Enterprise Identity Bus Part 4

English on February 19th, 2015 No Comments

The third step: Enabling easy community registration and sign-on.

In the first article we introduced the project requirements to get rid of an application identity silo environment and to introduce an identity hub infrastructure. The second part dealt with building a Single Sign On infrastructure leveraging WSO2 Identity Server and OpenID Connect Apache agents. The third part described account federations with cloud services and identity providers run by customers. In this blog we approach the requirement C:

C. Enable community users to register and sign in with their own social login (Google, Facebook …) to internet accessible in-house applications and probably to cloud services integrated into the community environment (e.g. Zendesk for customer services).

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Social authentication or sign-in allows users to access a service by using their Facebook, Google … accounts. No need to remember a new password or user name for the service. Also dynamic user creations eliminates or simplifies the annoying registration process filling out user profile forms, remembering password reset questions etc. Sounds like a good idea – integrating social logins had been a little cumbersome as most services used proprietary protocols or OAuth 2.0 for that. OAuth 2.0 flows are good for authorizing access to user data, but lack processes for transferring identity information. As a result the services implemented their proprietary add-on to the OAuth standard.

In the last months more and more of these services switched to OpenID Connect which builds on OAuth 2.0 but adds an extra identity layer. WSO2 Identity Server has predefined authentication options called “Federated Authenticators” for OpenID Connect, SAML and the derivatives from Facebook, Google, Yahoo Microsoft and some other possibly outdated standards. Making the Identity Bus reality: translating the in-house SSO protocol to the different languages of the multi-protocol-speaking real world.

Requirement 3 accomplished.

One word about provisioning. WSO2 Identity Server has support for SCIM provisioning. Currently not many services support that protocol but in the future a provisioning standard SCIM might play an important role especially when user life cycle processes involving de-provisioning will be tackled.

If you have questions do not hesitate to contact us. And don’t forget to watch the video showcasing the identity bus in action:

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