Problem Statement:
I am trying to build a custom management system which would require authentication and authorization both.
The system needs to have capabilities to manage/create/update/delete users, roles, permissions and groups.
My Design Solution
I am planing to implement this in-house from scratch and would provide authentication and authorization as follows.
Authentication : user would provide their credentials and the system would authenticate if the user is valid or not.
Authorization: once the user is authenticated, based on the user groups and the permissions they could access the requested pages on the site.
Question:
Now, my question is that suppose I have this application built successfully and in future my application requires LDAP (active directory) authentication would it be possible to plug in LDAP related features keeping my existing application intact or I would have to re-write the entire or most application using LDAP API's.
I have had a look at at apache shiro and spring security which
provides LDAP functionality and they also provide capabilities to manage/create/update/delete users.
As of now I have not yet decided if I would go with either of them or write my own.
Would appreciate if I could get a detailed reponse about how to go about things.
Note:
I am a complete newbie to LDAP so please excuse me if I have used some wrong terminology with regards to LDAP.
I would recommend NOT implementing this your self, just integrate with existing API.
Disclosure: I work for Stormpath (which provides exactly this) and on Apache Shiro.
Also, if your application needs to be backed by LDAP, most LDAP setups I've seen only support read operations when integrating with applications, so you may want to chat with your LDAP admin and see if your 'manage' user use case is viable.
Security is a serious domain, with lots and lots of hidden complications. I would definitely recommend against implementing this yourself. Since you mention Spring LDAP, I'm guessing you're in a Spring-based project. The obvious choice in such a setup would be the excellent Spring Security project.
Related
So, im doing research to know if its a good alternative to implement keycloak on the environment i'm working at.
Im using LDAP to manage users at my workingplace. I was wondering if is there a way to use keycloak as auth service in all upcoming systems and some of the existing ones. We are currently managing it with an IDP that we need to improve or replace, also there are some systems use their own login (this will eventually change).
The main problem i've crossed is that keycloak synchronizes against ldap and i dont want user data to be stored on keycloak, maybe if its only login data. User data is planned to be kept only on ldap's database in case that any userdata needs to be updated.
So is there a way to use keycloak only as an auth service fetching user credentials from ldap on every auth request?
pd: maybe i am mistaken on the meaning of what's an auth service an whats an IDP.
Actually it is not necessary that LDAP users are synced to Keycloak.
Keycloak supports both options
Importing and optionally syncing users from LDAP to Keycloak
or
Always getting the User info from LDAP directly.
But keycloak will always generate some basic federated user in it's database (e.g. for keeping up a session when using OpenID Connect - but you should not really care about that).
As far as I know (but I've not used that myself) you could also use keycloak to maintain the LDAP users data and write changes back to LDAP (see "Edit Mode" in Keycloak documentation)
Check Keycloak documentation regarding LDAP stuff to get more information https://www.keycloak.org/docs/6.0/server_admin/#_ldap
Beside the User-Data Topic, Keycloak provides a lot of different Protocols (like SAML and OpenIDConnect) to provide authentication for your services. So you could use different/multiple authentication protocols depending on your applications with just one "LDAP-Backend"
So I want to have single sign in, in all the products using a auth server but that's not only for employees, keycloak should be used to that like auth0?
There are also some advantages to Keycloak:
Keycloak is also available with support if you buy JBoss EAP (see http://www.keycloak.org/support.html). This might be cheaper than the enterprise version of Auth0. If you want to use custom DB, you need enterprise version of Auth0 anyway.
Keycloak has features which are not available in Auth0:
Fine-grained permissions and role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) configurable via web admin console or custom code or you can write yuour own Java and JavaScript policies. This can be also implemented in Auth0 via user rules (custom JavaScript) or Authorization plugin(no code, less possibilities). In Keycloak you can do more without code (there are more types of security policies available out of the box e.g. based on role, groups, current time, an origin of the request) and there is a good support for custom developed access control modules. Here some more detailed research would be interesting to compare them.
Keycloak also offers a policy enforcer component - which you can connect to from your backend and verify whether the access token is sufficient to access a given resource. It works best with Java Web servers, or you can just deploy an extra Java Server with Keycloak adapter which will work as a gatekeeper and decide which request go through and which are blocked. All this happens based on the rules which you can configure via Keycloak web interface. I am not sure such policy enforcer is included in Auth0. On top of that, Keycloak can tell your client application which permissions you need when you want to access a given resource so you do not need to code this in your client. The workflow can be:
Client application wants to access resource R.
