Under construction

Apache CXF Fediz: An Open-Source Web Security Framework

Overview

Apache CXF Fediz is a subproject of CXF. Fediz helps you to secure your web applications and delegates security enforcement to the underlying application server. Authentication is externalized from your web application to an identity provider which is a dedicated server component. The supported standard is WS-Federation 1.2 Passive Requestor Profile. Fediz supports Claims based Access control beyond Role Based Access Control (RBAC).

News

Features

The following features are supported by the Fediz plugin 1.0

• WS-Federation 1.1/1.2
• SAML 1.1/2.0 Tokens
• Custom token support
• Publish WS-Federation Metadata document
• Role information encoded as AttributeStatement in SAML 1.1/2.0 tokens
• Claims information provided by FederationPrincipal interface

The following features are planned for the next release:

• Support for Jetty and JBoss
• CXF plugin
• Support for encrypted SAML tokens
• Support for Holder-Of-Key SubjectConfirmationMethod
• "Resource IDP" support for Fediz IDP
• support for other protocols like SAML-P, OAuth

You can get the current status of the issues here .

Getting started

The WS-Federation specification defines the following parties involved during the web login:

• Browser
• Identity Provider (IDP)
  The IDP is a centralized, application independent runtime component which implements the protocol defined by WS-Federation. You can use any open source or commercial product as your IDP which supports WS-Federation 1.1/1.2. It's recommended to use the Fediz IDP for testing as it allows to test your web application in a sandbox without having all infrastructure components available. The Fediz IDP consists of two WAR components. The Security Token Service (STS) is doing most of the part like authenticating the user, retrieve claims/role data and create the SAML token. The IDP WAR translates the response to a HTML response thus a browser can process it.
• Relying Party (RP)
  The RP is the web application which should be protected. The RP must be able to implement the protocol as defined by WS-Federation. This component is called "Fediz Plugin" in this project which consists of container agnostic module/jar and a container specific jar. When an authenticated request is detected by the plugin it redirects to the IDP or authentication. The browser sends the response from IDP to the RP after successful authentication. The RP validates the response and creates the container security context.

It's recommended to deploy the IDP and the web application (RP) into different container instances as in a production deployment. The container with the IDP can be used during development and testing for any web application.

Setting up the IDP

The following blog entries describe how to set up the IDP:

STS WAR
IDP WAR

Set up the Relying Party Container

The Fediz plugin is deployed into the Relying Party (RP) container. The security mechanism is not specified by JEE. Even it is very similar in each Servlet Container there are some differences which requires dedicated Fediz plugins for each Servlet Container implementation. Most of the configuration is container independent and described here

The following lists shows the supported containers and the location of the installation and configuration page.

• Tomcat 7

Distribution

tbd

Samples

The examples directory contains two sample projects:

Building

Check out the code from here:

• svn
  http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cxf/fediz/trunk
• git
  git://git.apache.org/cxf-fediz.git

Building with Maven

You build the run the tests using the following command:

mvn clean install

Note: you need to use Maven 2.0.9 or newer and have the following environment variable set: MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx512m

Setting up Eclipse:

See this page for information on using the Eclipse IDE with the Fediz source code. This page is created for CXF but the same commands are applicable for Fediz too.