CODEWITHSUNDEEP
single-sign-onopenid-connect
John
John

Reputation: 605

OpenID Connect User Mapping

Currently my organization uses a number of web apps/mobile apps/APIs, some of which authenticate against an in-house IdP and others which use a third-party proprietary system (over which we have no control).

We have been asked to implement SSO for these web applications and as a result I have been reading up on OpenID Connect. I believe this would be a better solution than SAML given that (a) end-users are not always enterprise users, and (b) SAML not designed for mobile applications.

I believe I understand the flow reasonably well but have one sticking point. To allow users to authenticate using an external IdP, we would need to map the user back to our internal id. For example, user authenticates using OIDC/Google, resulting in us receiving the user's unique Google idenitifer (and email etc if we queried further), but this is not useful to us until we can map the Google identifier back to our internal customer id.

Is this mapping out of scope for OIDC? If so, is there a best-practice method for doing this? I'm sure we are not alone in this requirement...

Thanks, John

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1388

Answers (1)

Kavindu Dodanduwa
Kavindu Dodanduwa

Reputation: 13059

Is this mapping out of scope for OIDC?

Short answer, yes.! If your backend require a comparison/validation with internal identity details, then it has to be done out-of-scope of OpenID Connect(OIDC) protocol. OIDC simply define the process of obtaining tokens (ID and access token), which are required for authentication and authorization.

is there a best-practice method for doing this?

One option is to use out of band directory synchronization. For example, Google provider Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS), which allows you to synchronize identity details to LDAP or MS Active directory. Other alternative is to use SCIM protocol to communicate and provision users dynamically. For example Google provide that support as well.

Alternatively, you can use just-in-time provision at the time you receive tokens. This support will depend on your identity provider implementation. For example, WSO2 identity server support both JIT provisioning as well as SCIM.

Upvotes: 1

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