We’ve recently begun moving to amazon web services for hosting, however we still need to authenticate through ITS who handles the central SSO Authentication services for Virginia.edu.  In previous posts we looked at Pubcookie aka Netbadge - however Pubcookie is getting pretty long in the tooth (it’s last release back in 2010) and we are running Ubuntu 14 with Apache 2…. integrating pubcookie was going to be a PITA…. so it was time to look at Shibboleth – an Internet2  SSO standard that works with SAML  and is markedly more modern than pubcookie – allowing federated logins between institutions etc…

A special thanks to Steve Losen who put up with way more banal questions than anyone should have to deal with… that said, he’s the man

Anyhow – ITS does a fine job at documenting the basics - http://its.virginia.edu/netbadge/unixdevelopers.html.  Since we’re using ubuntu the only real difference is that we used apt-get

Here’s the entire install from base Ubuntu 14

apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php5 php-pear php5-mysql php5-ldap libapache2-mod-shib2 shibboleth-sp2-schemas drush sendmail ntp

Apache Set up

On the Apache2 side  we enabled some modules and the default ssl site

a2enmod ldap rewrite  shib2 ssl
a2ensite default-ssl.conf

Back on the apache2 side here’s our default SSL 

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
<VirtualHost _default_:443>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName bioconnector.virginia.edu:443
DocumentRoot /some_web_directory/bioconnector.virginia.edu
<Directory /some_web_directory/dev.bioconnector.virginia.edu>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

SSLEngine on

SSLCertificateFile /somewheresafe/biocon_hsl.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /somewheresafe/biocon_hsl.key

<Location />
AuthType shibboleth
ShibRequestSetting requireSession 0 ##This part meant that creating a session is possible, not required
require shibboleth
</Location>

the location attributes are important – if you don’t have that either in the Apache conf you’ll need it in an .htaccess in the drupal directory space

Shibboleth Config

The Shibboleth side confused me for a hot minute.

we used  shib-keygen as noted in the documentation to create keys for shibboleth and ultimately the relevant part of our /etc/shibboleth/shibboleth2.xml looked like this

<ApplicationDefaults entityID=”https://www.bioconnector.virginia.edu/shibboleth”
REMOTE_USER=”eppn uid persistent-id targeted-id”>

<Sessions lifetime=”28800″ timeout=”3600″ relayState=”ss:mem”
checkAddress=”false” handlerSSL=”true” cookieProps=”https”>
<!–we went with SSL Required – so change handlerSSL to true and cookieProps to https

<SSO entityID=”urn:mace:incommon:virginia.edu”>
SAML2 SAML1
</SSO>
<!–this is the production value, we started out with the testing config – ITS provides this in their documentation–>

<MetadataProvider type=”XML” file=”UVAmetadata.xml” />
<!–Once things are working you should be able to find this at https://www.your-virginia-website.edu/Shibboleth/Metadata – it’s a file you download from ITS = RTFM –>
<AttributeExtractor type=”XML” validate=”true” reloadChanges=”false” path=”attribute-map.xml”/>
<!–attribute-map.xml is the only other file you’re going to need to touch–>

<CredentialResolver type=”File” key=”sp-key.pem” certificate=”sp-cert.pem”/>
<!–these are the keys generated with shib-keygen –>
<Handler type=”Session” Location=”/Session” showAttributeValues=”true”/>
<!–During debug we used https://www.bioconnector.virginia.edu/Shibboleth.sso/Session with the  showAttributeValues=”true” setting on to see what was coming across from the UVa  Shibboleth IdP–>

/etc/shibboleth/attribute-map.xml looked like this

<Attribute name=”urn:mace:dir:attribute-def:eduPersonPrincipalName” id=”eppn”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”ScopedAttributeDecoder”/>
</Attribute>

<Attribute name=”urn:mace:dir:attribute-def:eduPersonScopedAffiliation” id=”affiliation”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”ScopedAttributeDecoder” caseSensitive=”false”/>
</Attribute>
<Attribute name=”urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.9″ id=”affiliation”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”ScopedAttributeDecoder” caseSensitive=”false”/>
</Attribute>

<Attribute name=”urn:mace:dir:attribute-def:eduPersonAffiliation” id=”unscoped-affiliation”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”StringAttributeDecoder” caseSensitive=”false”/>
</Attribute>
<Attribute name=”urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.1″ id=”unscoped-affiliation”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”StringAttributeDecoder” caseSensitive=”false”/>
</Attribute>

<Attribute name=”urn:mace:dir:attribute-def:eduPersonEntitlement” id=”entitlement”/>
<Attribute name=”urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.7″ id=”entitlement”/>

<Attribute name=”urn:mace:dir:attribute-def:eduPersonTargetedID” id=”targeted-id”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”ScopedAttributeDecoder”/>
</Attribute>

<Attribute name=”urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.10″ id=”persistent-id”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”NameIDAttributeDecoder” formatter=”$NameQualifier!$SPNameQualifier!$Name” defaultQualifiers=”true”/>
</Attribute>

<!– Fourth, the SAML 2.0 NameID Format: –>
<Attribute name=”urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:persistent” id=”persistent-id”>
<AttributeDecoder xsi:type=”NameIDAttributeDecoder” formatter=”$NameQualifier!$SPNameQualifier!$Name” defaultQualifiers=”true”/>
</Attribute>
<Attribute name=”urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.6″ id=”eduPersonPrincipalName”/>
<Attribute name=”urn:oid:0.9.2342.19200300.100.1.1″ id=”uid”/>
</Attributes>

Those two pieces marked in red are important – they’re going to be the bits that we pipe in to Drupal

For  debugging we used the following URL https://www.bioconnector.virginia.edu/Shibboleth.sso/Session to see what was coming across – once it was all good we got a response that looks like

MiscellaneousSession Expiration (barring inactivity): 479 minute(s)Client Address: 137.54.59.201SSO Protocol: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:protocolIdentity Provider: urn:mace:incommon:virginia.eduAuthentication Time: 2015-11-16T15:35:39.118ZAuthentication Context Class: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransportAuthentication Context Decl: (none)

Attributesaffiliation: staff@virginia.edu;employee@virginia.edu;member@virginia.edueduPersonPrincipalName: adp6j@virginia.eduuid: adp6junscoped-affiliation: member;staff;employee

The uid and eduPersonPrincipalName variables being the pieces we needed to get Drupal to set up a session for us

Lastly the Drupal bit

The Drupal side of this is pretty straight

We installed Drupal as usual  and grabbed the shib_auth module.

and on the Advanced Tab