SSO Support for Busy IT Admins 5 — Managing Integrations

So, that’s it… you’ve been given the weighty responsibility of SSO support for your organization. Or perhaps you’re new to the IAM team. Now what?

This post is the last in five-part series on the Fundamentals of SSO Support for IT Administrators.† You can see our first post here, our second post here, our third post here, and our fourth post here.

Keeping Integrations in Order

The primary purpose for a Single Sign On environment is to central authentication, and make things simpler for your users. However, one of the items that seems to plague busy academic and enterprise environments is a highly disorganized and disjointed SSO configuration. Here are some tips for keeping your SSO integrations in order, so that it’s easier to managing being the SSO Support “guy”.

Centralize as much as possible.

Many times we see orgs that are using some combination of Shibboleth, CAS, ADFS, and OAuth all at the same time, often with different administrators for each vying for the role of being the “SSO Support Principal”. With certain exceptions, you should reduce the number of deployed SSO solutions within your org’s ecosystem to as few as possible… for example:

• Shibboleth and ADFS are both primarily SAML-speaking IdP packages. Do you really need both? Did you know that you can delegate Shibboleth authentication to ADFS? Did you know that you can delegate ADFS authentication to Shibboleth?
• CAS works with a proprietary protocol… but Shibboleth IdP “speaks” that protocol. Ditch CAS and get Shib!
• But hey… CAS also “speaks” SAML… Ditch Shib and get CAS!
• Shibboleth, CAS, and ADFS all support OIDC to one degree or another, whether with native support or third-party plugins.

Mischief Configurations Managed

Configurations get out of sort, and quickly, when:

• more than one person edits/adds integrations to the server, or
• you fail to follow a standard operating procedure.

To that end, we strongly mention having a formal procedure in place (and documented, see below) for when an integration is built.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to use git to manage configuration files and build a review process with PRs and commits to the production repo – not that that’s a bad idea 😉 – but what it does mean is that you follow simple things like:

• Ensure that configuration file changes are commented, with an indication of who made the change, why they made it, and when. (For example, when I’m working in an IdP config file and I make a change on a users behalf I like to comment with things like:
  <!-- IDME / 2020-01-20 / New service added. <kellen@idmengineering.com> -->
• Make a copy of all configuration files before you make changes, and make sure they’re dated… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen “relying-party.xml”, “relying-party.xml.bak”, “relying-party.xml.bak2”, and “relying-party.xml.broken” all in the same config directory. Without context in the files, they’re useless.
• Don’t be afraid of deleting extra files that come with the software packages that aren’t needed after an initial deployment… I’m looking at you and your .dist files Shibboleth.

Documentation Prevents Problems

Do you have a single, centralized list of all of your SP integrations? Does that list come along with contact info for both the local responsible party as well as the vendor? Do you have metadata and/or testing URLs readily available?

Do you have a document that you provide to integration partners that specifies what information that you expect them to provide? Don’t be afraid to be a bit demanding here. SSO is difficult. You’ll help the partner organization improve by asking them to stick to standards and give you proper details.

Federate!

How many individual metadata files are you consuming? Can you limit the number of individual relying parties that you need to add by Federating with entities like InCommon or REFEDs.

Thanks for joining us!

Just following SOME of these tips will make your life managing an SSO support environment.  It’s been a bit of an adventure, and we hope you’ve enjoyed this series.  If you need support for your SSO environment we’re here for you. IDM Engineering is a team of dedicated, honest SSO support engineers that are readily available to help you architect a new single sign on environment, manage or improve existing SSO infrastructure, or just dig in and quickly solve a integration issue. We speak SAML… and OAuth… and ADFS… and SimpleSAMLphp… and more. Furthermore, we have a carefully curated collection of technological experience and expertise that can assist you with whatever single sign-on issue you’re facing. Give us a shot! Let us know how we can help you today!

† Or — how I learned to stop worrying and love XML.

SSO Support for Busy IT Admins 4 — Monitoring

So, that’s it… you’ve been given the weighty responsibility of SSO support for your organization. Or perhaps you’re new to the IAM team. Now what?

This post is the fourth in five-part series on the Fundamentals of SSO Support for IT Administrators.† You can see our first post here, our second post here, and our third post here, and our final post here.