Client application asks Keycloak policy enforcer which permission it needs to access resource R.
Kecloak policy enforcer tells the client application which permission P it needs.
The client application requests an access token with permission P from Keycloak.
The client makes a request to the resource server with the access token containing permission P attached.
Policy enforcer which guards the resource server can ask Keycloak whether permission P is enough to access resource R.
When Keycloak approves, the resource can be accessed.
Thus, more can be centralized and configured in Keycloak. With this workflow, your client and resource server can outsource more security logic and code to Keycloak. In Auth0 you probably need to implement steps 2,3,6 on your own.
Both Auth0 and Keycloak should be able to achieve your goal - assuming you want only social (facebook, google etc), and /or username & password authentication?
Auth0 is the less risky option, keycloak is good for non-commercial & where you can afford production outages without a global 24x7 support team. Here a few other reasons why I'd recommend Auth0 - the documentation is world class, they have quickstart samples so you can get up and running in minutes, and easy access to more advanced options - passwordless, authentication, MFA, anomaly detection, x9's reliability, rate-limiting, an extensive management api, extensions for everything eg exporting logs to log aggregator, and so on. Anyhow, good luck with your project, and obviously what suits best may simply be down to your own project requirements.
Should add, if you are doing mobile, then Auth0 put a lot of effort into adding the necessary specialised security flows to target mobile (native / hybrid) apps. For instance, PKCE usage when using /authorize endpoint. Please bear that in mind, as not certain how keycloak has been implemented to handle this - alot of IDMs still do this incorrectly today.
So i'm tasked with implementing SSO for our Windows application. Currently, after a user logs into the machine, he or she has to re-log in to our app when he or she loads the application. The application validates the user by querying a LDAP server.
What we're looking to have is for the user to automatically be logged into the app when they click on it. My understanding is that the LDAP authentication must still happen, but Im not exactly sure what the workflow would be, and how exactly we can validate a user without requiring them to re-enter a username / password. Note that this is not a web application so I can't use tools like SAML or OAuth (unless i'm mistaken about this too..?)
So my specific question is as follows:
Is it possible to use LDAP for SSO, and if so, how? Is it possible for me to authenticate a user with just his or her username, or is a password also required?
Any guidance would be appreciated, and am happy to provide further clarification if needed.
First of all, LDAP is a protocol, which you use to communicate with databases that implement this protocol.
So LDAP databases (commonly called directories) are ... databases and so do not provide SSO functionality.
To deploy a SSO solution, you need a SSO service. All your applications will have to be "compliant" with this service in a way or another.
The only way I can think of to make a "Windows SSO" without adding a third party application is that the applications can retrieve NTLM informations in requests made by the client and uses the user data to identify him. (but in term of security, I let you judge what you think about it ;) ) . See this php example
Some LDAP implementations, including OpenLDAP, provide some level of support the Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (GSSAPI) or SPNEGO (a specific GSSAPI implementation)
Although not trivial, it is possible to perform SSO from a "browser" that supports GSSAPI. AFIK, IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome all provide some level of support for GSSAPI although each browser requires specific configuration (typically whitelisting of Servers).
There are many SSO Products that implement these features in a "probably" more secure and easier process than doing it yourself.
There are many known vulnerabilities details that have been exploited with GSAPPI/SPNEGO typically due to implementation issues.
I would like to centralise user management including authentication, authorisation and auditing as this is currently being performed by each application. I was wondering if there is an open source solution already available? I'm aware I can use LDAP or AD but this still requires development of an application to manage users.
I believe LDAP is not an appropriate solution as we require custom user attributes to be defined at runtime which is something LDAP does not support.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
There is Apereo CAS. It handles what you are after.
See www.github.com/apereo/cas
I read some blogs about the LDAP integration in liferay and understood that LDAP is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
Also it is mainly for user authentication.
Still I am blind in my mind where exactly and in which scenarios do we need to use the LDAP?
Can anyone please explain this in brief with simple real time example.
Liferay as a portal platform also keeps track of user identity. If you have your existing user database already in LDAP (because that's what has been established as a standard) you probably don't want to recreate it in the portal. In fact, many other applications might need this data as well and they all connect to LDAP (again, because that's the standard format).
Thus Liferay allows you to tap into the standard as well.
If you don't have your users in LDAP yet, you might not need to bother. If you start with the user database in Liferay and it grows large, needing to be shared with many other applications, you might want to migrate to LDAP later. And, funny enough, there's also a plugin (EE only) to Liferay that publishes Liferay's user database in the LDAP format. But now we're going quite meta.