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Why Single Sign on Sucks

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Re: Why Single Sign on Sucks

#121
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Failure leads to weird redirects for which you can't really fall back to a login prompt because the auth happens on TLS level and a token in HTTP can't replace that. That's not true. nginx, for example, let's you return a custom response, which can easily be a 302 to the login page. But I agree with all other points. On a sidenote, there's also the great option of using a CA for your client certificates while still…

> Unfortunately, hardly any tutorials pointed this out and used their own CA for everything instead. I think this is one of the reasons so few people consider using TLS auth. There aren't many guides out there, and many of the ones that are easily accessible use a custom CA deployment that's an absolute pain to manage (custom TLS certs on websites with a custom ACME server or manual certificate generation, and so on)…

I’ve been in this boat and have documented weird bugs and things that don’t work, but yet to write something about a working configuration.

I wanted to use mTLS for self hosted services and it took a while to come up with something that worked well in browsers, but apps on iOS and Android basically can’t use the certs making it fruitless.

Re: Why Single Sign on Sucks

#122
post #20

This is how I login to SSO today at work: Login username is cached in browser. Password is auto-filled-in by my password manager, which is in turn unlocked for a period of time when I am logged into my desktop. I hit "Log In" button. Backend does magic. An app pops up on my phone. I supply my fingerprint. Authentication is approved, and my browser is now logged in. Same pattern works for logging into AWS from the con…

As an enterprise cloud software business, I will not allow my systems to handle user-chosen long-lived credentials like the passwords you describe. Sorry, it's too much of liability. Got any other ideas? (sincerely curious)

I was describing SSO logins.

Re: Why Single Sign on Sucks

#123
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an enterprise cloud software business, I will not allow my systems to handle user-chosen long-lived credentials like the passwords you describe. Sorry, it's too much of liability. Got any other ideas? (sincerely curious)

I was describing SSO logins.

Ahh! So saml2aws is authenticating to the same IdP to which you are authenticating in the browser in the first paragraph?

Sorry, I thought you were trying to gain convenience by simulating SSO.

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