social-edu-federation 1.0.1

An SAML backend for python-social-auth dedicated to education federation (RENATER)

social-edu-federation: An SAML authentication backend for python-social-auth dedicated to education federation (RENATER)

Overview

This library provides an authentication backend which can be used with Python Social Auth and optionally Python Social Auth - Django to connect your application to an education SAML federation.

Before beginning, you must read the above documentations.

For now, it is only limited to the RENATER's "Féderation Éducation-Recherche" (FER) federation.

Architecture

social-edu-federation is divided in two parts:

• The SAML backend and metadata parser, customized for the FER federation, usable with Python Social Auth.
• The Django integration which provides: base views to provide metadata, list available Identity Providers and testing material for local development.

Authentication behavior

This library parses the metadata to extract base SAML authentication for each identity provider in the federation metadata plus some extra information (see below Setup - Core section)

The authentication process can be summarized in few steps:

• The federation metadata are parsed to fetch the identity providers list.

• User choose an identity provider in the list with which they have an account and want to login.

• The backend makes an SAML authentication request and redirects the user to the identity provider "single login" page.

• The user logs in on the identity provider website and is redirected to our (Service Provider) site.

• The SAML FER backend will extract authentication data it needs from the authentication response assertions. The used assertions are:

  • urn:oid:2.5.4.4 (sn) aka (surname) This represents the user's first name.
  • urn:oid:2.5.4.42 (givenName) aka (gn) This represents the user's last name.
  • urn:oid:2.16.840.1.113730.3.1.241 (displayName) This represents the user's full name.
  • urn:oid:0.9.2342.19200300.100.1.3 (mail) Provides us the user email, we use it as email address and username.
  • urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.1 (eduPersonAffiliation) Allows us to try to determine the role (student/professor). This is not mandatory.

  Fields we do not use:

  • urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.7135.1.2.1.14 (supannEtablissement)

  All fields are documented on Renater supann.

• The authentication response passes through the "Social auth" pipeline. social-edu-federation provides one extra step to replace the social_core.pipeline.user.create_user original one. This step allows to have a fallback on the user's full name if one of the first name or last name is not available.

Setup

Core

You may install only the library core which will provide you with:

• The FER metadata parser (see social_edu_federation.parser.FederationMetadataParser) which is an extension of the original python3-saml's OneLogin_Saml2_IdPMetadataParser and provides extra features as:
  • Extract all the identity providers at once
  • Extract extra information from each identity provider metadata ( the identity provider's display name, the identity provider's organization name, the identity provider's organization display name)
• A basic "metadata store" which is not really helpful but organizes the process of fetching the metadata and convert it to a Python Social Auth like object, usable by the authentication backend.
• The SAML authentication backend which is preconfigured to be used with the FER federation.

$ pip install social-edu-federation

Django integration

If you also want to add this library into a Django project you may explicitly add the django extra while installing the library:

$ pip install social-edu-federation[django]

It is also recommended to add social_edu_federation.django.apps.PythonSocialEduFedAuthConfig to your INSTALLED_APPS to get the following features:

• A Django check which asserts the default "metadata store" is overridden.
• The prefetch_saml_fer_metadata management command (see Cache management below).
• The static files and Django views default templates (see Using the default views below).

Cache management

When using the Django integration, it is highly recommended to define a Django setting to tell social_edu_federation to use the "metadata store with cache". This will avoid fetching the whole federation metadata everytime we need an information about one identity provider.

# settings.py
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_FEDERATION_SAML_METADATA_STORE = "social_edu_federation.django.metadata_store.CachedMetadataStore"

This "metadata store" will use the Django default cache which can be easily replaced by the cache backend of your choice:

# settings.py
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_DJANGO_CACHE = "redis"

assert SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_DJANGO_CACHE in CACHES, "cache backend name is not in settings.CACHES"

If you installed the social_edu_federation Django application, you will be able to fill the cache asynchronously using the prefetch_saml_fer_metadata management command, by defining a cron job which will call django-admin prefetch_saml_fer_metadata saml_fer to refresh the FER cache. Using this make sure that no actual user has to wait for the full federation metadata to load loading time.

