SecureAuth Solves IntraNet and ExtraNet SSO

Written on December 4, 2009 at 1:07 am, by Tommy

In recent days I have been explaining both internally and externally SecureAuth inate ability to solve what has been, pretty difficult SSO problems.

Namely, how to solve authentication and identity between servers that are both internal and externally located.

The SecureAuth solution, that the team and I designed, solves this issue.    The solution, from its beginning back in 2005, was formulated in a way to authenticate disparate web servers, whether they are externally or internally hosted.   This is because, after SecureAuth conducts a 2-Factor, 2-way authentication – SecureAuth is designed to create both intranet and extranet session credentials.

It just took the world a little time to catch up on being able to consume these external session credentials.

Google Apps and Salesforce have shown the world that externally hosted applications are practical and in may cases, provide a cost and functionality improvement over their internally based solutions.     Both these service providers are able to consume federated assertions, SAML to be specific.

But as we have seen in discussion with enterprises, especially after the recent Salesforce Dreamforce show – enterprises are looking for solutions that can provide a SSO experience to the user between these extranet (Salesforce, Google) and intranet (SharePoint, OWA, WebSphere , Oracle 11g, etc) solutions.

SecureAuth is this solution that bridges these solutions.

The solution can also be configured to translate IDs across applications and across the “cloud”.

SecureAuth is able to do this because (See figure #1) below:

1. SecureAuth redirects the authentication to the SecureAuth servers

• Target applications do not need to be in same DNS domain.

2.  SecureAuth then looks for a SecureAuth authentication token:

• The SecureAuth token can be configured for any identity attribute that resides in the datastore

3.   If the SecureAuth token has been created, SecureAuth is able to conduct an identity
translation to the target resource:

• The identity can be the “logon ID” or an secondary ID that SecureAuth draws from the datastore that the application recognizes.

With this design, SecureAuth is able to create a SSO session between hosted and cloud based applications.

Figure #1 – SecureAuth’s design enables 2-Factor SSO between hosted and cloud applications.

Please contact us at 949.777.6959 or sales@multifa.com.