Web Single Sign-On Authentication using SAML

TL;DR

This paper discusses implementing SAML to enable secure single sign-on for web applications, simplifying authentication across multiple external service providers and reducing internal resource burdens.

Contribution

It presents a detailed implementation of SAML for SSO, addressing authentication challenges with external web services.

Findings

SAML provides a secure SSO solution for web applications.

Implementation reduces complexity in managing external authentication.

Enhances security and user convenience for organizations using SaaS.

Abstract

Companies have increasingly turned to application service providers (ASPs) or Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors to offer specialized web-based services that will cut costs and provide specific and focused applications to users. The complexity of designing, installing, configuring, deploying, and supporting the system with internal resources can be eliminated with this type of methodology, providing great benefit to organizations. However, these models can present an authentication problem for corporations with a large number of external service providers. This paper describes the implementation of Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and its capabilities to provide secure single sign-on (SSO) solutions for externally hosted applications.