Presented by

  • Ben Martin

    Ben Martin
    @realmonkeyiq

    Dr Martin is the lead developer of FileSender and maintainer of SimpleSAMLphp. Previously he created the libferris filesystem and loves to push the envelope of what a filesystem can do. He loves to build robots, cnc machines, and tinker with electronics. He has a long history with open source, including many ODF projects and a core contributor to FontForge for many years.

Abstract

SAML and SimpleSAMLphp (SSP) allow web applications to authenticate hundreds of thousands of users from many different institutes. The normal focus of SSP is for larger installations and complex configurations. In this talk I will try to bring things to the smallest scale I can. Using the same database that an application is already using to store authentication data and describing the configuration steps with a focus on a simple deployment for very small scale use. For example 20 users instead of 20,000. On the other hand, your app with 20 users will scale to 200,000 users if the need arises. Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML is a technology to allow verification that a user is who they claim to be. SAML allows for Single Sign On where a single authentication event (such as a user name and password) can be used to authenticate a user with multiple applications. SimpleSAMLphp is a php library that allows web applications to use SAML to authenticate users. My goal is to enable smaller installs of SSP so that more open source applications can be written to support it and those applications can then more easily be deployed by larger sites such as universities, research facilities, and NRENs (national research and education network) such as aarnet.