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Showing posts from June, 2015

Seamless User Profile Migration from MySQL to OpenDJ

Following on from my previous post on OpenDJ password schemes, a common requirement is often to migrate users into the OpenDJ profile store from an existing database. There are numerous ways to do this, such as LDIF file imports or using OpenIDM reconciliation and livesync. However, both methods only really do a like for like comparison – no data cleansing takes place - unless you start to configure some logic processing in there.

This might be fine, but if your existing repositories contain millions of entries, some of which you don't know are live, a quick way to migrate across only active users, is to use OpenAM, with it's Dynamic Profile creation feature.




The above describes the process at a high level. Basically there are 3 authentication modules in a chain, using the flexibility of sufficient and optional modules. 
In this flow, there are basically 3 states.

User in MySQLUser in OpenDJAuthentication Works AgainstPassword Captured1st RunYesNoMySQLNo2nd RunYesYesMySQLYes3rd …
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Password Storage in OpenDJ

A common use case, is the migration of user profile data to OpenDJ.  Especially in large scale consumer facing identity projects, most clients already have repo's that contain user profile data.

Sometimes these stores also contain authentication data - that is the user name and password of the individuals.  Migrating data is relatively simple in this day and age regardless of whether that is identity data or not, but a common issue regarding login credentials, is how to migrate without impacting the login process.  For example, you don't necessarily want to get every user to reset their password for example, when they migrate to the new system.

Within OpenDJ this fortunately isn't a big deal.  A reason users might have to reset their password, is often to do with how the password has been stored on the source system.  When it comes to passwords there are generally two main approaches - symmetric encryption and hashing.  Symmetric encryption (meaning the password can be decry…
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Stateless Tokens within OpenAM 13.0

The unstable OpenAM nightly build of 13.0, contains a great new feature: the ability to create stateless or client side tokens.  This brings a range of new use cases to the access management table, including increased scale (less server side storage, CTS replication and in memory storage) and the potential for "offline" token introspection for authorization.  Stateless does of course lack a lot of the key features of the stateful architecture.

What is a stateless token?

The stateless token is basically a JWT token, that is stored in the existing iPlanetDirectoryPro cookie (if accessing via a browser) or within the tokenId response if authenticating over REST.  The JWT contains all of the content that would stored on the server side in a stateful session - so things like uid, expiryTime and any other profile or session attributes you want to define.

To quote my colleague Ashley Stevenson "Stateful is a phone call and Stateless is a text message".

The token can also be …
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