In today’s interconnected world, managing user identities across multiple applications and systems can be both challenging and time-consuming. This is where federated identity management comes into play. With federated identity management, you can enable seamless integration and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities across various applications, streamlining user authentication and authorization processes.

In this blog post, we will explore how to implement federated identity management using GlassFish, an open-source application server, and OpenID Connect, a widely adopted authentication protocol. We will use Java as the programming language for our implementation.

Getting Started

Before we dive into the implementation details, let’s quickly go through the prerequisites for this tutorial:

1. GlassFish: Have GlassFish installed and running on your system. If you don’t have GlassFish installed, you can download it from the official website (link: https://javaee.github.io/glassfish/download).

2. Java Development Kit (JDK): Make sure you have JDK installed on your system. You can download the latest version of JDK from the Oracle website (link: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-jdk11-downloads.html).

Setting up OpenID Connect Provider

To implement federated identity management, we need an OpenID Connect Provider (OP) that will handle the authentication and authorization processes. For this tutorial, we will use Keycloak as the OpenID Connect provider. You can download and install Keycloak by following the instructions in the official Keycloak documentation (link: https://www.keycloak.org/documentation.html).

Once you have Keycloak up and running, you need to create a new realm and set up a client in Keycloak for our GlassFish application.

Implementing OpenID Connect in GlassFish

Now that we have our OpenID Connect provider set up, let’s integrate it with our GlassFish application.

1. Add OpenID Connect library: Download the javaee-security-api JAR file and add it to your GlassFish application’s classpath.

2. Configure OpenID Connect provider: In your GlassFish application’s web.xml file, configure the OpenID Connect provider and specify the client ID, client secret, and authorization URL for your Keycloak client.

<login-config>
    <auth-method>OIDC</auth-method>
    <realm-name>OIDCRealm</realm-name>
    <auth-method-params>
        <param-name>OIDCProviderURI</param-name>
        <param-value>https://your-keycloak-server/auth/realms/your-realm</param-value>
        <param-name>OIDCClientId</param-name>
        <param-value>your-client-id</param-value>
        <param-name>OIDCClientSecret</param-name>
        <param-value>your-client-secret</param-value>
    </auth-method-params>
</login-config>

1. Secure resources: Use the @RolesAllowed annotation to secure specific resources and restrict access to authorized users only.

@GET
@Produces(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN)
@RolesAllowed("admin")
public String getAdminData() {
    return "Welcome, Admin!";
}

1. Enable SSO: To enable single sign-on (SSO) across multiple applications, set the cookie-domain property in your GlassFish configuration.

asadmin set server-config.security-service.property.sesssion-cookie.sso-cookie.domain=.example.com

Conclusion

By implementing federated identity management with GlassFish and OpenID Connect, we have achieved seamless integration and single sign-on capabilities for our Java web application. This allows users to authenticate once and access multiple applications without the hassle of re-authentication.

Federated identity management not only simplifies user authentication and authorization but also improves security by centralizing user identity management. With the power of GlassFish and OpenID Connect, you can take your application’s security to the next level.

#Tech #FederatedIdentity #OpenIDConnect