Delegated Authentication

Single Sign-On (SSO) allows for the delegated authentication of platform Users against a corporate database. With SSO, users have a single username and password that provides access to applications which support SSO.

Using SSO allows an organization to validate their users in their own secured environment. This means you can implement you own authentication methods (such as a database or LDAP Directory) to authenticate a user.

How it Works

After a user is validated against the customer’s environment, the user is logged into the platform.

Scope

SSO is limited to user authentication and does NOT include authorization. Users must be active in the platform. Teams, Roles and other permissions must also be maintained.

It is the responsibility of the corporate System Administrator/IT Staff to develop and implement a Web service that can accept and respond to the SSO web service calls made by the platform servers.

Actions

When a User logs in, the following actions take place to authenticate the user in both the platform and in your organization's systems. This table lists the actions taken by the User, the platform and your organization's web service. See Web Service for more information.

User does...	Platform does...	Your Organization's Web Service does...
1. On User Login	Validate that: User is Active SSO is Enabled
2.	Make a Web Services call to the organization's Web service, requesting authorization. Include these parameter in the call: username password originatingIp Note: originatingIp is the IP address that originated the login request. This could be useful to restrict access based on the user’s location. The Web Service must be implemented in a way that the platform is able to access it.
3.		Validate the passed information and return either "Authenticated" or "Failure".
4.	On Authenticated response, generate a new User Session. On Failure, notify the user.

Making a Web Service Call

Use the URL and port number provided under the Single Sign-On Settings Section to make a SOAP request to authenticate the users. SSO Request and SSO Response are predefined by the platform. These request and response are conducted via SOAP messaging.

Web Services Message Format

Request

SSO SOAP Request sent from the platform is as follows:

<syntaxhighlight lang="xml" enclose="div"> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soapenv:Body> <LJAuthenticate xmlns="urn:authentication.soap.ws.longjump.com"> <username>jim@abc.com</username> <password>sales</password> <originatingIp>1.2.3.4</originatingIp> </LJAuthenticate> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> </syntaxhighlight>

Response

SSO SOAP Response expected by the Platform is as follows:

<syntaxhighlight lang="xml" enclose="div"> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soapenv:Body> <LJAuthenticateResponse xmlns="urn:authentication.soap.ws.longjump.com"> <Status>Authenticated</Status> </LJAuthenticateResponse> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> </syntaxhighlight>

Implement SOAP in Your Corporate Environment

Consider the following best practices when implementing delegated authentication single sign-on for your organization:

• Your organization’s implementation of the Web service must be accessible by the platform servers. This means you must deploy the Web service on a server typically in your DMZ.
• Namespaces, element names, and capitalization must be exact in SOAP requests. Wherever possible, generate your server stub from the WSDL to ensure accuracy.
• For security reasons, you should make your Web service available by SSL only. You must use an SSL certificate from a trusted provider, such as Verisign or Thawte.
• The platform sends you the originatingIp in the web service call it makes to your servers. You can use this information to restrict access based on the user’s location.
• You must map your organization’s internal usernames and the platform's usernames. If your organization does not follow a standard mapping, you may be able to extend your user database schema (for example, Active Directory) to include the platform username as an attribute of a user account. Your authentication service can then use this attribute to map back to a user account.
• We recommend that you do not enable single sign-on for the system administrator’s profile. If your system administrators are single sign-on users and your single sign-on server has an outage, they have no way to log in to the platform. System administrators should always be able to log in to the platform so they can disable single sign-on in the event of a problem.