Book Image

OpenAM

By : Indira Thangasamy
Book Image

OpenAM

By: Indira Thangasamy

Overview of this book

<p>OpenAM is an open source continuation of the OpenSSO project that was taken over, and later scrapped, by Oracle. OpenAM is the only commercial-grade, feature-rich web application that provides SSO solutions. It has a variety of features and a powerful Single Sign-On capability, but the implementation can be tricky, and the unorganized and incoherent online documentation is not very helpful.</p> <p>The <i>OpenAM</i> book will serve as a guide to everything you need to know to get started with implementing Single Sign-On using OpenAM to protect your web applications, along with real-world examples.</p> <p>The author's extensive experience in testing and troubleshooting OpenAM enables him to share insights on how the product works, its strengths, its weaknesses, and some inside information.</p> <p>If you are reading this, you probably want to protect your web application using OpenAM. The book starts off with an introduction to OpenAM and describing the core features and the kind of problems that can be solved by OpenAM. Then it provides you with detailed instructions on how to protect your web applications by using OpenAM server and policy agents. You will also learn about the user interface elements in order to manage OpenAM successfully. You'll understand the concepts of identity web services provided by OpenAM. There are examples in the book that describe how the REST-based identity services can be invoked and utilized. In the final chapters, you will find detailed discussions about backup, recovery, and audit logging.</p> <p>The book concludes by discussing some of the common OpenAM problems and tips to troubleshoot them. Although the project name has changed from OpenSSO to OpenAM, the product screen and file names still reflect OpenSSO. Hence, you will encounter the term "OpenSSO" throughout the book.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
OpenAM
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started
Index

Summary


In this chapter we learnt at length about various authentication mechanisms supported by the OpenSSO server. With many examples, I have enabled the reader to go through tutorial-like, do-it-yourself kind of steps to perform certain authentication service configuration tasks. Configuring the SSL key stores and enabling secure transport for the Tomcat server would definitely be handy for you to set up the certificate-based authentication. Although most of the authentication services are available out of the box in the OpenSSO, if you need any custom authentication module, it can be easily implemented by following the procedure that is described in this chapter. In the last part of the chapter we did learn a lot about the Session Service and SSO token structure and properties. Session high availability and constraints are one of the critical features to implement production level SSO deployments. In the next chapter, password reset application is introduced along with the user account...