In ISAM 9.0.4.0 the OIDC relying party was completely rewritten for increased flexibility. This has made it much easier to add support for Facebook Login into an ISAM Reverse Proxy instance. Here are the steps I've taken to authenticate into ISAM with Facebook. Pre-Conditions: ISAM 9.0.4.0 - Preconfigured Standard WebSEAL reverse Proxy with default configuration.... Continue Reading →
The ISAM OAuth implementation is exceedingly flexible. If you are just looking to do basic OAuth flows, then chances are you won't ever even look in these OAuth Mapping Rules. On the other hand, if you're looking to modify the behaviour of the OAuth flow to achieve OAuth nirvana, then these Mapping Rules are going... Continue Reading →
The ISAM Reverse Proxy has a wealth of settings that can be configured. This means that almost every deployment situation can be catered for, but also means that its easy to overlook some settings that may give you grief. In this post, I've decided to capture some of the more important ones to help you... Continue Reading →
In ISAM using the Local Response Redirect capability has traditionally been overkill when using it for an EAI for a login operation. The reason being, almost any error or management page that is traditionally handled by ISAM now gets redirected to your EAI. Including Login operations, Logout page, Stepup and other authentication related operations. It... Continue Reading →
ISAM provides the concept of Authentication Levels out of the box. This means a given authentication mechanism or flow can be assigned an integer value >0 that represents the authentication strength. OAuth Auth can make use of this for features such as incremental authentication - for example if the OAuth grant was issued via single... Continue Reading →
Tying an authentication mechanism to an authentication level can be very useful when writing security policy in ISAM. For example you might want a password based authentication (Such as Basic Auth or Forms Auth) to map to level 1, whilst you might hold a federated identity, or something achieved through another EAI to have a... Continue Reading →
It is possible to use Basic Users with the ISAM OAuth-Auth capabilities. (ISAM Basic users are users that have NOT been imported into the ISAM registry.) Authentication used to be performed by: isAuthenticated = PluginUtils.isValidUsernamePassword(username, password); I've talked about how this is configured here. This authentication mechanism *can* be configured to use Federated Registries, however... Continue Reading →
Sometimes it might be necessary to manage a session lifetime based on business or security factors, and these might need to be specific to an operation in progress. Here are some helpful techniques for managing the timeouts more dynamically: Understanding Session timeout accuracy Before we go into more detail of setting the session timeouts - it's... Continue Reading →
My colleague has posted an in depth set of articles on IBM DeveloperWorks for Kerberos configuration with ISAM. It covers both Kerberos integration's, being Desktop SSO with Kerberos into ISAM, and junctioning to servers using Kerberos for Junction SSO. The article is available here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/W746177d414b9_4c5f_9095_5b8657ff8e9d/page/Information%20and%20Guides%20for%20Kerberos%20SSO
Updated 09/2015: HTTP 505 error solved. See end of article. On a customer site, I encountered BMC Remedy, and had to perform SSO into the Application from ISAM. My initial attempt included trying to use the standard integration we have with Tomcat versions, as detailed here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24021393 Unfortunately, this didn't work in the time I'd... Continue Reading →
When trying to configure an EAI, I encountered the following error whenever it was supposed to be authenticating the user: Server Error Access Manager WebSEAL could not complete your request due to an unexpected error. Diagnostic Information Method: GET URL: <url> Error Code: 0x38cf042f Error Text: Server Error Solution Provide your System Administrator with the... Continue Reading →
When using ISAM in OAuth patterns, there are a number of ways you can do authorization based on OAuth scopes. In general, at last check, there are three main ways of Authorizing OAuth requests based on their scope. (or other attributes associated with the tokens). The mechanisms available are dependent on which OAuth validation mechanism... Continue Reading →
Update 15/05/2015: It would seem that I may have over complicated this, we have a ISAM feature to do this already! 🙂 Apparently since TAM 6.1.1 we can use static management and error page templates per junction, as stated in the following technote: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21587936 So feel free to choose your own adventure! Different people access... Continue Reading →
What is Clickjacking? Clickjacking (User Interface redress attack, UI redress attack, UI redressing) is a malicious technique of tricking a Web user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives they are clicking on, thus potentially revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. It... Continue Reading →
Update 5/08/15: In the ISAM 8.0.1.3 Release, we've added a new stanza to the ISAM Reverse Proxy config file. This allows the easy addition of headers to all ISAM responses. [rsp-header-names] # # This stanza is used to define static HTTP headers which will be added # to every HTTP response from the WebSEAL server. ... Continue Reading →
Philip Nye 