Single Sign On – You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

Arnes Blanert wrote an extensive article for the architect magazine on the subject of Single Sign On (SSO).  It covers both authentication and authorization via a variety of widely and not so widely used methods, including oAuth, SAML, JSON Web Token and more.

As someone who was involved in a variety of Single Sign On implementations (see some of the posts on the subject in my blog), I wish I had an article like this in my RSS feeds much much earlier.

PHP : Microsoft Office 365 and Active Directory

Disclaimer: I am not the biggest fan of Microsoft.  On the contrary.  I keep running into situations, where Microsoft technologies are a constant source of pain.  If that annoys you, please stop reading this post now and go away.  I don’t care.  You’ve been warned.

A few recent projects that I’ve been working on in the office required integration with Microsoft Office 365.  Office 365 is a new kid on the block as far as I am concerned, so I had no experience of integrating with these services.

The first look at what needs to be done resulted in a heavy drinking session and a mild depression.  Here are a few links to get you started on that path, if you are interested:

We’ve discussed the options with the client and decided to go a different route – limit the integration to the single sign-on (SSO) only, and use their Active Directory server (I’m not sure about the exact setup on the client side, but I think they use Active Directory Federation Services to have a local server in the office synchronized with the Office 365 directory).

Exposing the Active Directory server to the entire Internet is not the smartest idea, so we had to wrap this all into a virtual private network (VPN).  You can read my blog post on how to setup the CentOS 7 server as an automated VPN client.

Once the Active Directory was established, PHP LDAP module was very useful for avoiding any low-level programming (sockets and such).  With a bit of Google searching and StackOverflow reading, we managed to figure out the magic combination of parameters for ldap_connect(), ldap_set_option(), and ldap_search().

It took longer than expected, but some of it was due to the non-standard configuration and permissions on the client side.  Anyways, it worked, which were the good news.

The client accepted the implementation and we could just close the chapter, have another drink, and forget about this nightmare.  But something was bothering me about it, so I was thinking the heavy thoughts at the back of my mind.

The things that bother me about this implementation are the following:

  • Although it works, it’s a rather raw implementation, with very limited flexibility (filters, multiple servers, etc).
  • The code is difficult to test, due to the specifics of the AD setup and the network access limitations.
  • There is a lack of elegance to the solution.  Working code is good, but I like things to be beautiful too.  As much as possible at least.

So, I was keeping an eye open and I think today I came across a couple of links that can help make things better:

  1. adLDAP PHP library, which provides LDAP authentication and integration with Active Directory.  I don’t know how I missed it so far, but I think now things will be much easier and cleaner.
  2. Search Filter Syntax documentation on MSDN.
  3. This Reddit thread.  Yes, a lot of the things I’ve learned today are linked from it.  But it’ll be much easier for me to find all this information in my own blog, next time I’ll have to deal with Microsoft again.
  4. Public-facing LDAP server thanks to Georgia Institute of Technology, for testing connection and simple queries.

Armed with this new knowledge, I’m sure the current working solution can be improved a lot – simplified with fewer lines of code, based on the much more robust and tested code base, and given a basic test script to make sure the code works somewhere else, outside of a particular client’s setup.

I wish I came across that all much earlier.

 

Single Sign-On Between SugarCRM and Request Tracker

As mentioned before, over the last few month I’ve been involved in quite a few integration projects, using mostly SugarCRM and Request Tracker.  One of the interesting challenges was the Single Sign-On (SSO) between the two.

Continue reading Single Sign-On Between SugarCRM and Request Tracker

SugarCRM, RoundCube and Request Tracker integration on a single domain

In my years of working as a system administrator I’ve done some pretty complex setups and integration solutions, but I don’t think I’ve done anything as twisted as this one recently.  The setup is part of the large and complex client project, built on their infrastructure, with quite a few requirements and a whole array of limitations.  Several systems were integrated together, but in this particular post I’m focusing primarily on the SugarCRM, RoundCube and Request Tracker.  Also, I am not going to cover the integration to full extent – just the email related parts.

Continue reading SugarCRM, RoundCube and Request Tracker integration on a single domain

Single Sign-On with SugarCRM and RoundCube Using Multiple PHP Sessions

I am currently involved in an interesting integration project at work.  As part of it, we need to create a single sign-on process between SugarCRM (version 6.5.20) and RoundCube (version 1.1.4) webmail application.  RoundCube webmail is being displayed within the iframe inside the SugarCRM user interface, so it would help if users didn’t have to login to RoundCube since they are already authenticated in SugarCRM.

Once the user is authenticated in the SugarCRM, a PHP session is created with, among other information, authenticated user ID.  Using that ID, we can fetch the full user record and get his IMAP credentials, necessary for the RoundCube login.  While this wasn’t too difficult, there were a couple of road bumps that I’d like to document here, so that next time I won’t have to work it all out from scratch again.

Continue reading Single Sign-On with SugarCRM and RoundCube Using Multiple PHP Sessions