This guide will step you through configuring your SilverStripe project to function as a SAML 2.0 Service Provider (SP). It will also show you a typical way to synchronise user details and group memberships from LDAP.
As a SilverStripe developer after reading this guide, you should be able to correctly configure your site to integrate with the Identity Provider (IdP). You will also be able to authorise users based on their AD group memberships, and synchronise their personal details.
We assume ADFS 2.0 or greater is used as an IdP.
Table of Contents generated with DocToc
- Install the module
- Gather pre-requisites
- YAML configuration
- Check configuration
- Establish trust
- Configure SilverStripe Authenticators
- Test the connection
- Configure LDAP synchronisation
- Debugging
- Advanced SAML configuration
- Advanced features
- Resources
First step is to add this module into your SilverStripe project. You can use composer for this:
composer require "silverstripe/activedirectory:*"
Commit the changes.
SAML uses pre-shared certificates for establishing trust between the Service Provider (SP - here, SilverStripe, also known as the Relying Party) the Identity Provider (IdP - here, ADFS, also known as the Claims Provider).
You need to create an x509 certificate and private key and make it available to the SilverStripe site to be able to sign SAML requests. The certificate's "Common Name" doesn't need to be anything special - any will do.
You can generate this yourself by using the openssl
command:
openssl req -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout saml.pem -out saml.crt -days 1826
Contact your system administrator if you are not sure how to install these.
The following pieces of information are required to configure our SP endpoint:
- IdP certificate
- IdP entityId (e.g.
https://<idp-domain>/adfs/services/trust
) - IdP SSO URL (e.g.
https://<idp-domain>/adfs/ls
)
Talk with your ADFS administrator to find out how to obtain these. If you are managing ADFS yourself, consult the ADFS administrator guide.
It is also possible to extract this metadata from the IdP endpoint, if ADFS is already running and the domain is known.
Go to https://<idp-domain>/FederationMetadata/2007-06/FederationMetadata.xml
, and trawl the XML for the required
pieces.
Now we need to make the silverstripe-activedirectory module aware of where the certificates can be found.
Add the following configuration to mysite/_config/saml.yml
(make sure to replace paths to the certificates and keys):
---
Name: mysamlsettings
After:
- "#samlsettings"
---
SAMLConfiguration:
strict: true
debug: false
SP:
entityId: "https://<your-site-domain>"
privateKey: "<path-to-silverstripe-private-key>.pem"
x509cert: "<path-to-silverstripe-cert>.crt"
IdP:
entityId: "<idp-entity-id>"
x509cert: "<path-to-adfs-cert>.pem"
singleSignOnService: "https://<idp-domain>/adfs/ls"
If you don't use absolute paths, the certificate paths will be relative to the BASE_PATH
(your site web root).
Certificates and keys should be PEM formatted.
The signature algorithm must match the setting in the ADFS relying party trust configuration. For ADFS it's possible to downgrade the default from SHA-256 to SHA-1, but this is not recommended. To do this, you can change YAML configuration:
SAMLConfiguration:
Security:
signatureAlgorithm: "http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#rsa-sha1"
It is possible to tweak Authentication Context for the SAML requests. In practice, this depends on the ADFS configuration and it's hard to recommend something apart from saying we have seen two setups that work in practice: the default, and "false".
For the default setting, you don't need to do anything. This module should be able to negotiate federation with ADFS, choosing the best available Authentication Context.
If you want an Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) but ADFS presents you with a dialog box asking for credentials, you might want to try a "false" setting instead. This means the Authentication Context node will be omitted from the SAML request.
SAMLConfiguration:
Security:
requestedAuthnContextBool: false
It is also possible to provide custom list of Authentication Contexts, as well as the value for the "Comparison" attribute:
SAMLConfiguration:
Security:
requestedAuthnContextArray:
- 'urn:federation:authentication:windows',
requestedAuthnContextComparison: 'maximum'
entityId
: URI that uniquely identifies the party. This must be set to the site URL (e.g.https://<your-site-domain>
), because we reuse it as the base URL for the SAML endpoints.privateKey
: Path to private key used for signing SAML request (the key you have generated)x509cert
: Path to certificate for the ADFS to use when verifying SAML requests (the certificate you have generated, matching the key above)
entityId
: URI that uniquely identifies the party. For ADFS it's typicallyhttps://<idp-domain>/adfs/services/trust
x509cert
: The token-signing certificate ADFS is usingsingleSignOnService
: The endpoint on ADFS for where to send the SAML login request. For security reasons this should use SSL, and the webserver must be able to connect.