Project setup

For a basic use of the FER backend for authentication you will need to define:

# settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "social_django.apps.PythonSocialAuthConfig",  # see python-social-auth
    "social_edu_federation.django.apps.PythonSocialEduFedAuthConfig",
]
MIDDLEWARE = [
    # ...
    "social_django.middleware.SocialAuthExceptionMiddleware",  # At the end
]

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
    "social_edu_federation.backends.saml_fer.FERSAMLAuth",
    "django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend",  # only if you keep Django basic auth
]

# Python social auth
SOCIAL_AUTH_JSONFIELD_ENABLED = True

SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SECURITY_CONFIG = {
    "authnRequestsSigned": True,
    "signMetadata": True,
    "wantAssertionsSigned": True,
    "rejectDeprecatedAlgorithm": True,
}

# Specific social_edu_federation
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_FEDERATION_SAML_METADATA_STORE = "social_edu_federation.django.metadata_store.CachedMetadataStore"

# SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_ENTITY_ID should be a URL that includes a domain name you own
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_ENTITY_ID = "https://you-site.example/saml/metadata/"
# SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_PUBLIC_CERT X.509 certificate for the key pair that
# your app will use
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_PUBLIC_CERT = "MII..."
# SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_PRIVATE_KEY The private key to be used by your app
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_PRIVATE_KEY = "MII..."

# Next certificate management, keep empty when next certificate is still not known
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_NEXT_PUBLIC_CERT = None
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_EXTRA = (
    {
        "x509certNew": SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_NEXT_PUBLIC_CERT,
    }
    if SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SP_NEXT_PUBLIC_CERT
    else {}
)

SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_ORG_INFO = {  # specify values for English at a minimum
    "en-US": {
        "name": "Organization name",
        "displayname": "Organization display name",
        "url": "https://you-site.example",
    }
}
# SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_TECHNICAL_CONTACT technical contact responsible for your app
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_TECHNICAL_CONTACT = {
    "givenName": "Dev team",
    "emailAddress": "[e-mail]",
}
# SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SUPPORT_CONTACT support contact for your app
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_SUPPORT_CONTACT = {
    "givenName": "Dev team",
    "emailAddress": "[e-mail]",
}
# SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_ENABLED_IDPS is not required since the
# SAML FER backend is overridden to allow dynamic IdPs.
# see social_edu_federation.backends.saml_fer.FERSAMLAuth.get_idp(idp_name)

# Custom parameter to define the FER Federation Metadata
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_FEDERATION_SAML_METADATA_URL = (
    "https://metadata.federation.renater.fr/renater/main/main-idps-renater-metadata.xml"
)

# Use (or not) the default pipeline with the first/last name cleanup step
from social_edu_federation.pipeline import DEFAULT_EDU_FED_AUTH_PIPELINE
SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_PIPELINE = DEFAULT_EDU_FED_AUTH_PIPELINE

Using the default views

To make your Service Provider metadata publicly available, you will need to add the following URL:

# some_module/urls.py
from django.urls import path

from social_edu_federation.django.views import EduFedMetadataView


urlpatterns = [
    # ...
    path(
        "saml/metadata/",
        EduFedMetadataView.as_view(backend_name="saml_fer"),
        name="saml_fer_metadata",
    ),
]

You may also want to have a look at the provided EduFedIdpChoiceView which serves the list of identity providers in the federation. It includes a cookie mechanism for the user to easily find the last used identity providers.

An easy way to use it:

# some_module/views.py
from social_edu_federation.django.views import EduFedIdpChoiceView


class CustomizedEduFederationIdpChoiceView(EduFedIdpChoiceView):
    """Display the list of all available Identity providers using our own template."""

    template_extends = "my_site/base.html"


# some_module/urls.py
from django.urls import path

from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    # ...
    path(
        "saml/renater_fer_idp_choice/",
        views.CustomizedEduFederationIdpChoiceView.as_view(backend_name="saml_fer"),
        name="saml_fer_idp_choice",
    ),
]

Testing views

social-edu-federation comes along with testing views to ease the development process. Those testing views are to be used when you want to test the whole authentication loop on your local computer.

How to plug the testing views in your project is not detailed here, but you can try them (or see how they are plugged) by running the social-edu-federation tests suite.

Fetch the project:

git clone [e-mail]:openfun/social-edu-federation.git

Create a virtual environment and install requirements:

cd social-edu-federation
pip install .[dev,django]

Run the standalone Django project:

make run_django

Open it in your browser.

Docker

In case you want to plug the testing views in your own project which is run in a Docker container you will probably need to define the port used in the generated metadata. By default, it will use the Django application port (let's say 8000) but if your mapping to the container uses another port you have to define SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_IDP_FAKER_DOCKER_PORT setting to provide the proper port.

E.g.:

• Without override: metadata will be for http://testserver:8000/saml/idp/sso/
• With SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_FER_IDP_FAKER_DOCKER_PORT=11000, metadata will be for http://testserver:11000/saml/idp/sso/.

Contributing

This project is intended to be community-driven, so please, do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any question related to our implementation or design decisions.

We try to raise our code quality standards and expect contributors to follow the recommandations from our handbook.

Versioning

This project follows Semantic Versioning 2.0.0.

License

This work is released under the MIT License (see LICENSE).

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2022 France Université Numérique

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.