Book Image

Okta Administration: Up and Running

By : Lovisa Stenbäcken Stjernlöf, HenkJan de Vries
Book Image

Okta Administration: Up and Running

By: Lovisa Stenbäcken Stjernlöf, HenkJan de Vries

Overview of this book

IAM, short for identity and access management, is a set of policies and technologies for ensuring the security of an organization through careful role and access assignment for users and devices. With this book, you’ll get up and running with Okta, an identity and access management (IAM) service that you can use for both employees and customers. Once you’ve understood how Okta can be used as an IAM platform, you’ll learn about the Universal Directory, which covers how to integrate other directories and applications and set up groups and policies. As you make progress, the book explores Okta’s single sign-on (SSO) feature and multifactor authentication (MFA) solutions. Finally, you will delve into API access management and discover how you can leverage Advanced Server Access for your cloud servers and Okta Access Gateway for your on-premises applications. By the end of this Okta book, you’ll have learned how to implement Okta to enhance your organization's security and be able to use this book as a reference guide for the Okta certification exam.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Okta
8
Section 2: Extending Okta

Using SAML and OpenID Connect applications

To fully embrace the capabilities of Okta's SSO, it is recommended to use federation protocols such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID Connect (OIDC). Both handle and look at login flows differently, but they share one common feature, they allow an application to delegate their authentication to an Identity Provider (IdP) such as Okta. This means that there is no reason to have a password in your application anymore. The user is no longer responsible for a strong unused password, but the application will refer to the IdP for authentication. We will be looking at both, to see what they have in common and where they differ.

SAML is a framework built upon XML and allows interactions between an IdP and Service Provider (SP), to communicate user authentication, entitlement, and attribute information. The flexibility of the XML allows it be modified and to send different relevant information based on the integration...