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Single Sign On

Introduction

We don’t want to have to do identity management (joiners, movers, leavers) in the Modernisation Platform. To avoid this we use AWS single sign on (SSO), with AuthO (authentication and authorization as a service) and our GitHub organisation teams to manage access to environments.

Diagram

Single Sign On

Workflow

1. SSO Auth0 GitHub authentication

  • Users access the SSO login portal via the link https://moj.awsapps.com/start. This URL is hosted via the AWS SSO component.
  • AWS SSO is configured to use Auth0 as an application and sets the associated Application ACS URL. Auth0 will be the primary authentication endpoint providing the SSO with GitHub via SAML 2.0.
  • AWS SSO redirects users to an Auth0 SSO URL login page. Auth0 is configured to used GitHub as its IDP (Identity Provider) and prompts users to authenticate using their GitHub credentials. If authentication is successful (or if the user is already authenticated on Auth0, this step will be skipped) Auth0 sends an encoded SAML response to the browser.
  • The browser sends the SAML response (SAML Assertion) to AWS SSO (service provider for verification). Once verified, the user is able to login to the AWS SSO portal.

2. System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) SSO

  • AWS SSO provides support for SCIM v2.0 standard. SCIM keeps your AWS SSO identities in sync with identities from your IdP (GitHub).
  • A scheduled Lambda job (index.js) is used for SCIM provisioning from GitHub. A nodejs script uses the the GitHub API package Octokit to sync GitHub Groups and users to AWS SSO. It does this by calling the AWS SSO SCIM endpoint.
  • SCIM will populate AWS SSO Groups and users with the GitHub data.

3. SSO Permission Sets

  • A permission set is a collection of administrator-defined policies that AWS SSO uses to determine a user’s effective permissions to access a given AWS account. The root permissions sets are managed in the sso-admin-permission-sets.tf file.
  • The permission set is mapped using Terraform to the associated AWS account as part of the baseline workflow.
This page was last reviewed on 21 November 2023. It needs to be reviewed again on 21 May 2024 by the page owner #modernisation-platform .
This page was set to be reviewed before 21 May 2024 by the page owner #modernisation-platform. This might mean the content is out of date.