I have a working implementation of SAML (OneLogin) within an enterprise architecture.
When a guest user arrives at my application they are redirected to the company login where they enter their username / password. After that the user identity is passed back to my application and we log them in.
However, I notice that in other applications within the company I do not have to login at all. Somehow the website "knows who I am" and seems to authenticate me automatically. I presume there is some form of certificate on my pc / browser which the other applications are passing to the SAML??
Can somebody tell me the technical term or process? Is there a process whereby I simply pull the certificate from the browser or PC and pass it to the SAML? I would like my users to be able to auto-login without entering their credentials.
Thanks
There's a number of mechanisms that support an "automatic" authentication like what you describe. In the Identity and Access Management (IAM) realm, we have all sorts of names for it, but many of us call that "seamless single sign-on (SSO)".
Within a corporate environment, I would suspect that you are dealing with a one of two mechanisms: Kerberos authentication (especially if you're a Microsoft shop and log in to a domain-joined machine on a daily basis), or your machine is in an MDM-type of system, which uses a machine- and/or user-based certificate (aka PKI) to authenticate the user or user/machine combination.
Within your enterprise, if there are other applications whose users are immediately authenticated to the application without entering their username and password, then you should talk to your IAM team or your Single Sign On (SSO) administrators to understand why that doesn't work for yours.
I will also say that it's possible that your security team evaluated what information your application offers (insider financials? source code? your secret recipe? credit card data?) and decided that they would still require the user enter their username and password to get access to the data. So when you go to your SSO admins to ask, if they say that it's intentional, you should feel free to ask why and who you should talk to about it.
After a LOT of research and testing I finally have the answer to this question, and it is incredibly simple!
In summary:
I have a working solution with OneLogin that sends me to a page like this:
https://sts.companyname.com/adfs/ls
The url is specified in the config: saml->config->idp->singleSignOnService->url
However, this page requires the user to enter their username and password and, instead, I would like the system to be fully seamless.
The solution, it turns out, is simply to hyperlink to the following url:
https://sts.companyname.com/adfs/ls/IdpInitiatedSignon.aspx?LoginToRp=https://mypage.com/saml/metadata
where "loginToRp" url is the url provided in saml->config->sp->entityID
The ADFS IDP Initiated Signon will connect to your metadata schema and automatically log the user in (without the user needing to provide any credentials)
NOTE: this only applies to intranet sites in a corporate environment
Related
I'm writing a Playwright test that starts with a Google Auth0 login. After I fill my test user and password in the UI (google login), in Firefox and Webkit the authentication passes successfully, while, on Chromium, I'm getting the Verify it's you message (with a "send sms" message).
The account does not have 2 steps authentication.
When it happened locally, I opened the browser in headful mode, and after few clicks (which I assume "told" the browser that I'm a real user) the problem disappeared (I can now run my tests in headless mode locally). But, it still happens on CI (GitHub)
I run the test with chromium flags: --disable-dev-shm-usage and --disable-web-security.
I couldn't find any data about it anywhere...
When Google determines that a user is logging in from an unknown device or a new location, they may prompt the user with an additional login challenge.
The login challenge that the user receives depends on the information that associated with the account.
Does the prompt say "Enter a phone number to get a text message" or something else like "This device isn't recognized..."
If the former I believe you can circumvent this extra prompt by having a phone number linked to the Google account in question. If the latter I believe the prompt is once per user per device.
My understanding it is basically Google trying to get a valid phone number for the account (to prevent spam etc).
-- Edit
The only other thing I can think of is that you can temporarily turn off the verify-it's-you challenge, for 10 mins, but only if the account is a member of a Google Workspace or Cloud Identity service. I am not sure this is possible for an unmanaged account - or how useful it would be. The other issue is that for "free services" Google doesn't really offer any kind of support.
Anyhow, you might try "Temporarily turn off login challenges for a user" -
https://support.google.com/a/answer/12077697
There is also so good information on this verify-it's-you challenge here.
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2018/04/more-secure-sign-in-chrome.html
It has some notes on disabling the challenge per organization via response headers, but again this is for an organization and managed accounts.
If you wish to disable the new screen for your organization, you can
use the X-GoogApps-AllowedDomains HTTP header to identify specific
domains whose users can access Google services. Users in those domains
won’t see this additional screen, as we assume those accounts are
trusted by your users. This header can be set in Chrome via the
AllowedDomainsForApps group policy.
Google offers two systems for accessing Gmail. IMAP and SMTP and a the Gmail rest api Gmail - Scope for SMTP is https://mail.google.com/. However with Gmail rest API, just the required scope (like send, modify) can be used.
What are the main differences between the implementation of these two for sending an email? I've been using SMTP to send the mails without any issues but since that involves having a bigger scope for OAuth2, I want to know if there are any possible risks involved in moving to the API approach.
Users.messages: send says there's a restriction on attachment size.
This method supports an /upload URI and accepts uploaded media with
the following characteristics:
Maximum file size: 35MB Accepted Media MIME types: message/rfc822
Are there any other differences that I should know about if I start using Gmail APIs instead of using SMTP connection for OAuth2.
Also, what is the reasoning behind providing full access as the only possible scope for SMTP/IMAP?
Note: I only requirement is the ability to send emails.
Using SMTP you are directly accessing the mail server located at mail.google.com. SMTP servers have been around since the 60's they don't have the ability to limit what access you have. When you log in you have full access to do what ever the mail server in question is capable of. To login to the SMTP server you need the login (most often email address) and password of the account you wish to access. Drawback to using the SMTP to connect to Gmail is that if the user changed the password you would then loose access. This day in age it is also considered by most to be bad practice for third party developers to be storing a users login and password in your system. For example: I would never give any application access to my login and password to Google. How could you ever prove to me that your system is secure? If your hacked so am I.
