User Tools

  • Logged in as: anonymous (anonymous)
  • Log Out

Site Tools


mantisbt:issue:4235

This is an old revision of the document!


Requirements for Plugable Authentication

Introduction

There are lots of requirements to support extra authentication methods, and lots of patches supplied against various different releases to add an authentication method. We need a means of adding an Authentication method that does not need to patch core functionality. Setting up a system of plugins for authentication would be the best way to acheive this.

High Level Requirements

  1. Support for authentication via Mantis plugins by supporting protocols that validate a user name/ password, as well as others that delegate the authentication process to another application (e.g. Open ID / CAS).
  2. Support for single sign-on (e.g. Windows Login, CMS integration, etc). The single sign on should work for both Login and Logout scenarios.
  3. Support for hybrid authentication. For example, employees are authenticated against LDAP where customers are authenticated using Mantis standard infrastructure.
  4. Avoid sign-up when a user is authenticated but doesn't yet have a record in the DB. In this case, Mantis should pull the required data from the authentication plugin. For example, pull user information from LDAP when a user logs in for the first time.
  5. Prepopulate sign-up form with fields from authentication plugin (e.g.LDAP, OpenId, X.509).
  6. An authentication plugin should be able to mark some of the user profile information as read only. For example, user name or email may be marked as read only.
  7. Once a user is signed up using a protocol, this protocol should be stamped on the user record and in the future the user should only be able to login via this protocol. For example, if a user is authenticated against Active Directory, then removed from Active Directory, then he/she should not be able to login against their user record in Mantis (use in termination of employment scenarios). (This may cause a problem when a user logs in via Windows auth at work, but would like to login from home where he/she is not authenticated in Windows.
  8. When a user signs on, the protocol used needs to be recorded so that reauthentication and logout use the same protocol. – storing this on the database may be a problem if users are sharing userids.
  9. Once we have authenticated we should be able to use our credentials to automatically sign the user into another system (e.g. a wiki) and log then out of that system when we log out of mantis.
  10. Provide functions that can be used by cms integration. e.g. when you log into a cms, one of its plugins logs you into mantis.
  11. On starting mantis, if the users identity can be immediately detirmined, then they should be automatically logged in without seeing the login pages.
  12. Easy Customisation of login, signup and reauthentication pages.

Detailed Requirements

The existing authentication methods (e.g. LDAP, HTTP) need refactoring to become plugins.

Anonymous authentication needs to be as simple as enabling a plugin, which would then create the required anonymous user (if not already existing).

We should be able to take credentials from other active logins (e.g. a cms token,http or X.509 authentication) and use that to automatically login (and reauthenticate ?) the user without asking them to supply another set of credentials.

Authentication systems which use credentials other than userid/password should be able to add a form to the login/reauthentication/signin pages for their credentials (e.g. openid url). They may also be required to display a different page instead.

Plugins should have a means of specifying their priority. We would wish to check for methods that require fetching no extra resources (Anonymous user or X.509) first, then those which require database accesses, and finally those that require fetching an external resource (e.g. LDAP, CAS).

Plugins could be allowed to deny a request authorised by an earlier executing plugin.

Plugins may need to fill in missing credentials for later plugins to check against (e.g OpenId plugin to supply userid that the url relates to, or http plugin to supply userid (and password ?).

Plugins should be able to be marked as protected, to prevent users from accidentally removing access to their site.

There should be a plugin configuration page which plugins can override to add extra fields as needed.

The signup process should be able to be configured so that it does not have to send a confirmation email, as this is a problem for some sites.

Basic/http authentication to get web server to display sign-in dialogue where possible.

Implementation Notes

  • The new plugin and event system should be used to implement this if possible.
  • events of type chain should be used.
  • plugin events will need to be called in a configurable order.
  • Installation could be problematical. The current schema update page is displayed after a link is clicked on the front page. The plugins are loaded before page headers are output so that header events can be fired. if the plugin tables do not exist (plugin system problem), or do exist but need some extra fields (pluggable authentication problem), there will be a dataase error before the schema can be upgraded.
  • check login events to be passed username, password, already_verified flag, and userid (if known).
  • usually if already_verified is set plugin will just pass these parameters to the next in the chain unchanged.
  • when all the events have been processed the user will be logged in if already_verified is true, otherwise the current error message will be displayed.

Database Changes

Configuration

Implementation Log

Other Changes

Feedback

  • Please provide feedback
mantisbt/issue/4235.1201549092.txt.gz · Last modified: 2008/10/29 04:36 (external edit)

Driven by DokuWiki