® Practical Approaches to Web Services Authentication 72nd OGC Technical Committee Frascati, Italy Fiona Culloch March 9, 2010 Sponsored and hosted by ESA/ESRIN
OGC ® Federated Authentication
OGC ® User Selects Identity Provider
OGC ® Enters Credentials at IdP
OGC ® Logged in to Service Provider
OGC ® Browser-Based Federation Mature Implementations –Open-source Shibboleth SimpleSAMLphp, … –Commercial OpenAthens Sun Novell, … Policy infrastructure –Many national federations
OGC ® But… Doesn’t work for non-browser clients!
OGC ® Why Not? The protocols (SAML) require: –HTTP redirection –Cookies –SSL/TLS –User input (usernames, passwords, etc.) –(X)HTML processing Web service clients may not support any of these! –(OGC Authentication IE client survey) Making IdP discovery/interaction impossible
OGC ® One Solution Identified By UK JISC-funded EDINA project SEE-GEO (2006–08) –Initiated and led by EDINA geospatial team –With input from AM Consult (Andreas Matheus) UK federation (JISC/EDINA SDSS project) Shibboleth Core Team (Chad La Joie)
OGC ® Concept Separate –Client flow (XML over HTTP) –From browser authentication flow (HTML, SAML over HTTP) In the client flow –URI must contain valid token –Token validated by browser authentication flow
OGC ® Authenticating Proxy (“Façade”) OWS Façade Client XML
OGC ® Façade Has Two Faces OWS Façade Client XML Browser SAML HTML SP
OGC ® Façade Separates Auth. from Application FaçadeOWS SAML, Fed., X.509, Auth. Policy, … OWS, WMS, WFS, … Sys. admin., Auth. policy (Someone else’s problem!) App. design, OGC standards,… (Your problem)
OGC ® SEE-GEO Work Being Taken Forward In the OGC (1H 2010) –Authentication Interoperability Experiment Interoperability testing Investigate best choice of SAML protocols, bindings At EDINA –JISC-funded project WSTIERIA (2010) Generalise from OWS to any WS Abstract from SAML protocols, bindings to Shibboleth concept of “protected service”
OGC ® Meanwhile, Elsewhere… Shibboleth Core Team / U. of Chicago have developed –Shibboleth extension for web services Based on SAML 2.0 Enhanced Client Proxy (ECP) Client libraries (for Java, …) Supports N-tier use cases!
OGC ® So Why Bother With Façade? No client library required SAML 2.x / Shibboleth 2.x not required –As of December 2009, only ~20% of UK federation IdPs SAML 2.0 Few / zero client modifications required WSTIERIA taking both approaches forward
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