Keeping Tabs on Your SSO Environment

A proper monitoring regime really gives you two – separate but equally important – tools:

• You’ll more quickly be able to access critically important debugging information when new, unexpected errors arise.
• You’ll be able to generally keep apprised of what’s going on… i.e. pro-actively tackling issues before they become serious, or more likely, start to gather the attention of users.

Let’s discuss each, in turn.

Know Your Logs

You would be surprised how many technical leads we encounter on a day-to-day basis that either don’t know what information is logged where, or don’t know how to properly tune their logging to get the information that’s relevant to the problem at hand.

My apologies if this post is somewhat Shibboleth-specific, as by it’s nature those products (SP and IDP) seem to obfuscate the logging process somewhat, and for the uninitiated, it can be quite daunting to determine what to long and where it’s controlled. This is further complicated, for example within SP on Windows, by how the Shibboleth Services interact with the web-browser of note. For example… if you’re leveraging Shibboleth SP on IIS, do you know what’s written to shibd.log vs. native.log. And importantly, do you know how to configure native logging properly to a file so that you don’t have to deal with Event Viewer?

It’s fundamentally important to understand what data you’re logging and have access to if you are tasked with providing SSO Support for your organization.

In SSO it’s quite rare that there are problems that result in no useful logging information. And when that does occur, 90% of the time it implies that the issue isn’t on your end, but on your integration partner’s end. The remaining 10% are usually the result of not having the correct logging categories enabled.

Being Proactive

A properly deployed environment will have at least some degree of monitoring involved. This doesn’t necessary mean deploying a full monitoring solution like Nagios, Graylog, or Splunk. More importantly, a simple audit of the logs on a normal cycle (weekly? monthly? when you can remember it?) is better than nothing.

Here, I find logging to files more useful, as you’ll be able to pretty quickly determine what’s an error that we should concern ourselves with – i.e. a particular metadata feed URL randomly dies – versus a warning we can safely ignore – i.e. a user hitting the back button at the wrong time resulting in a stale session warning.

Whatever your SSO environment looks like, take time to familiarize yourself with what is – and isn’t – logged:

• Shibboleth SP Logging
• Shibboleth IdP Logging
• SimpleSAMLphp Logging — unfortunately, documentation here is sparse. One line under Maintenance. (Look for a future post from us concerning the topic. Will update this post when available.)
• ADFS Logging

Next time… SSO Management Best Practices

We’ll dive into best practices for managing integrations in your environment… what information you should require, to sign or not to sign, and why a good documentation bundle can save you a TON of headaches.

† Or — how I learned to stop worrying and love XML.

SSO Support for Busy IT Admins 3 — Finding Help When You Need It (Desperately)

So, that’s it… you’ve been given the weighty responsibility of SSO support for your organization. Or perhaps you’re new to the IAM team. Now what?

This post is the third in five-part series on the Fundamentals of SSO Support for IT Administrators.† You can see our first post here, and our second post here. Our fourth post can be found here, and our fifth post here.

Master the Art of Google-Fu

Quick! Something is broken. An obscure error message fills your screen when you try to log in. Who ever is going to help you?!

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…
a powerful heuristic search engine!

A powerful discriminator between those who provide SSO support well, and those that don’t, is the ability to effectively search out solutions to one’s problem. In 99% of cases, whatever issue you’re encountering that you need to fix.

Here are some quick tips to make your searches more fruitful:

• Use quotation marks. Searching for "shibboleth" log file location will be more likely to give you good results than shibboleth log file location
• Use minus signs liberally to restrict keywords: "shibboleth" sp -idp will limit your results to only Service Provider content (ideally)
• Search specific sites using a colon: shibboleth sp site:wiki.shibboleth.net to search the Shib wiki using Google
• Search sites that link to a particularly useful resource for explanatory content, i.e. best practices link:wiki.shibboleth.net
• Try using Google Advanced Search

For more advanced search operators, see: Google Advanced Search Operators: The Ultimate List (40+ Advanced Operators)

Get Help from Others

Okay, Google hasn’t been that helpful. It’s not a miracle cure for all of your SSO Support needs. Maybe it’s pointed you in a couple of directions, but you’re still unsure. No worries… everyone has been there. Which is why, during your searches, you should have encountered tons of resources for where to ask your unanswered questions.

