Web SSO solution that's easy to implement? - java

I'm looking at a SSO (Single Sign On) solution to fit our relatively simple use case.
Website1 - currently authenticates with database user table.
Website 2 [new] - wants to use the same authentication information and when user clicks link to website1 they shouldn't have to re-login.
Website1 is J2EE based running on Websphere.
Website 2 is .Net based hosted by external company.
Ideally looking to keep the current user table as the user directory and have time out of session across applications and password expiry.
Any suggestions on 'simple' SSO solution, trying to justify it against rolling our own.

I used the Central Authentication Service project (CAS) on a couple of projects. It was simple, easy to grasp and implement as of version 1.x.
CAS is an authentication system originally created by Yale University but now part of the Jasig Community.
Jasig Community CAS homepage
DeveloperWorks article on CAS from 2003

If you can run both services under Apache, this worth a look: http://www.openfusion.com.au/labs/mod_auth_tkt/

I am sure below solution will meet your expectation.
http://webmoli.com/2009/08/29/single-sign-on-in-java-platform/

A slightly more general solution that is very popular these days is OpenID. You can use your user table as an OpenID provider, and set up all your websites as OpenID consumers.
Benefits:
Simple
Widely used
Extensible, later you can allow more providers or add more consumers
Implementations in many languages

Related

Authentication solution for a Java based Product

We are developing a Java based product. We need to make the authentication part to fit for major authentication services, like LDAP, OpenID, Oauth2, SAML. The idea is, when we deploying the product for a company who is having LDAP, our product should be able to cater it. If the company has OAuth2, then our product should be able to cater that as well.
I want to know, what are the better approaches and tools. I'm looking for a open source solution which support all these protocols in one place. Please share the knowledge.
I'd suggest Spring Security. It is completely independent to the Spring Core framework and with some simple configuration and some additional libraries (also developed by the same team), you can get a simple solution for most of the popular authentication methods.
With a couple of annotations, you can configure which methods or endpoints you want secured either.
You can create spring profiles, who decide which authentication method to be used.
Simple approach is to use an IAM (identity and access management) solution. Kecloak is a good open source one (and is written in java but you shouldn't mind).
By the way, your question is off-topic (recommending software or tools). Post it here
You need to separate out Identity repositories and Identity protocols.
LDAP and AD are repositories.
OpenID, OAuth2, SAML are protocols.
You need an IAM system that handles all the protocols and sits on top of the repositories.
For your product to talk to your IAM, you need a protocol stack in your product e.g. for SAML.
You then federate your IAM with other vendors e.g. if a vendor comes along and wants to authenticate with their AD, they would install ADFS and then ADFS federates with your IAM system.
So the logical flow goes:
User --> authenticate on their IAM --> trusted by your IAM --> access to your application granted.
You could also look at Identity as a Service e.g. Azure AD, Auth0, Okta etc.

How to authenticate user on REST using Shiro and OATH 2

I am about to start developing a REST service and security is an important aspect of this project but I can't find some definitive information on how to implement it. My service will be consumed by an Android App at first, but could be used by other platforms later. Controlling user access is critical, so Authorization and Authentication control of the REST services is very important.
Although I can find topics on how to make a secure REST API, like here, here and this big one here, to my surprise, all of them fail to point to a famous standard or framework or time tested solution, which usually is the "way to go" in securing software applications, where we avoid as much as we can to "roll your own security solution".
So far on my research I think OAUTH 2.0 (or even OAUTH 1.0) is the best way to go, it's a public widely used protocol and supports Authorization and Authentication and we can control the lifetime of keys and even have a special refresh key allowing the client to not store password information for acquiring a new key if needed.
I also think Apache Shiro is the best framework for Security, Authorization and Authentication in java, so it comes to a surprize for me when I can't find any integrations between Shiro and OAUTH 2.0...ok there is one that's 5 years old, and doesn't inspire much trust to me.
Even more curious is the fact that Les Hazlewood, the Apache Shiro PMC Chair, owns (ok, owned, he just sold it to Okta) Stormpath, a company made for Identity and User Management, so I would expect him to have provided some easy integrations between OAUTH 2.0 and Shiro, unless this would disrupt Stormpath business plan too much I guess (which I don't believe, since the Apache Foundation won't allow this kind of behavior).
So the final questions are:
1 - Are there any easy integrations between Shiro and OAUTH 2.0 or will I have to code my own?
2 - Does everyone implement their own OAUTH 2.0 solution for dealing with REST APIs access control or am I missing something?
I know the Buji project uses Shiro and supports Oauth2. I haven't used it, but you can check it out.
You definately don't need to code your own. There's some great java libraries and apps that you can use for oauth2 and you can choose from a low level library that you use to build your own oauth2 server up to a full featured standalone openid connect server.
Spring security provides oauth2 that you can use to embed an oauth2 server in your application. A tutorial is available at http://www.baeldung.com/rest-api-spring-oauth2-angularjs.
There's mitreid openid connect https://github.com/mitreid-connect/OpenID-Connect-Java-Spring-Server, which has a war overlay that you can use to add a user and client admin app into your webapp.
Keycloak (https://www.keycloak.org/) provides a full featured standalone openid connect server.