At this point you should be able to verify your SAML endpoint is configured correctly. Go to <your-site>/saml/metadata
and see if this is generated without errors. This endpoint will be used by ADFS to set up trust with our SP.
At this stage the SilverStripe site trusts the ADFS, but the ADFS does not have any way to establish the identity of the SilverStripe site. ADFS should now be configured to trust our SP.
The only thing required here is to pass <your-site>/saml/metadata
to the ADFS administrator, and request to set up
the "Relying Party Trust". Once this is completed the authentication should be possible.
silverstripe-activedirectory has some specific requirements on how ADFS is configured. To help the other party set ADFS up, you might consider passing a link to the ADFS administrator guide alongside the metadata link.
To be able to use the SAML or the LDAP authenticator you will need to set them up in the mysite/config.php
.
You can choose which authenticators you would like to display on the login form.
// Show the SAML Login button on login form
Authenticator::register_authenticator('SAMLAuthenticator');
// Show the LDAP Login form
Authenticator::register_authenticator('LDAPAuthenticator');
You can unregister the default authenticator by adding this line:
Authenticator::unregister('MemberAuthenticator');
To prevent locking yourself out, before you remove the "MemberAuthenticator" make sure you map at least one LDAP group to the SilverStripe Administrator
Security Group. Consult CMS usage docs for how to do it.
If you register the SAMLAuthenticator as the default authenticator, it will automatically send users to the ADFS login server when they are required to login.
Authenticator::set_default_authenticator('SAMLAuthenticator');
Should you need to access the login form with all the configured Authenticators, go to:
/Security/login?showloginform=1
Note that if you have unregistered the MemberAuthenticator
, and you wish to use that method during showloginform=1
, you
will need to set a cookie so it can be used temporarily.
This will set a cookie to show MemberAuthenticator
if showloginform=1
is requested:
Authenticator::unregister('MemberAuthenticator');
if(isset($_GET['showloginform'])) {
Cookie::set('showloginform', (bool)$_GET['showloginform'], 1);
}
if(Cookie::get('showloginform')) {
Authenticator::register_authenticator('MemberAuthenticator');
}
For more information see the SAMLSecurityExtension.php.
At this stage you should be able to authenticate. If you cannot, you should double check the claims rules and hashing algorithm used by ADFS. Consult ADFS administrator guide to assist the ADFS administrator.
You can also review the troubleshooting guide if you are experiencing problems.
These are the reasons for configuring LDAP synchronisation:
- It allows you to authorise users based on their AD groups. silverstripe-activedirectory is able to automatically maintain Group memberships for its managed users based on the AD "memberOf" attribute.
- You can pull in additional personal details about your users that may not be available from the IdP directly - either because of claim rules, or inherent limitations such as binary data transfers.
- The data is only synchronised upon modification, so it helps to keep SAML payloads small.
Example configuration for mysite/_config/ldap.yml
:
LDAPGateway:
options:
'host': 'ad.mydomain.local'
'username': 'myusername'
'password': 'mypassword'
'accountDomainName': 'mydomain.local'
'baseDn': 'DC=mydomain,DC=local'
'networkTimeout': 10
'useSsl': 'TRUE'
The baseDn
option defines the initial scope of the directory where the connector can perform queries. This should be set to the root base DN, e.g. DC=mydomain,DC=local
The useSsl
option enables encrypted transport for LDAP communication. This should be mandatory for production systems to prevent eavesdropping. A certificate trusted by the webserver must be installed on the AD server. StartTLS can alternatively be used (useStartTls
option).
For more information about available LDAP options, please see the Zend\Ldap documentation and API overview documentation.
You can then set specific locations to search your directory. Note that these locations must be within the baseDn
you have specified above:
LDAPService:
users_search_locations:
- 'CN=Users,DC=mydomain,DC=local'
- 'CN=Others,DC=mydomain,DC=local'
groups_search_locations:
- 'CN=Somewhere,DC=mydomain,DC=local'
Note that these search locations should only be tree nodes (e.g. containers, organisational units, domains) within your Active Directory. Specifying groups will not work. More information is available on the distinction between a node and a group.
If you are experiencing problems with getting the right nodes, run the search query directly via LDAP and see what is returned. For that you can either use Windows' ldp.exe
tool, or Unix/Linux equivalent ldapsearch
.
See "LDAP debugging" section below for more information.
You can visit a controller called /LDAPDebug
to check that the connection is working. This will output a page listing the connection options used, as well as all AD groups that can be found.
