#Authentication

When a company is quite large and many different applications used by employees. But while those applications are mostly completely different, how to make it possible to not force users to enter credentials as many times as many applications they would like to use. The best way is to use SSO, so, it will be possible to have a portal, where users could launch any application used in a company. There are many different ways how to give access to your application by using the SSO mechanism, and some of them are:

• OAuth2
• Kerberos
• SAML

InterSystems already supports OAuth2 and can be quite easily deal with Kerberos. But I would like to discuss about using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language).

As many of you, our partners, are more widely using modern UI frameworks to create client front-end, you may have encountered a question, "So how do I secure my data when I just finished developing all new fancy browser based client experience?"

The answer is easy. Use a standard, proven OAuth2 and OpenID!

"OK, but how can I do it? I have never done it before."

No problem, just have a look here, if your client is Angular (not AngularJS) based, there is a demo project available for you to review and get inspired!

Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Part 3. Appendix

InterSystems IRIS OAUTH classes explained

In the previous part of our series we have learned about configuring InterSystems IRIS to act as an OAUTH client as well as authorization and authentication server (by means of OpenID Connect). In this final part of our series we are going to describe classes implementing InterSystems IRIS OAuth 2.0 framework. We will also discuss use cases for selected methods of API classes.

The API classes implementing OAuth 2.0 can be separated into three different groups according to their purpose. All classes are implemented in %SYS namespace. Some of them are public (via % package), some not and should not be called by developers directly.

Imagine that your .NET project uses the Caché DBMS and you need a fully-functional and reliable authorization system. Writing such a system from scratch would not make much sense, and you will clearly want to use something that already exists in .NET, e.g. ASP.NET Identity. By default, however, this framework supports only its native DBMS – MS SQL. Our task was to create an adaptor that would let us quickly and easily port Identity to the InterSystems Caché DBMS. This work resulted in creation of the ASP.NET Identity Caché Provider.