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Options for Single Sign On in PeopleSoft |
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Monday, 02 October 2006 |
I spent some time this summer implementing Oracle's CoreID product (now known as Oracle Access Manager) as a solution to bypass the PeopleSoft sign in screen. It works as an add-in module in Apache, IIS or IHS that intercepts requests and checks to see if the URL is protected in the Access Manager component. If it is protected, Access Manager executes the security rules as specified. Our rules redirect the user to an IIS web server which performed Integrated Windows Authentication. After the user was successfully authenticated, it redirected the user back into PeopleSoft using the original URL that the user requested. But in addition to redirecting the user back, it added the user's EMPLID (which was retrieved from Active Directory) as an HTTP header in the request.
On the PeopleSoft side, I enabled the WWW_Authenticate signin PeopleCode to retrieve the EMPLID header, look up the Operator ID, and do a Switch User to sign in as that operator. I did put some code to make spoofing the EMPLID header a bit more difficult for a wannabe hacker.
But CoreID is a relatively complicated product meant to work with multiple web applications. If you're wanting to just do Kerberos authentication with PeopleSoft to bypass the sign in screen, you might look at the following options:
- WebLogic "should" be able to do this, but the version that's delivered with PeopleSoft seems to be missing the Kerberos security policy functionality. It might be worth checking with PS to see if you can get a full version, otherwise consider purchasing it
- Investigate WebSphere or Oracle Application Server's Kerberos authentication options.
- Use IIS as a reverse proxy server (it has native Integrated Windows Authentication). Having been down this path, I know IIS authenticates the user but doesn't want to pass the username/password over to your app server. You might have to write your own ISAPI filter to make it happen.
- There are network devices that do the authentication and cache application username/password combinations. When the user hits the web site, the network device signs the user in based on the authentication so the user never sees the signin screen. Although this sounds like a maintenance nightmare, but I know of one company that is VERY happy with this solution and it's relatively cheap to deploy.
- Probably the most common approach I've seen is to write some type of ASP script that users could hit via URL which would use IIS's native Integrated Windows Authentication to authenticate the user, generate a PSTOKEN (via Component Interface) and redirect them back into PeopleSoft. Not bad if your users start from the same point in the app, but it's not so good if users expect to be able to click on any URL and get straight into the app w/ no signin.
Please let me hear from you if you've tried any of these approaches and let me know what worked and what didn't.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 02 October 2006 )
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