Why Is It Good For Business?

Federation Single Sign-on (SSO) is a very popular means of providing SSO among internet applications. There are few specifications that provide SSO across the internet. What exactly is Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Federation? Why is it good for business?

SAML Federation works on the basis of establishing trust between entities to form a federation. A federation is a group of organizations which share information, but are internally independent. Essentially, once two entities decide to form a federation, they exchange information to identify each other. With SAML, each entity exchanges a metadata file representing basic information about the entity. An entity is either an Identity Provider (IdP) or a Service Provider (SP). The IdP provides information about the user and SP provides  service to the user.

This is great for business, as SAML provides flexibility of who will be able to access your service or user information. It requires both parties to be aware of each other through use of the metadata file, with each party understanding who is providing service and who will be providing user identity information. The IdP needs to know what additional user information needs to be passed to the SP.

To create the federation, metadata files must be exchanged. Then, either side can initiate the SSO event. Depending on whether the use is already authenticated with the IdP, it will be sent to the SP’s application or be prompted for authentication before access to the application is granted.

As soon as the IdP determines the user is authenticated, it sends the necessary user information in a SAML Assertion. The SAML Assertion alerts the SP that a user has been authenticated, initiating a search for a matching user so access to the application can be granted. If a matching user is found, they receive access. If not, the SP has the options of either creating the non-existing user or rejecting the authentication.

The SAML assertion is sent as POST data through the end user's browser, so there is no direct connection from the IdP to the SP. There are options to encrypt the data within the assertion to prevent any browser-side snooping of information. During the Metadata swap, there is the option to provide encryption certificates, including the certificate’s public key to encrypt data. The server receiving data can only decrypt it with the private key of the certificate. There is an extra layer of protection on top of the TLS protocol that is used to protect the traffic. 

The Beauty of SAML Federation

Once you are part of a federation, you can take advantage of services that your partners are federated with. Essentially you can “daisy chain” providers within the federation.

In the above diagram, an employee of Company A (A) will authenticate through A’s website and access a service provided to Company B (B) from Company C (C). The employee will access C using his A credentials. C does not know what A is and vice versa. There is no agreement among the two. B collects the user information from A and then provides it to C. The access is dependent on B’s relationship with A and C. As far as A is concerned, B is providing the service that C has.

This is the brokered trust model, much like how a mortgage broker is the middleman between you and the bank. You trust when you go to a mortgage broker that they have a good relationship with the bank and your goal is to leverage that relationship to get a better deal. Company A is trusting Company B’s relationship with Company C.

SAML Federation is an amazing technology that makes user management across the internet easy. SAML Federation goes beyond just internet-based SSO, and allows systems across many different services to maintain the user data through SAML Assertions. Federation allows anyone to supplement their service with other service providers, meaning that you can provide a complete solution without owning and operating everything and provide quick and easy access to your clients.

Here at Hub City Media, I have had the opportunity to see many clients with varying implementations of federation, and I find that Oracle Access Manager's flexibility is quite amazing in this area. I expect SAML Federation to be with us for a long time.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES - ARCHITECT 

OASIS SAML Technical Overview - https://wiki.oasis-open.org/security/Saml2TechOverview

Damien Carru's Blog: It's a Federated World - https://blogs.oracle.com/dcarru/entry/federation_proxy_in_oif_idp