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SAML: A Technical Primer

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41–50 of 100 posts

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#41
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your CISO wants to use SAML for anything, fire your CISO. Frankly I’d suggest the same thing about Okta but as bad as they are whatever you do to avoid them would probably be worse in practice.

I gather that you've fired every CISO you've ever had.

If I’d been in a position to, I would have. Except for Sam Quigley who was the fucking best.

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#43

Everyone in here is saying SAML is dead and long live OIDC. The company I work for has SAML support, but not OIDC. As far as I understand it, all the customers are asking for SAML. I've never heard a request for SAML. This is in the health care sector.

Anyone who thinks OIDC is way easier than SAML has never implemented OIDC (or SAML).

I investigated both and implemented OIDC. It was difficult, but compared to the SAML and XML complexity, I'd say it was much easier.

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, yeah, having SAML means putting XML parsing into critical security points. No thanks.

Even better: XML signatures, which are very easy to get wrong in both signing and verification.

Yeah, it is a gross morass of pain and cruft and unclear implementation for devs.

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, yeah, having SAML means putting XML parsing into critical security points. No thanks.

Is it that different from parsing JSON? A honest question, what's the difference? Billion laughs attacks and similar?

Yeah, see the other replies in here. It is just a mess of ancient cruft and unclear implementation guidelines.

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who thinks OIDC is way easier than SAML has never implemented OIDC (or SAML).

I investigated both and implemented OIDC. It was difficult, but compared to the SAML and XML complexity, I'd say it was much easier.

XML is marginally more complicated than JSON: attributes and namespaces.

Apples to apples, is it's not much different. XSD is just as complex as JSONSchema.

Verbose? Sure.

But people love XML so much, they invented JS-and-XML (JSX). :shrug:

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#47
post #23

This is a very weird page, as it seems to suggest that SAML is the only way to do single sign-on integration with IdPs like Okta. But modern systems all do OIDC, which is what you should do. You need a much better reason to support SAML than "the CISO wants it so they can use Okta", because the CISO can (and should) just use OIDC.

OIDC is better when using the authorization code flow because it does not only rely on cryptography while validating the token. The relying party needs to talk to the IdP. This is better from a security perspective, because past vulnerabilities have shown, that implementing the cryptography right in every relying party is challenging. You can achieve similar security with SAML when using the artifact binding. Note: I work professionally with Keycloak and also offer reviews of OIDC and SAML implementations.

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#48
post #23

This is a very weird page, as it seems to suggest that SAML is the only way to do single sign-on integration with IdPs like Okta. But modern systems all do OIDC, which is what you should do. You need a much better reason to support SAML than "the CISO wants it so they can use Okta", because the CISO can (and should) just use OIDC.

> But modern systems all do OIDC

Factually incorrect

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#49
post #47
post #23

This is a very weird page, as it seems to suggest that SAML is the only way to do single sign-on integration with IdPs like Okta. But modern systems all do OIDC, which is what you should do. You need a much better reason to support SAML than "the CISO wants it so they can use Okta", because the CISO can (and should) just use OIDC.

OIDC is better when using the authorization code flow because it does not only rely on cryptography while validating the token. The relying party needs to talk to the IdP. This is better from a security perspective, because past vulnerabilities have shown, that implementing the cryptography right in every relying party is challenging. You can achieve similar security with SAML when using the artifact binding. Note: I…

I don't think artifact binding really addresses many of the issues people are talking about when they suggest OIDC is categorically more secure than SAML.

Re: SAML: A Technical Primer

#50
post #49
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OIDC is better when using the authorization code flow because it does not only rely on cryptography while validating the token. The relying party needs to talk to the IdP. This is better from a security perspective, because past vulnerabilities have shown, that implementing the cryptography right in every relying party is challenging. You can achieve similar security with SAML when using the artifact binding. Note: I…

I don't think artifact binding really addresses many of the issues people are talking about when they suggest OIDC is categorically more secure than SAML.

OIDC is newer and many of the issues with SAML were addressed in the architecture. However I’m curious to hear which attack vectors you are thinking about.
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