FIDO/GLUU Identity Provider

This guide describes how to implement a NIEF SAML Identity Provider (IDP) system that authenticates with Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) credentials held on a personal mobile device.

Background

FIDO is a standard for performing multifactor authentication of users by verifying proof of possession of a smart phone, along with requiring the user to authenticate themself to the smart phone with a biometric. This FIDO/Gluu Implementation Guide provides details on how to deploy a NIEF SAML IDP using the Gluu Server along with the ThumbSignIn online FIDO service. The Gluu Server only runs on the Linux operating system (it can be run within a virtual machine or docker container).

This guide is designed around the use of commercial software that has free versions that are sufficient for small and simple deploys:

• ThumbSignIn
• Gluu Server Community Edition

Getting Started

The Gluu Server runs on various versions of Linux, details of all supported versions can be found within the Gluu Installation Guide. For this guide, we will assume the use of CentOS 7 as it is free and the version of Linux the NIEF team knows best. Prior to installing Gluu update the CentOS selinux settings to permissive within the /etc/selinux/config file.

Installing Gluu

Installing RPMs

It may be easier to follow the detailed Gluu Installation Guide, but the quick version of the install steps are included here. Each of these commands should be executed from a root login on the Linux machine to add/trust the Gluu repository and then install the Gluu Server RPM:

   # wget https://repo.gluu.org/centos/Gluu-centos7.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/Gluu.repo
   # wget https://repo.gluu.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-GLUU -O /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-GLUU
   # rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-GLUU
   # yum clean all
   # yum install gluu-server-3.1.5

Updating Linux Startup

Next you need to update the Linux server to start the Gluu service on boot:

   # /sbin/gluu-serverd-3.1.5 enable 
   # /sbin/gluu-serverd-3.1.5 start

Initial Gluu Setup

Finally, you need to login to the Gluu container and configure it for initial use:

   # /sbin/gluu-serverd-3.1.5 login
   # cd /install/community-edition-setup
   # ./setup.py

This setup script will prompt for a variety of things, most of these should be obvious how to populate or can be left as the default settings. There are three we call out as important:

• Password for oxTrust and LDAP superuser - This password is important for further configuration of the system, be sure to set it to something you can remember and/or use in your password manager.
• Install Apache HTTPD Server - If your Linux deploy already has a working Apache httpd install, you may wish to forgo this and use your configuration of Apache HTTPD. If you prefer to use the Gluu version, you may need to disable the Apache Httpd you have installed.
• Install Shibboleth SAML IDP - This defaults to false, but it is required for our purposes.

Testing

It is always a good idea to test and validate a new IDP deployment within a test environment. The NIEF Testbed is intended for exactly this purpose.