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Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
Andrea Biancini
Towards a Federation as a Service From IdP in the Cloud project to FaaS
Andrea Biancini
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Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
Agenda
• What is an Identity Federation • What needs to be done to operate a Federation
Introduction: the theoretical standpoints
• What have we done? IdP in the cloud project • Project implementation • Benefits and project results
What we learnt and did to grow a Federation
• Extending this approach to Federation managers • Identifying the key processes • Implementing a Federation «appliance» • ELCIRA: activities and expected benefits
The ongoing project activities
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What is an Identity Federation
§ An Identity Federation is a collection of organizations that agree to interoperate under a certain rule to manage user identities.
§ Within a Federation different organizations cooperate in managing identities by taking care of their users and services.
§ The Federation builds a global trust within the different organizations.
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What needs to be done to operate a Fed.
§ Participants have to: § Define procedures to create and manage an IdP; § Define procedures to create and manage an SP.
§ Federation managers have to: § Registering an entity (IdP or SP) in the Federation
§ Validating metadata information toward Federation policies; § Performing all security controls and signing metadata; § Guiding the participants in the implementation of an Identity
Management policy. § Signing and distributing the Metadata. § Providing accessory services (like information pages or
Discovery Service).
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What we learnt from our communities
§ From a participant’s point of view, the more complex task is that of creating and managing an IdP.
§ In this activity, in fact, the participant has to: § Manage a lot of different technologies (Shibboleth,
Tomcat, LDAP, security on the server, …); § Monitor and update constantly the technical infrastructure
(for security and quality of service); § Manage privacy and identity management policies; § Manage users and passwords.
§ Many entities do not have enough skills or resources to manage them all!
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The answer to this problem!
§ To tackle this problem, GARR started the “IdP in the cloud” service § Goal: offering IdPs as a service on a cloud infrastructure!
§ This service permitted to take away greater part of the job from Federation participants. § All technological aspects are managed by GARR on behalf of
the participating entity (including monitoring and updates); § Compliance to regulation and Federation policy is delegated to
GARR; § The participating entity “only” has to manage users and
passwords.
How we did this: the infrastructure
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2 sites, 12 servers
Instances, images & Data GlusterFS
Openstack VM unique flavor Public IPs
Service VMs § Nagios, Splunk, Collectd § DNS § Puppet Master IdP VMs go here
Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
§ Use a Puppet recipe to describe the features of the “IdP in the cloud” VM
How we did this: automatization
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=> IDP in the Cloud • Shibboleth IdP • uApprove • Custom login
page
• Apache2 • OpenLDAP • phpLDAPadmin • MySQL
• iptables • rsyslog • Nagios, Collectd
probes
Web interfaces openLDAP
Base VM – 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 20 GB disk Ubuntu 12.04 + Puppet Agent
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Key benefits of IdP in the cloud
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Operation
Focus on your users’ identity
Focus on the services they
want
Organization
Tutored pre & post
provisioning
Marginal OpEx, no CapEx
Compliance with federation policies
Technology
Quick provisioning
Continuous delivery
Resiliency, openness, …
Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
Andrea Biancini
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Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
Project results
§ With this approach the Identity Federation is diffusing into new communities: § Institutions in the biomedical research with small IT teams; § Cultural heritage institutions.
§ From request to Federated IdP in a few days (including administrative tasks) with no technical effort from requestor!
§ Possibility to manage all these systems with limited human resources (~10 IdP, < 0.5 FTE)
Extending this approach
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§ We are extending this approach (used for IdP in the Cloud) from participants to Federation managers!
§ W e p l a n t o p r o v i d e a F e d e r a t i o n
«appliance» (provisioned on a Cloud) with all the required technological components to implement a fully functional Federation.
Indentifying the key processes
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§ As said, the main processes a Federation manager has to implement are: § Registering an entity (IdP or SP) in the Federation § Signing and distributing the Metadata. § Providing accessory services (like information pages or
Discovery Service).
§ Among them, we have found that the more complex to be implemented is the first. In fact: § it requires human and technical validation; § it is the process that permits to create the trust; § entities are what the users see of the Federation!
Registering an entity in the Federation
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Registration of an entity (IdP or SP) in the FederationRe
questor
entity
GARR
administratio
nFede
ratio
n managers
IDEM – the Italian Identity Federation
Completes and sends all required documents to GARR (as by the process)
Verify the «Member Accession Form»
document.
Verify the «Registration Request» document.