You can configure the module so everyone imported goes into a default group. The group must already exist before you can use this setting. The value of this setting should be the "Code" field from the Group.
LDAPService:
default_group: "content-authors"
Member.ldap_field_mappings
defines the AD attributes that should be mapped to Member
fields.
By default, it will map the AD first name, surname and email to the built-in FirstName, Surname,
and Email Member fields.
You can map AD attributes to custom fields by specifying configuration in your mysite/_config/ldap.yml
. The three
different AD fields types that can be mapped are: textual, array and thumbnail photo.
Member:
ldap_field_mappings:
'description': 'Description'
'othertelephone': 'OtherTelephone'
'thumbnailphoto': 'Photo'
A couple of things to note:
- The AD attributes names must be in lowercase
- You must provide a receiver on the
Member
on your own (a field, or a setter - see example below).
There is a special case for the thumbnailphoto
attribute which can contain a photo of a user in AD. This comes
through from AD in binary format. If you have a has_one
relation to an Image
on the Member, you can map that field
to this attribute, and it will put the file into place and assign the image to that field.
By default, thumbnails are saved into assets/Uploads
, but you can specify the location
(relative to /assets) by setting the following configuration:
Member:
ldap_thumbnail_path: 'some-path'
The image files will be saved in this format: thumbnailphoto-{sAMAccountName}.jpg
.
Here is an extension that will handle different types of field mappings defined in the mysite/_config/ldap.yml
mentioned above. You will still need to apply that extension to Member
to get it to work.
<?php
class MyMemberExtension extends DataExtension {
private static $db = [
// 'description' is a regular textual field and is written automatically.
'Description' => 'Varchar(50)',
...
];
private static $has_one = [
// 'thumbnailphoto' writes to has_one Image automatically.
'Photo' => 'Image'
];
/**
* 'othertelephone' is an array, needs manual processing.
*/
public function setOtherTelephone($array) {
$serialised = implode(',', $array));
...
}
}
You can schedule a job to run, then have it re-schedule itself so it runs again in the future, but some configuration needs to be set to have it work.
If you want, you can set the behaviour of the sync to be destructive, which means any previously imported users who no longer exist in the directory get deleted:
LDAPMemberSyncTask:
destructive: true
To configure when the job should re-run itself, set the LDAPMemberSyncJob.regenerate_time
configuration.
In this example, this configures the job to run every 8 hours:
LDAPMemberSyncJob:
regenerate_time: 28800
Once the job runs, it will enqueue itself again, so it's effectively run on a schedule. Keep in mind that you'll need to have queuedjobs
setup on a cron so that it can automatically run those queued jobs.
See the module docs on how to configure that.
If you don't want to run a queued job, you can set a cronjob yourself by calling:
/usr/bin/php framework/cli-script.php dev/tasks/LDAPMemberSyncTask
Similarly to syncing AD users, you can also schedule a full group and user sync. Group mappings will be added automatically, resulting in Members being added to relevant Groups.
As with the user sync, you can separately set the group sync to be destructive:
LDAPGroupSyncTask:
destructive: true
And here is how you make the job reschedule itself after completion:
LDAPAllSyncJob:
regenerate_time: 28800
If you don't want to run a queued job, you can set a cronjob yourself by calling the two sync tasks (order is important, otherwise your group memberships might not get updated):
/usr/bin/php framework/cli-script.php dev/tasks/LDAPGroupSyncTask
/usr/bin/php framework/cli-script.php dev/tasks/LDAPMemberSyncTask
If you have existing Member records on your site that have matching email addresses to users in the directory,
you can migrate those by running the task LDAPMigrateExistingMembersTask
. For example, visting
http://mysite.com/dev/tasks/LDAPMigrateExistingMembersTask
will run the migration.
This essentially just updates those existing records with the matching directory user's GUID
so they will be synced from now on.
There are certain parts of his module that have debugging messages logged. You can configure logging to receive these via email, for example. In your mysite/_config.php
:
SS_Log::add_writer(new SS_LogEmailWriter('my@email.com'), SS_Log::DEBUG, '<=');
To enable some very light weight debugging from the 3rd party library set the debug
to true
SAMLConfiguration:
debug: true
In general it can be tricky to debug what is failing during the setup phase. The SAML protocol error message as quite hard to decipher.
In most cases it's configuration issues that can debugged by using the ADFS Event log, see the Diagnostics in ADFS 2.0 for more information.