These can be more or less helpful, depending upon the community, who frequents it, who answers questions, and perhaps most importantly… how you ask the questions. Never post to a forum:

ADFS won’t work. What do?! Error -2146885613

Because you’re NOT going to get anything from that. To give you insight into what makes a good question on ANY forum or mailing list, take a look at the StackOverflow guide to asking questions.

Here are some good places to keep in mind for getting help:

• Shibboleth Users Mailing List (though there are better options for SSO Support for Shibboleth Consortium Members)
• Microsoft ADFS Technet Forum
• SimpleSAMLphp Google Group
• The StackOverFlow single sign-on Tag
• Forums/channels related to your particular OAuth library, i.e. the PHPLeague OAuth2 Client Gitter

Get Help From a Professional

We’d be remiss to not mention ourselves here. If you’re really struggling with a problem, and none of the above have helped, we’re here.

IDM Engineering is a team of dedicated, honest SSO support engineers that are readily available to help you architect a new single sign on environment, manage or improve existing SSO infrastructure, or just dig in and quickly solve a integration issue. We speak SAML… and OAuth… and ADFS… and SimpleSAMLphp… and more. Furthermore, we have a carefully curated collection of technological experience and expertise that can assist you with whatever single sign-on issue you’re facing.

Give us a shot! Let us know how we can help you today!

Next time… Keeping Tabs on Your SSO Environment

We’ll dive into best practices for monitoring your environment… keeping tabs on your servers, looking for problems before they occur, and conducting regular maintenance will help your future self not hate single sign-on so much!

† Or — how I learned to stop worrying and love XML.

SSO Support for Busy IT Admins 2 — THE LAB

So, that’s it… you’ve been given the weighty responsibility of SSO support for your organization. Or perhaps you’re new to the IAM team. Now what?

This post is the secondof a five-part series on the Fundamentals of SSO Support for IT Administrators.† You can see our first post here, our third post here, our fourth post here, and our fifth post here.

The Lab is Your BEST Friend

No matter what issue you’re facing when it comes to SSO, if you can’t dive into an environment that’s almost like your production environment and mess everything up trying to make something happen, you’ll never be able to manage SSO support for your organization. And there are countless tools, like Docker and Git, that make keeping a lab environment a breeze.

The Lab Should Be Production Lite

If you’re responsible for a load-balanced Shibboleth and CAS dual-deployment environment with two-nodes for each, then no, you don’t NEED to have 4 more server VMs running for the lab. But in that kind of case, it’s entirely reasonable to keep a dev CAS and a dev Shibboleth instance on hand, separated in the same way they are separated in production, but simply not load balanced.

Likewise, if your production server runs on an AWS t2.2xlarge doesn’t mean that a t2.micro wouldn’t suffice. If you’re leveraging a cloud provider resource like AWS already, there’s no reason that you can’t keep your dev instance spun down (but NOT terminated) effectively indefinitely.

Furthermore, when it comes to SAML, the single most important bit of information is the entityID. You can have a dev Shibboleth IDP for example, which is configured with the same entityID as your production environment. Then, so long as you point the DNS hostname of the production IdP to your dev server’s IP address, authentications will occur against that box. That means it’s relatively trivial to test configuration changes (like attribute release policies) BEFORE moving the configuration to production.

Don’t Be Afraid to Break Things

I use git to manage my configs on all of my dev environments which utilize file-based configurations. (Others prefer subversion.) Every time I want to make a new major change (say, experiment with a new, custom MFA provider in Shibboleth) I’ll create a new branch. That way, if I need to, I can just checkout the last working branch and all of my work is still safe and sound in the “indev” (as I like to name them) branch.

Here’s another use case… let’s say you’re responsible for idp.example.org, a Shibboleth IdP. You need to work on onboarding two service providers, Company A and Company B. You can work on these configurations separately within two branches, without worry that changes you make for Company A will throw things off for Company B’s integration. As the integrations start to near completion… you merge the branches separately.

