Book Image

Implementing Identity Management on AWS

By : Jon Lehtinen
Book Image

Implementing Identity Management on AWS

By: Jon Lehtinen

Overview of this book

AWS identity management offers a powerful yet complex array of native capabilities and connections to existing enterprise identity systems for administrative and application identity use cases. This book breaks down the complexities involved by adopting a use-case-driven approach that helps identity and cloud engineers understand how to use the right mix of native AWS capabilities and external IAM components to achieve the business and security outcomes they want. You will begin by learning about the IAM toolsets and paradigms within AWS. This will allow you to determine how to best leverage them for administrative control, extending workforce identities to the cloud, and using IAM toolsets and paradigms on an app deployed on AWS. Next, the book demonstrates how to extend your on-premise administrative IAM capabilities to the AWS backplane, as well as how to make your workforce identities available for AWS-deployed applications. In the concluding chapters, you’ll learn how to use the native identity services with applications deployed on AWS. By the end of this IAM Amazon Web Services book, you will be able to build enterprise-class solutions for administrative and application identity using AWS IAM tools and external identity systems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: IAM and AWS – Critical Concepts, Definitions, and Tools
9
Section 2: Implementing IAM on AWS for Administrative Use Cases
13
Section 3: Implementing IAM on AWS for Application Use Cases

Connecting Amazon Cognito to an external IdP – OIDC

Amazon Cognito user pools support the use of multiple external IdPs. It would be unusual, though not necessarily ill-advised, to connect the same external IdP to an Amazon Cognito user pool using both SAML and OIDC. We will connect our external IdP to OIDC in the interest of demonstrating how both protocols operate when used with an external IdP with a user pool. We'll proceed as follows:

  1. From the user pool, we can select the type of federated provider we want to add under the Federations menu. We will select the OpenID Connect option. We can see a marker on the SAML option indicating an existing connection, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

    Figure 12.21 – Selecting a new IdP for the user pool

  2. In the following screenshot, we see the required fields for configuring the new OIDC IdP. As we do not have all of these values yet, this means that we will need to create a client that the Amazon Cognito...