This manual describes Spring Security SAML Extension component, its uses, installation, configuration, design and integration possibilities.
The extension enables both new and existing applications to act as a Service Provider in federations based on Web Single Sign-On and Single Logout profiles of SAML 2.0 protocol. The extension allows seamless combination of SAML 2.0 and other authentication and federation mechanisms in a single application. All products supporting SAML 2.0 in Identity Provider mode (e.g. ADFS, Okta, Shibboleth, OpenAM, Efecte EIM or Ping Federate) can be used with the extension.
The extension can also be used in applications which are not primarily secured using Spring Security. It can be adapted for both single and multi-tenant environments.
The extension can be either embedded inside your application and work along other authentication or single sign-on mechanisms, or it can be deployed separately and convey authentication information to applications using a custom mechanism.
The extension is probably the most complete open-source SAML 2.0 SP implementation with the widest feature-set and configuration possibilities. Other Java open-source alternatives are e.g. native SAML service providers integrating with IIS or Apache from Shibboleth (SAML processing is done on the web server and not on the application level) or OpenAM Fedlet.
Current implementation should be conformant to SAML SP Lite and SAML eGovernment profile. The following profiles, bindings and features are supported as part of the product:
Web single sign-on profile
Web single sign-on holder-of-key profile
IDP and SP initialized single sign-on
Single logout profile
Enhanced client/proxy profile
Identity provider discovery profile and IDP selection
Metadata interoperability and PKIX trust management
Automatic service provider metadata generation
Metadata loading from files, URLs, file-backed URLs
Processing and automatic reloading of metadata with many identity providers
Support for authentication contexts
Logging for authentication events
Customization of both SP and IDP metadata
Processing of SAML attributes and user data using UserDetails interface
Support for HTTP-POST, HTTP-Redirect, SOAP, PAOS and Artifact bindings
Easy integration with applications using Spring Security
Sample application with an user interface for quick configuration
You can use the following supported standards as a reference:
SAML 2.0 basic profiles
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/v2.0/saml-core-2.0-os.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/v2.0/saml-metadata-2.0-os.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/v2.0/saml-profiles-2.0-os.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/v2.0/saml-authn-context-2.0-os.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/v2.0/saml-bindings-2.0-os.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/v2.0/saml-conformance-2.0-os.pdf
SAML 2.0 additional profiles
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/Post2.0/sstc-saml-holder-of-key-browser-sso.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/Post2.0/sstc-saml-idp-discovery.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/Post2.0/sstc-saml2-holder-of-key.pdf
http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/Post2.0/sstc-metadata-iop.pdf
eGovernment profile
http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/download/attachments/42139782/kantara-egov-saml2-profile-2.0.pdf
Spring Security SAML Extension requires as a minimum Java 1.6 and is known to work with most Java containers and application servers. It can also be used with PaaS providers, such as Google App Engine, please see https://github.com/vschafer/spring-security-saml-gae for details.
Source code for the project is maintained on Github.
Snapshot builds of the project are available in the SpringSource repository. We use Bamboo for continuous integration.
Source code of the module is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. You may obtain copy of the license at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.
Please use Spring Security Extensions Jira for submitting of bugs and feature requests. Patches can be sent directly to GitHub as pull requests, but preferably open a Jira issue as well.
Please send your pull requests directly to GitHub and preferably also open issue in Jira.
For commercial support and consulting services please contact [email protected]
For community support please use Stack Overflow. The Spring Security forums contain some previously answered questions, but are now in read-only mode.
Internal processing of SAML messages, marshalling and unmarshalling is handled by OpenSAML.
Spring SAML has a transitive dependency to library Not-Going-To-Be-Commons-SSL. Inside Spring SAML this library is only used for hostname verifications and will be removed in case OpenSAML removes the dependency.