Google Apps domain integration

We have a Java web application (using struts and hibernate) and want the users to automatically log into the Google apps domain accounts.
We have set up the Google apps for Education domain accounts and created the users in it and we have the same users in our java web application also.
The requirement is that when the users log into our application portal, their is a link to go to Google apps, once they click on this link, it should log them in without asking for password.
We are using Tomcat 7 as our server for the web application. Which SSO tool should we use for doing this? Oracle's SSO is paid, Shiboleth doesn't work with Tomcat 7.
Any help highly appreciated? Is SSO the only option or another way to do this.
Thanks
Any SSO solution that supports the SAML2 protocol should work. Apart from the expensive solutions that Oracle, IBM, CA and others provide, you can find the following solutions that definitely work well with Tomcat7 and are open source :
Apereo (ex Jasig) CAS : Used quite a lot in the education community. Simple to setup but specific configurations (like an advanced authentication module) might require some programming effort. It supports Google Apps authentication, but none other SAML2 service. If you really want to only login to Google Apps, that's a great and simple solution.
Forgerock OpenAM : Formerly Sun OpenSSO, this is used in education and industry. Many more features, supports most of the SAML2 service providers out there including Google Apps, but more complex.
Note that if you already have a portal solution, you should check if that portal does not already support SAML2 federation and could act as the SSO server.
Note also that you will need to link the portal authentication and the SSO server authentication, to make sure that your users do not authenticate twice. This can be done in two ways :
Tell the SSO server to delegate the authentication to your portal solution. This might require some light custom coding depending on your portal.
The opposite : tell the portal to use the SSO as an authentication solution. Most portals support some kind of authentication delegation so it should only be configuration?
Lastly, if your authentication is setup on Tomcat itself (that is if your portal already delegates the authentication to the Tomcat container), then you can do the same for the SSO server.

Is there a good Java open source OpenID Provider for LDAP?

What I am looking for is a Java servlet implementation of an OpenId provider for LDAP ... something I can plug into TomCat, point it at an LDAP directory server, and provide OpenId style authentication from those user accounts in the directory server.
I have been using OpenID4Java for years and it works fine, but it is just an API, and does not provide the user interface required for a complete OpenID provider.
I want to be able to write a large number of small web-based utilities, and allow people SSO access to all of them using OpenID, but these people already have accounts in the directory server, and I do not want to make them create a new password. They should use the same old password they are used to.
I tried OpenID-LDAP, but it is based on PHP. I am looking for one I can install into TomCat and manage consistently with other JSP based applications. I looked at JOIDS which seems to have capability to register and manage users, but nothing to link to LDAP. This excellent Wiki Page lists other options, like Atlassian Crowd, but I need open source.
I am asking at this time to see if I have missed anything. If there is nothing, I will probably write one.
You may try using WSO2 Identity Server which provides OpenID provider that can be plug in with LDAP and provides UI as well.

User managed security in Java EE

I want to protect my JSF pages in a Java EE 6 app.
I want to store users and roles in the DB and have privileged users administer them via a web tool. The privileged users would add users to roles and set certain pages to require certain roles for access.
It seems to me that container managed security won't let me do that. Would JAAS be the way forward?
Any suggestions and links to examples would be appreciated.
The short answer is yes. JAAS will allow you manage security against a database use a LoginModule(many container implementations JBoss offer these pre-canned out of the box) and you can check out this article(http://weblogs.java.net/blog/2006/03/07/repost-using-jaas-jsf) or this book(http://www.java.net/external?url=http://purl.oclc.org/NET/jsfbook/) for more specifics how to authenticate Users and determine authorization parameters with JAAS and JSF.
For your second requirement, I can't see any reason why you can then create a separate tool that has access to those tables to modify credential information. Though this seems like a problem that has already been solved by using an LDAP provider with any one of a number of free and open source web interfaces.
Another nifty feature because of the clear separation of concerns is that you can later easily migrate to LDAP or third party services with little effort.
I recommend that you take a look at Spring Security.
Spring Security is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework.
Here is an article that explains using Spring Security with JSF.

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