Identity Providers

This page contains information about integrating your identity provider (IdP) with RCIAM in order to allow users in your community to access RCIAM tools and services.

Identity Provider integration workflow#

To integrate your Identity Provider with the RCIAM service, you need to contact us at faai [AT] grnet.gr indicating your request. The integration follows a two-step process:

Register your Identity Provider and test integration with the demo instance of RCIAM. The demo instance allows for testing authentication and authorisation to RCIAM services and resources without affecting the production environment of RCIAM. Note that the demo instance is not connected to the production service and no information is shared between the two systems.
Register your Identity Provider with the production instance of RCIAM to allow members of your Community to access production RCIAM services and resources protected by RCIAM.

The most important URLs for each environment are listed in the table below but more information can be found in the protocol-specific sections that follow.

Protocol	Demo environment	Production environment
SAML	https://rciam-demo.example.org/proxy/module.php/saml/sp/metadata.php/sso	https://rciam.example.org/proxy/module.php/saml/sp/metadata.php/sso
OpenID Connect	See client registration	See client registration

General requirements for integrating identity providers#

An institution or a community may connect their IdP with RCIAM to allow their users to access RCIAM services, or any other services that have enabled RCIAM as an authentication provider. This section presents the general requirements for integrating an IdP with RCIAM, while protocol-specific instructions are provided in the sections that follow.

Attribute release requirements#

As a bare minimum, the IdP of a user's Home Organisation or Community is expected to release a non-reassignable identifier that uniquely identifies the user within the scope of that organisation or community. The unique identifier must be accompanied with a minimum set of attributes which the RCIAM Service Provider Proxy will attempt to retrieve from the user's IdP. If this is not possible, the missing user attributes will be acquired and verified through the user registration process with the RCIAM Account Registry. The following table describes the data requested from the user's Home Organisation, which are communicated to the RCIAM SP as either SAML attributes or OIDC claims, depending on the protocol supported by the authenticating IdP.

Description	Notes
At least one of the following unique user identifiers: pseudonymous, non-targeted identifier; name-based, non-targeted identifier; pseudonymous, targeted identifier
Preferred name for display purposes	For example to be used in a greeting or a descriptive listing
First name
Surname
Email address
Affiliation within Home Organisation or Community	To be released only if relevant for accessing RCIAM services

Note that the above set of requested attributes, particularly the identifier, name, email and affiliation information, complies with the REFEDS R&S attribute bundle.

Information about group membership and role information released by your IdP should follow the URN scheme below (see also AARC-G002):

<NAMESPACE>:group:<GROUP>[:<SUBGROUP>*][:role=<ROLE>]#<GROUP-AUTHORITY>

where:

<NAMESPACE> is in the form of urn:<NID>:<DELEGATED-NAMESPACE>[:<SUBNAMESPACE>*], where
- <NID> is the namespace identifier associated with a URN namespace registered with IANA, as per RFC8141, ensuring global uniqueness. Implementers can and should use one of the existing registered URN namespaces, such as urn:geant and urn:mace;
- <DELEGATED-NAMESPACE> is a URN sub-namespace delegated from one of the IANA registered NIDs

to an organisation representing the e-infrastructure, research infrastructure or research collaboration.

<GROUP> is the name of a VO, research collaboration or a top level arbitrary group. <GROUP> names are unique within the urn:mace:example.org:group namespace;
zero or more <SUBGROUP> components represent the hierarchy of subgroups in the <GROUP>; specifying sub-groups is optional
the optional <ROLE> component is scoped to the rightmost (sub)group; if no group information is specified, the role applies to the VO
<GROUP-AUTHORITY> is a non-empty string that indicates the authoritative source for the entitlement value. For example, it can be the FQDN of the group management system that is responsible for the identified group membership information

Example entitlement values expressing VO/group membership and role information:

urn:geant:aai-community:group:aai-example-group:role=member#aai-community.example.orgurn:geant:aai-community:group:aai-example-group:role=vm_operator#aai-community.example.org

Operational and security requirements#

The IdP needs to comply with additional requirements to achieve a higher level of assurance and allow its users to gain access to a wider set of RCIAM services. A first group of additional requirements are defined by the Sirtfi framework v1.0. Adherence to these requirements can be asserted by publishing Sirtfi compliance in the eduGAIN metadata. These requirements are in the areas of operational security, incident response, traceability and IdPs and users responsibility.

Branding requirements#

RCIAM provides a central Discovery Service (or "Where Are You From" - WAYF) page where users in your Home Organisation or Community will be automatically redirected when necessary to select to authenticate at your IdP. You can provide us with a logo of your Organisation or Community (in high-res png or preferably in svg format) to include a dedicated login button that will allow users to easily identify your IdP.

