OIDC protocol all the time there are other protocols too) and builds its own the user-level token. It may or may not create a local user (it is called user provisioning).
IdP1 returns to the client and the client can request a user-level token.
Then the client can call the API services with the token trusted by the API provider.
2. Assertion Framework for OAuth Authorization Grants
This option is built on top of the Assertion Framework for OAuth 2.0 Client Authentication and Authorization Grants, it is an optional extension of the OAuth2 protocol. I call this a token swap service
Basically the token service could validate the access or ID token of a trusted (partner) IdP and issue its own token based on the provided user information.
As you see there are a lot of information and to build a secure solution you ned to make sure that all steps are properly secured (signature, expiration, issuer, validity, audience, subject domain, .. are validated). Disclaimer - as my job we implement IAM/IDM solutions and a lot can get wrong if shortcuts are taken. So you may really consider using an out of box and proven solution.
Context
I am developing a solution with
Two clients, a mobile one and an SPA.
An authorization server under my control.
A resource server / identity provider, that provides user data and features through an API.
I am using OAuth2.0 because it can provide advantages such as allowing third-party apps to easily integrate with my Auth server / IdP, whether it be to have access to user data, or API features. It would also allow the clients to integrate with other IdPs and eventually have their data migrated over to mine.
OAuth Flow
Authentication
During the OAuth flow, there is a redirection to authenticate the user on the authorization server. At that point user enters credentials and consents to the scopes/claims clients want access to. In the case of third-party client applications I understand that:
Mobile: the latest RFCs recommend browser custom tabs for mobile apps.
SPAs: Being browser-based, here a simple redirection.
But that's the use case where it's a third-party client app delegating authentication and account management to my IdP system. This ensures the mobile application can't snoop on user's credentials (and eventually leverage sso solution of IdP so there's no need for credentials input).
In my case, I own both the client and the rest.
My first question is: Since I own the application, whether it be mobile or web, do I necessarily need to implement that redirection to a UI hosted on my IdP? Or can I have a form directly as a part of the mobile/web app and authenticate the user through REST (and then follow the rest of the OAuth flow to deliver an AccessToken + IdToken for OIDC)?
Scopes
When it's third-party client applications, I understand that we must display to the end-user the data (scopes/claims) the client wants access to. User must give an explicit consent and know what data is going to be used by the application.
But in my case, since I own the application, can't I just have a Terms & Conditions page the user approves to use the app and skip the scopes/claims approval in the OAuth flow?
In brief, what's best practice and why when there's no third-party involved?
Should be a simple matter of registering the app in the IBM Cloud and providing callback URIs for authenticating the user and returning control just like login with google or login with Amazon.
But I cannot seem to find the exact flow of steps involved.
--prasanna
I think the service you are looking for is App ID.
When you are developing a web application, you can use the App ID web flow to securely authenticate users. Users are then able to access your server-side protected content in your web apps.
App ID uses the OIDC authorization code flow to securely authenticate users. With this flow, when the user is authenticated, the app receives an authorization code. The code is then exchanged for an access, identity, and refresh token. In code exchange step the tokens are always sent via a secure backchannel between the app and the OIDC server. This provides an additional layer of security as the attacker is not able to intercept the tokens. These tokens can be sent directly to the web server hosting application for user authentication.
App ID interacts with identity providers by using multiple protocols such as OpenID Connect, SAML, and more. For example, OpenID Connect is the protocol that is used with many social providers such as Facebook, Google. Enterprise providers such as Azure Active Directory External link icon or Active Directory Federation Service External link icon, generally use SAML as their identity protocol. For Cloud Directory, the service uses SCIM to verify identity information.
Read this blog post for using a custom identity provider
For an in-depth understanding of the flow, you can refer to this link
Background:
I have a basic user database with username(email) and password. The users are able to sign in to a website of mine with these credentials. From the website they get a link to different services they have access to, but with different username/passwords. So they click the link "Open My Service X" and they have to login with their service unique login credentials. I do have the users service login-username. So I can map local-user <=> service-user.
I want SSO between service X which has support for SAML and my website.
Question/Problem:
I want the users to login with their user/password in my database, then single sign on towards service X where service X has support for SAML. I don't want a user to be able to sign up for a new user account to my website using the SAML support in service X. The user must already have an account in my database.
