Wednesday, March 16, 2016

New Kid On The Block: Fediz OpenId Connect

Apache Fediz, Identity Provider for the WEB, was created by Oliver Wulff and during the last few years, with the major support from Colm and Jan, has become quite a popular provider for supporting SSO with the help of the WS-Federation Profile.

Before I continue, I'd like to clarify that even though WS-Federation is obviously related to SOAP, the important thing is that as far as the user experience is concerned, it is pure SSO. For example, AFAIK, a Microsoft Office Outlook login process is currently WS-Fed aware.

But OpenId Connect (OIDC) is a new SSO star for the WEB, with all of the software industry players with SSO-related interests supporting it, as far as I can see it.

OIDC really shines. I was talking about something similar before in context of the JOSE work, it is really been designed by some of the best security and web experts in the industry. And OIDC is still a very bleeding edge development as far as a maintsream adoption by the software industry is concerned. Google, Microsoft, and other top companies have created OIDC servers, but what if you want your own OIDC ?

Fediz OpenId Connect (Fediz OIDC) is the new project that Colm, Jan and myself started working upon back in November 2015 and it joins a family of OIDC-focused projects that are appearing probably every month in various developer communities.   

As you can imagine we are at the start of a rather long road. OIDC is great but is undoubtedly complex to implement right.  We've had a good progress so far and most of OIDC Core is supported OOB, something that you can try right now.

Apache CXF OAuth2 and OIDC authorization modules are linked to a flexible Fediz IDP (Authentication System) with the minimum amount of code. We will be working on making it all more feature complete, robust, configurable, customizable, production ready.

We are planning to talk about Fediz OIDC a lot more going forward.

Stay tuned !