Verify the Metadata and validate the quality of the information
Signing and distribution of the Metadata to the
Federation
Verify the entity is working correctly and releasing the right attributes
End
Security checks on certificates and keys
Supporting the process
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§ To support and standardize the process, we implemented a workflow for entity registration
§ This flow spans two integrated tools: § Resource Registry: to validate metadata
information (and diffuse awareness); § Metadata Aggregator: to verify all the security
aspects bound to certificates and to sign the metadata for the distribution to the Federation (and inter-federations).
The scenario
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RR
DS
Fed MD
Interfederation
Interfed. MD
MDA
Fed MD +
Interfed. MDOR
Interfed. test MD
Administrative Technical
FaaS
Federationoperator
·∙ Dealing with customers requesting the service (approving, registering, provision of services)
·∙ Managing instances of service
·∙ Management of federation policy·∙ Dealing with new IdPs and SPs joining the federation (auditing, approving, registering, etc. )
·∙ Support and communications with IdP and SPs
·∙ Managing RR
MDS MDS test
Interfed. test MD
Fed MD opt-‐ed
Technology to be developed
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§ To provision the Federation «appliance» new Puppet recipes are being developed to automatize installation of the software components.
§ With these developments, the IdP in the cloud schema will be extended to permit the provisioning of a complete Federation as a service on a Cloud infrastructure.
Expected goals
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§ With this «appliance» we plan to standardize and support Federation operations.
§ By consuming this FaaS service, it will be possible to: § Start rapidly the operation of a new Federation, by almost
eliminating the technological step in; § Leverage experiences and best practices to operate
effectively a Federation even starting with little or no prior experience.
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ELCIRA: adopting Federations
§ ELCIRA will support the adoption of Identity Fedarations in Latin America.
§ But, as we have seen, deploy Federations is hard! 1. Technology needs to be installed and managed 2. Processes, steps, attribution of responsibility have
to be implemented
§ ELCIRA will borrow GARR experience in automatizing components installation in a cloud and in operating a Federation.
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ELCIRA: supporting IdP installation
§ We will leverage GARR experience and solutions, developed during IdP in the Cloud project, to grow IdP diffusion within new or existing Federations.
§ This will permit NRENs to: § Guarantee compliance to qualitative standards
for new IdPs in the Federation; § Give the opportunity to enter rapidly in
production with a Federation entity!
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ELCIRA: how to sustain new Federations?
§ GARR also provides support in sustaining the birth of new Federations by: § Sharing best practices for the key processes; § Sharing lesson learnt, dos and don’ts; § Providing technical solutions, as the “federation
appliance” described earlier.
Thanks!
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Q&A
Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
Andrea Biancini
IdP in the Cloud Showcase
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What IdP in the Cloud is
The service goal: make the deployment and the management of the identity providers easy, by minimizing the activities and the complexity for home organizations.
• IdP as a Service (PaaS) • IdM as a Service (SaaS) => IdP in the Cloud
Benefits § Dedicated virtual appliance § Updates and customization § Federation policy compliancy § Cloud advantages
First cloud service from GARR
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Getting an IdP in the cloud
Request for an “IdP in the Cloud”
IdP instantiation and configuration
IdP delivery and user management
Tutor the user in preparing the documents requested by GARR and the IDEM Federation
The service creates a new IdP taking care of § Tools installation and configuration § Pre-production assessment § Federation policies
Ready-to-use dedicated IdP VM to access federated services. Requestor tutored in managing users identities.
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The request document
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§ Is a very easy document to be produced by the requesting organization, with the following information (used to customize IdP and its Metadata):
§ Organization name § Organization internet domain § IdP name (or EntityID) § Description of the service § Organization public web site URL § Organization privacy policy page URL § IdP Informative web page URL (shown to users) § Organization logo images § Technical contact mailing list
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Provisioning the VM
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§ Live demo!
§ A new configuration for the IdP will be installed on the Puppet agent (with the support of two scripts created ad-hoc).
§ Puppet will take care of all the rest!
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Puppet
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§ Open source framework able to automate repetitive system administration tasks.
§ Automatize the provisioning and configuration of IT servers.
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Basic principles of Puppet
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Everything is described as a
resource
Puppet executes transitions among
resource states
(without a definite precedence)
The final state
represents the desired result
IdP in the cloud: user perspective
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User interfaces: • Custom IdP login page • IdM interface • Access log analysis tools
Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014
We are evaluating Perun a tool that could replace phpldapadmin. More information here: http://perun.cesnet.cz.
That’s all folks!
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Q&A
Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014