Are you running a Microsoft Windows Service (e.g. Sharepoint) with non-public content connected to your organisational Active Directory (AD)? Do you want to make content available to specific external users, e.g. users with a SWITCH edu-ID? This article is for you.
While Windows Authentication remains based on Active Directory Servers, the gap between the Windows and the Shibboleth world has become bridgeable, thanks to new features in ADFS 2016.
Imagine yourself running some Microsoft Windows service such as a Sharepoint instance. You probably need to configure external authentication. This is, and always was, straightforward if you can attach Active Directory Servers to the Sharepoint instance. However, it used to turn out a bit more cumbersome if you wanted to base your external authentication on a non-Windows service like e.g. a Shibboleth IdP[1]. In short, supporting regular SWITCHaai was difficult for Windows services.
Thankfully, this has changed. ADFS 4.0, being a part of Windows Server 2016 has improved interoperability with SAML 2.0, which allows for use of a Shibboleth IdP when serving authentication requests from Windows services.
Peter M. Studer, one of the Identity Management (IdM) specialists at the University of Bern, has recently posted a blog (in German), which explains in detail how to deploy an ADFS server as a proxy to an IdP within SWITCHaai, in particular as a proxy to the SWITCH edu-ID IdP.
We find this step-by-step tutorial extremely helpful and will set up an appropriate proof of concept locally. This may be a first step towards integration of SWITCH edu-ID authentication for Windows services. If you are interested in learning more about the proof of concept, please contact us!
[1] IdP: Identity Provider
P.S.: There’s – at least – one more thing that has to be sorted out before such an idea can go into production: the metadata signature check. Any resource in a federation needs to properly link into the trust chain, something which is well prepared for resources based on Shibboleth software, but can be hard for others – yet.