If you’re also leverage git for production, when you’re ready to push the configs live, it’s just a matter of a simple git push to the relevant remote and a restart of Shibboleth (or a call to a reloadable service)

Similar functionality can be achieved in the ADFS / Windows sphere with Virtual Machine Snapshots and Powershell, though that’s inherently a bit trickier.

Next… To the Internet!

Next week… we’ll dive into the standard first action you should always, ALWAYS taken when confronted with a new issue: GOOGLE THE HECK OUT OF IT!

Can’t Wait?

Need help now? Well what would a blog post be without a sales pitch? IDM Engineering is a team of dedicated, honest SSO support engineers that are readily available to help you architect a new single sign on environment, manage or improve existing SSO infrastructure, or just dig in and quickly solve a integration issue. We speak SAML… and OAuth… and ADFS… and SimpleSAMLphp… and more. Furthermore, we have a carefully curated collection of technological experience and expertise that can assist you with whatever single sign-on issue you’re facing. Give us a shot! Let us know how we can help you today!

† Or — how I learned to stop worrying and love XML.

So, that’s it… you’ve been given the weighty responsibility of SSO support for your organization. Or perhaps you’re new to the IAM team. Now what?

This post is the first of a five-part series on the Fundamentals of SSO Support for IT Administrators.† You can see our second post here, our third post here, our fourth post here, and our fifth post here.

SSO Support Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

You wouldn’t necessarily know this by researching “best practices”. Trying to find information about best practices for managing a Shibboleth environment, for example, will turn up a lot of lackluster information. For example, a brief inquiry on “managing a Shibboleth IdP environment” turns up some basic Shibboleth Wiki entries, a ton of integration instructions for getting popular Service Providers working with Shibboleth, and the only truly reasonable resource that turns up on the front page is an excellent, though aged whitepaper: “Implementing a Shibboleth SSO Infrastructure” from SANS.

So what are you to do?

Start Small: First Principles

Ask yourself this? Can you explain how a single sign-on interaction works? Can you explain it to your mother? What about a rubber duck? If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and assess your knowledge.

What technologies does your environment leverage? SAML? ADFS? OAuth? Make sure you’re familiar with the concepts of single-sign on before trying to dive in to a Shib IdP config and get MFA working.

For SAML —

The shib wiki isn’t a bad place to start here, surprisingly, but you should relatively quickly realize that Shibboleth != SAML. OASIS is the group that actually oversees that SAML protocol, and the high-level overview that they provide is a fantastic place to start if you don’t “get” SAML.

For ADFS —

You are, unfortunately, subject to the whims and whimsy of The Great Old Ones in charge of Microsoft. Fortunately, there is some good documentation to come out of Redmond, such as this piece on best-practices when deploying ADFS. They’ll even helpfully tell you that it only takes 9 minutes to read (do not misconstrue reading and understanding). Getting used to the nomenclature surrounding ADFS can be a bear — ADFS has it’s own language — though you’ll be able to go a long way if you just substitute “identity provider” every time you ready “claims provider” and “service provider” each time you read “relying party”.

For OAuth —

First thing first: do you understand that OAuth 1.0 ≠ Oauth 2.0 ≠ OpenID Connect ≠ OpenID? Here StackOverFlow provides! This new-ish technology (for the IAM community) has an abundance of posts on how it’ll solve all of your problems, but adoption at the enterprise is slow, which means that it can be a challenge to find trusted sources. What’s left then are commercial providers. Here, Auth0 takes the lead in providing a reasonable trove of materials.

Next… To the Lab!

Next week… we’ll dive into the crucible by which Help Desk turn into Engineers, the lab, and why development environments play an absolutely crucial role for those tasked with SSO Support for their Organization.

Can’t Wait?

Need help now? Well what would a blog post be without a sales pitch? IDM Engineering is a team of dedicated, honest SSO support engineers that are readily available to help you architect a new single sign on environment, manage or improve existing SSO infrastructure, or just dig in and quickly solve a integration issue. We speak SAML… and OAuth… and ADFS… and SimpleSAMLphp… and more. Furthermore, we have a carefully curated collection of technological experience and expertise that can assist you with whatever single sign-on issue you’re facing. Give us a shot! Let us know how we can help you today!

† Or — how I learned to stop worrying and love XML.