So my question might be rather vague, but I'm having a hard time to grasp how this can be achieved?
I was thinking of letting my webapp become a SAML identity provider, so that the SSO request are transferred back to my webapp and verified for their service-user. Would that be correct approach?
You're on the right track with your SAML IdP. There are basically three parts involved. Your email database (the identities), your existing application front end and the remote services which support SAML. Usually it's SAML2 these days.
To get single sign-on (SSO) across your portfolio of apps (your own app and the remote services) you could install an IdP like the Shibboleth IdP and convert your app to use it instead of using email/password to login. That would take a fair amount of work as you'd have to convert your app into a SAML SP, just like the remote services.
An easier way might be to only use the IdP for SAML to the remote services and get the IdP to recognise that your users are already logged in with their email/password. Cookie? So the IdP should never display a login page as it would recognise your app's cookie and match that with a user in the database. It then releases SAML attributes to the remote service based on that user's information. That also covers your use case of not allowing account creation via SAML from a remote service.
That would mean you might end up with the following URLs:
https://yourapp.com/
https://yourapp.com/idp/
Your users login with the first URL as normal and the remote services use the second URL. That way your app cookie will be visible to the /idp endpoint but you'd need to write code to match that with a user in the database.
OpenID authentication is inherently browser based. If I wanted to allow an OpenID user to authenticate against an API for use in alternative clients, is there an accepted best practice for that?
So if a user tried to log in with their OpenID into an iPhone app, for instance, how would that work? The only thing I can think of generating an API token of some sort for them and get the user to manually enter it somewhere. This approach is not user friendly.
This is the way sites like Basecamp work, but it still seems clunky to me.
The problem you're seeing is not unique to OpenID. Any password-less authentication scheme can have this problem. OAuth (http://oauth.net/) is a solution that is an open standard that is quickly gaining traction on a lot of web sites. It is totally independent of how the user authenticates, so their OpenID Provider does not need to support or even be aware that your site (the "service provider" in OAuth terms) is using OAuth. Your API client can be web based or even a local application!
The process would be something like this:
Roles:
the user: someone who has an account with your web site.
service provider: your web site, which has a programmatic API that requires some credential to access.
consumer: the client, whether web or local application, that needs access to the service provider's API.
Flow:
The user is at the consumer. He indicates he wants to access data at the service provider.
The user is either redirected (if the consumer is a web site) or a browser is popped up (if the consumer is a local app) and the user sees the service provider web site.
The user is either already logged into the Service Provider via a persistent cookie, or the user must first log into the Service Provider however that is done (OpenID in your case).
The Service Provider then asks the user: "Consumer (some consumer) wants access to your data (or our API, or whatever). Do you want to authorize this? (yes/no)
User confirms, and the browser window closes or is redirected back to the Consumer site.
Via some OAuth protocol magic, the consumer now has a secret credential that it can use to access your API and access whatever user-private information you just authorized.
Obviously I can't include the whole OAuth spec here, but you can see hopefully from the above that this should solve your problem. OAuth libraries exist to make adding support for it easy.
If you happen to be using ASP.NET, I suggest http://dotnetopenid.googlecode.com/ as it recently added OAuth support (v3.0 beta 1).
Neither OpenID nor OAuth define how a user authenticates. They define how the consumer directs the user agent to the authentication provider, how the user agent is directed back, and how the consumer can verify the identity that the user authenticated as.
The actual method used to authenticate is out of band for both schemes.
There are differences between OpenID and OAuth, but both require that the consumer use HTTP redirects and callback URLs. They're both browser based. If your app speaks HTTP, it can do either. However, a main point is that the user is only entering credentials into a trusted app.
What you want is not possible with OpenID. OpenID is based on the premise that you (the iPhone app) only want to know about your users that their OpenID-provider trusts them. They never authenticate themselves to you.
Good OpenID-providers in fact even prevent that you mediate the authentication process (as this would expose users to a possible attack - by you!): they demand that users login with them directly and refuse login-by-referral.
See: this related question
The problem is that the openid spec has no standard provision for authentication with the provider, so the provider can elect that authentication happens via a phone call or whatever.
Hopefully more providers embrace OAuth. Alternatively you could hand code the authentication for a few of the bigger sites.