SAML Identity Provider#

To allow users in your community to sign into RCIAM applications, you need to connect to the RCIAM AAI SP Proxy as a SAML Identity Provider (IdP). Users of the application will be redirected to the central Discovery Service page of the RCIAM AAI Proxy where they will able to select to authenticate at your IdP. Once the user is authenticated, the RCIAM AAI Proxy will return a SAML assertion to the application containing the information returned by your IdP about the authenticated user.

Metadata registration#

SAML authentication relies on the use of metadata. Both parties (you as an IdP and the RCIAM AAI SP) need to exchange metadata in order to know and trust each other. The metadata include information such as the location of the service endpoints that need to be invoked, as well as the certificates that will be used to sign SAML messages. The format of the exchanged metadata should be based on the XML-based SAML 2.0 specification. Usually, you will not need to manually create such an XML document, as this is automatically generated by all major SAML 2.0 IdP software solutions (e.g., Shibboleth, SimpleSAMLphp). It is important that you serve your metadata over HTTPS using a browser-friendly SSL certificate, i.e. issued by a trusted certificate authority.

To exchange metadata, please send an email including the following information:

entityID
Metadata URL

Depending on the software you are using, the authoritative XML metadata URL for your IdP might be in the following form:

https://your.idp.example.eu/idp/shibboleth (Shibboleth)
https://your.idp.example.eu/simplesaml/module.php/saml2/idp/metadata.php (SimpleSAMLphp)

Note that if your IdP is part of a federation, then it would be preferred to send us the URL to a signed federation metadata aggregate. We can then cherry pick the appropriate entityID from that.

You can get the metadata of the RCIAM SP Proxy on a dedicated URL that depends on the integration environment being used:

Demo environment	Production environment
https://rciam-demo.example.org/proxy/module.php/saml/sp/metadata.php/sso	https://rciam.example.org/proxy/module.php/saml/sp/metadata.php/sso

For the production environment, it is recommended that you get the metadata for the RCIAM SP (entityID: https://rciam.example.org/proxy/module.php/saml/sp/metadata.php/sso) from a signed eduGAIN metadata aggregate. For example, the following aggregates are provided by GRNET:

Attribute release#

The SAML based Identity Provider of your Home Organisation or Community is expected to release a non-reassignable identifier that uniquely identifies the user within the scope of that organisation or community, along with a set of additional information as described in the following table (see also general attribute release requirements):

Description	SAML attribute
At least one of the following unique user identifiers: pseudonymous, non-targeted identifier; name-based, non-targeted identifier; pseudonymous, targeted identifier	`SubjectID` (public) or `eduPersonUniqueId` `eduPersonPrincipalName` `SubjectID` (pairwise) or `eduPersonTargetedID` or SAML persistent identifier
Preferred name for display purposes	`displayName`
First name	`givenName`
Surname	`sn`
Email address	`mail`
Affiliation within Home Organisation or Community	`eduPersonScopedAffiliation`
Group(s)/role(s) within Home Organisation or Community	`eduPersonEntitlement`

OpenID Connect Identity Provider#

Users in your community can sign into RCIAM applications through the RCIAM service using your OpenID Connect or OAuth 2.0 based Identity Provider.

Client registration#

To enable your OIDC Identity Provider for user login, RCIAM needs to be registered as a client in order to obtain OAuth 2.0 credentials, such as a client ID and client secret, and to register one or more redirect URIs. Once RCIAM is registered as a client, your users will be redirected to the central Discovery Service page of RCIAM when logging into RCIAM applications, where they will able to select to authenticate at your IdP. Once the user is authenticated, RCIAM will be responsible for communicating the information returned by your IdP about the authenticated user to the connected application. Depending on the protocol, this information will be expressed through a SAML assertion, a set of OIDC claims or a (proxy) X.509 certificate.

Provider configuration#

RCIAM needs to obtain your OpenID Provider\'s configuration information, including the location of the Authorisation, Token and UserInfo endpoints. Your OpenID Provider is expected to make a JSON document available at the path formed by concatenating the string /.well-known/openid-configuration to the Issuer, following the OpenID Connect Discovery 1.0 specification.

Attribute release#

The OpenID Connect or OAuth 2.0 based Identity Provider of your Home Organisation or Community is expected to release a non-reassignable identifier that uniquely identifies the user within the scope of that organisation or community, along with a set of additional information as described in the following table (see also general attribute release requirements):

Description	OIDC claim
At least one of the following unique user identifiers: pseudonymous, non-targeted identifier; name-based, non-targeted identifier; pseudonymous, targeted identifier	`sub` (public) N/A `sub` (pairwise)
Preferred name for display purposes	`name`
First name	`given_name`
Surname	`family_name`
Email address	`email`
Affiliation within Home Organisation or Community	`eduperson_scoped_affiliation`
Group(s)/role(s) within Home Organisation or Community	`eduPerson_entitlement`