Single Sign On

Last update: May 3, 2023

CREATED FOR:

  • Developer
CAUTION
AEM 6.4 has reached the end of extended support and this documentation is no longer updated. For further details, see our technical support periods. Find the supported versions here.

Single Sign On (SSO) allows a user to access multiple systems after providing authentication credentials (such as a user name and password) once. A separate system (known as the trusted authenticator) performs the authentication and provides Experience Manager with the user credentials. Experience Manager checks and enforces the access permissions for the user (i.e. determines which resources the user is allowed to access).

The SSO Authentication Handler service ( com.adobe.granite.auth.sso.impl.SsoAuthenticationHandler) processes the authentication results that the trusted authenticator provides. The SSO Authentication Handler searches for a ssid (SSO Identifier) as the value of a special attribute in the following locations in this order:

  1. Request Headers
  2. Cookies
  3. Request Parameters

When a value is found, the search is finished and this value is used.

Configure the following two services to recognize the name of the attribute that stores the ssid:

  • The login module.
  • The SSO Authentication service.

You must specify the same attribute name for both services. The attribute is included in the SimpleCredentials that is provided to Repository.login. The value of the attribute is irrelevant and ignored, the mere presence of it is important and verified.

Configuring SSO

To configure SSO for a AEM instance, you need to configure the SSO Authentication Handler:

  1. When working with AEM there are several methods of managing the configuration settings for such services; see Configuring OSGi for more details and the recommended practices.

    For example, for NTLM set:

    • Path: as required; for example, /

    • Header Names: LOGON_USER

    • ID Format: ^<DOMAIN>\\(.+)$

      Where <*DOMAIN*> is replaced by your own domain name.

    For CoSign:

    • Path: as required; for example, /
    • Header Names: remote_user
    • ID Format: AsIs

    For SiteMinder:

    • Path: as required; for example, /
    • Header Names: SM_USER
    • ID Format: AsIs

  2. Confirm that Single Sign On is working as required; including authorization.

CAUTION
Make sure that users cannot access AEM directly if SSO is configured.
By requiring users to go through a web server that runs your SSO system’s agent, it is ensured that no user can directly send a header, cookie or parameter that will lead the user to be trusted by AEM, as the agent will filter such information if sent from the outside.
Any user who can directly access your AEM instance without going through the web server will be able to act as any user by sending the header, cookie or parameter if the names are known.
Also make sure that of headers, cookies and request parameter names, you only configure the one that is required for your SSO setup.
NOTE
Single Sign On is often used in conjunction with LDAP.
NOTE
If you are also using the Dispatcher with the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) then additional configuration will be required in:
  • disp_iis.ini
  • IIS
  • servervariables=1 (forwards IIS server variables as request headers to the remote instance)
  • replaceauthorization=1 (replaces any header named “Authorization” other than “Basic” with its “Basic” equivalent)
In IIS:

  • disable Anonymous access

  • enable Integrated Windows authentification

You can see which authentication handler is being applied to any section of the content tree by using the Authenticator option of the Felix Console; for example:

http://localhost:4502/system/console/slingauth

The handler that best matches the path is queried first. For example, if you configure handler-A for the path / and handler-B for the path /content, then a request to /content/mypage.html will query handler-B first.

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