Now on to Oauth2. Oauth came about sometime around 2005 when people wanted to be able to access APIs without having to do something stupid like
http://awsom.api.com?login=xxx&password=XXX
If memory services it was originally created for the twitter API developers wanted to be able to access their users twitter account without having to store their login in and password. Again the main problem with this was the developer in question would then have full access to a users twitter account and if the user or the developer changed the password things would break.
So they created OAuth. The main features with OAuth are:
You can limit access you give an application: (readonly, read write)
Password change does not affect access
No sharing account credentials with developers of third party apps
So the main point for me as a developer using Oauth with any Google API would be not having to store the login and password of my users and not being affected by a password change. My users would probably say not having to share their login with me and being able to give my application limited access to their account.
Now back to Gmail. Google made a change about two months ago any refresh token(oauth2) that was created using a Gmail scope will automatically expire when the user changes their password. To my knowledge this is only Gmail. so that removes point number two from the features of oauth.
Which should you use is really up to you, assuming you need to be able to send emails. Then limiting access to read only in your application isn't something you need (point one). However in my opinion from a security standpoint I would never ask my users to give me their login and password and would always choose oauth2. Yes SMTP works, will Google shut it down, probably not users have always been given access to the direct SMTP server of their email provider its how applications like outlook work.
as for OAuth support with SMTP unfortunately I haven't done much research into that guess I need to read RFC 4422 . If you can use OAuth with SMTP servers then again I guess the question would have to come down to speed is it faster to access the SMTP server or the REST API server? I can really think of no differences. Attachments with the Rest API can be tricky. I may do a bit more digging on the subject.
We want to provide seamless access for all our users to SP's like publishers. The SP's are independent and provide services to a lot of different companies, i.e., we each have independent IdP solutions.
We want it to work as if there were no authentication, i.e., the user find a link on the Internet and follow it. If the site provide special services (that we pay for) for our users we would like them to use our own IdP (but only for our own users) to authenticate them.
Our current SAML setup requires that the SP support IP-address recognition and/or use specific domain names, i.e., the user access a specific domain name or come from our IP-ranges so the SP knows which IdP to redirect to but if our user comes from any other IP-address and don't access a specific URL the system is lost.
How is this solved?
I think a cookie given by the SP every time the user gets authenticated (from our network which the SP recognizes) can solve this but is that the standard? And it is not really a solution as it requires that our users have visited them at least once from our network!
This isn't so much a SAML question as it is an identity provider discovery problem which isn't specific to the protocol. How is a publisher supposed to know / decide that a particular user should be redirected to your IdP via SAML or any other protocol? This isn't a tractable problem in a general sense. The publisher and you will need to agree on a contract between two entities (you and these publishers) when it comes to these special users / services.
One possible implementation of IdP discovery that doesn't involve domains or IP ranges is a dynamic lookup of the IdP based on the user's identity. User clicks a link, navigates to the publisher site and attempts to login with (for example) his identity of myname#mycompany.com . The publisher can then do a lookup of mycompany.com in their identity store of special users / services / IdPs and determine that this user should not be allowed to login with local (publisher-managed) credentials. Instead, the user should be sent to some 3rd party IdP via a SAML authentication request. The publisher can do this at the time of user login but before the user has a chance to enter their publisher-managed credentials, be it via your favorite AJAX technique or some other form of UI gratification.
The publisher could use a persistent cookie so that the next time this user comes to this publisher they'll know that this user "belongs" to a 3rd party IdP and redirect accordingly.
Am developing a Windows Store 8.1 app using C# and xaml.
I am doing Single sign on using Azure Active Directory Account login.
I do not want users to be redirected to the Microsoft Account login screen, and then come back. I want to supply them with the login credential screen where we capture their username and password, and then we want to programatically do the authentication against Azure AD, and get back the claims identity.
How can i achieve this?
This is not a supported scenario for security concerns. One of the value propositions for AAD is that the password management, across the whole login lifecycle, is managed and secure. This is particularly important for scenarios in which AAD is securing a 3rd-party SaaS solution. A developer should not be able to have access to a user's credentials at any point.
All that said, it sounds like there is another question here which is answerable: How can I customize the login screen that AAD gives me?
AAD Premium does offer features for adding custom branding to your tenant. However, you still will be working with a screen that is provided for you.
Bear with me please. I am a layman in web technology and have few simple questions which need simple language answers.
When we login using a username and password on any website, what exact connection/relation is established with the website server? Is it that the server stores the IP address of the user and allows the user access to certain tables from the server database for a short span of time and the regular query to the server keeps the 'connection alive'?
Thanks in advance..
A login system receives a set of credentials from the user, typically an identifier and a password. It could include what is called an authentication token, which is either generated by a handheld device (so you not only have to have id and password but the token generator; it's on the equivalent of requiring both the pin and the card at an ATM), or it's generated by combining the password with something else and returning an encryption result.
The login system, once it receives the credentials, compares them to what is stored on the credential database. In some cases the credentials are sent encrypted, such that even the login system doesn't even know what they are, all it does is determine if the encryption is correct. This would mean that even if someone was monitoring the communication channel they could not use it to fake a login later.
Now, if the credential is valid, one of two things happens. For a desktop application or general sign-on, the login program will transfer control to either the rest of the program (for an application), or grants access to the system (for a sign on). When the person leaves the application or signs off the system, then everything starts over.
For a website, the login program will send the user a cookie that another part of the website can read and determine the user was authenticated and their credentials passed. This continues until the cookie expires, or the user logs out. If the user logs out, the website sends a new cookie that says the former cookie is expired.