Also ensure that all protocols are matching. SAML is very sensitive to differences in http and https in URIs.
For debugging what information SilverStripe is getting from LDAP, you can visit the <site-root>/LDAPDebug
from your browser. Assuming you are an ADMIN, this will give you a breakdown of visible information.
To see debug information on the sync tasks, run them directly from your browser. The tasks are at <site-root>/dev/tasks/LDAPGroupSyncTask
and dev/tasks/LDAPMemberSyncTask
.
LDAP is a plain-text protocol for interacting with user directories. You can debug LDAP responses by querying directly. For that you can use Windows' ldp.exe
tool, or Unix/Linux equivalent ldapsearch
.
Here is an example of ldapsearch
usage. You will need to bind to the directory using an administrator account (specified via -D
). The base of your query is specified via -b
, and the search query follows.
ldapsearch \
-W \
-H ldaps://<ldap-url>:<ldap-port> \
-D "CN=<administrative-user>,DC=yourldap,DC=co,DC=nz" \
-b "DC=yourldap,DC=co,DC=nz" \
"(name=*)"
It is possible to customize all the settings provided by the 3rd party SAML code.
This can be done by registering your own SAMLConfiguration
object via mysite/_config/saml.yml
:
Example:
---
Name: samlconfig
After:
- "#samlsettings"
---
Injector:
SAMLConfService: MySAMLConfiguration
and the MySAMLConfiguration.php:
<?php
class MySAMLConfiguration extends Object {
public function asArray() {
return [
// add settings here;
];
}
}
See the advanced_settings_example.php for the advanced settings.
LDAPAuthenticator
expects a username to log in, due to authentication with LDAP traditionally
using username instead of email. You can additionally allow people to authenticate with their email.
Example configuration in mysite/_config/ldap.yml
:
LDAPAuthenticator:
allow_email_login: 'yes'
Note that your LDAP users logging in must have the mail
attribute set, otherwise this will not work.
You can allow users who have not been migrated to LDAP to authenticate via the default MemberAuthenticator
.
This is different to registering multiple authenticators, in that the fallback works on the one login form.
Example configuration in mysite/_config/ldap.yml
:
LDAPAuthenticator:
fallback_authenticator: 'yes'
The fallback authenticator will be used in the following conditions:
- User logs in using their email address, but does not have a username
- The user logs in with a password that does not match what is set in LDAP
If the LDAP bind user that is configured under 'Connect with LDAP' section has permission to write attributes to the AD, it's possible to allow users to update their password via the internet site.
Word of caution, you will potentially open a security hole by exposing an AD user that can write passwords. Normally you would only bind to LDAP via a read-only user. Windows AD stores passwords in a hashed format that is very hard to brute-force. A user with write access can take over an accounts, create objects, delete and have access to all systems that authenticate with AD.
If you still need this feature, we recommend that you use a combination of encryption, scheduled password rotation and limit permission for the bind user to minimum required permissions.
This feature only works if you have the LDAPAuthenticator
enabled (see "Configure SilverStripe Authenticators" section).
This feature has only been tested on Microsoft AD compatible servers.
Example configuration in mysite/_config/ldap.yml
:
LDAPService:
allow_password_change: true
A feature is available that allows data to be written back to LDAP based on the state of Member
object fields.
Additionally, you can also create new users in LDAP from your local records.
Before this can be used, the credentials connecting to LDAP need to have write permissions so LDAP attributes can be written to.
To turn on the feature, here is some example configuration in mysite/_config/ldap.yml
:
Member:
update_ldap_from_local: true
create_users_in_ldap: true
LDAPService:
new_users_dn: CN=Users,DC=mydomain,DC=com
The new_users_dn
is the DN (Distinguished Name) of the location in the LDAP structure where new users will be created.
Now when you create a new user using the Security section in /admin
, the user will be created in LDAP. Take note
that the "Username" field must be filled in, otherwise it will not be created, due to LDAP users requiring a username.
You can also programatically create a user. For example:
$member = new Member();
$member->FirstName = 'Joe';
$member->Username = 'jbloggs';
$member->write();
If you enable update_ldap_from_local
saving a user in the Security section of the CMS or calling write()
on
a Member object will push up the mapped fields to LDAP, assuming that Member record has a GUID
field.
See "Map AD attributes to Member fields" section above for more information on mapping fields.
It is possible to figure out if a user exists in the database when sending a password reset link by observing the response time. To ensure response times are the same regardless of if the user exists you can enable the following configuration:
LDAPLoginForm:
consistent_password_times: true