jonahkagan / passport-saml

SAML 2.0 authentication with Passport

Passport-SAML

This is a SAML 2.0 authentication provider for Passport, the Node.js authentication library.

The code was originally based on Michael Bosworth's express-saml library.

Passport-SAML has been tested to work with both SimpleSAMLphp based Identity Providers, and with Active Directory Federation Services.

Installation

$ npm install passport-saml

Usage

Configure strategy

This example utilizes the Feide OpenIdp identity provider. You need an account there to log in with this. You also need to register your site as a service provider.

The SAML identity provider will redirect you to the URL provided by the path configuration.

passport.use(new SamlStrategy(
  {
    path: '/login/callback',
    entryPoint: 'https://openidp.feide.no/simplesaml/saml2/idp/SSOService.php',
    issuer: 'passport-saml'
  },
  function(profile, done) {
    findByEmail(profile.email, function(err, user) {
      if (err) {
        return done(err);
      }
      return done(null, user);
    });
  })
));

Provide the authentication callback

You need to provide a route corresponding to the path configuration parameter given to the strategy:

app.post('/login/callback',
  passport.authenticate('saml', { failureRedirect: '/', failureFlash: true }),
  function(req, res) {
    res.redirect('/');
  }
);

Authenticate requests

Use passport.authenticate(), specifying saml as the strategy:

app.get('/login',
  passport.authenticate('saml', { failureRedirect: '/', failureFlash: true }),
  function(req, res) {
    res.redirect('/');
  }
);

Security and signatures

Passport-SAML uses the HTTP Redirect Binding for its AuthnRequests, and expects to receive the messages back via the HTTP POST binding.

Authentication requests sent by Passport-SAML can be signed using RSA-SHA1. To sign them you need to provide a private key in the PEM format via the privateCert configuration key. For example:

    privateCert: fs.readFileSync('./cert.pem', 'utf-8')

It is a good idea to validate the incoming SAML Responses. For this, you can provide the Identity Provider's certificate using the cert confguration key:

    cert: 'MIICizCCAfQCCQCY8tKaMc0BMjANBgkqh ... W=='

Usage with Active Directory Federation Services

Here is a configuration that has been proven to work with ADFS:

  {
    entryPoint: 'https://ad.example.net/adfs/ls/',
    issuer: 'https://your-app.example.net/login/callback',
    callbackUrl: 'https://your-app.example.net/login/callback',
    cert: 'MIICizCCAfQCCQCY8tKaMc0BMjANBgkqh ... W==',
    identifierFormat: null
  }

Please note that ADFS needs to have a trust established to your service in order for this to work.