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UsingTheFederatedAuthenticationPlugin.md

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Federated Authentication Plugin

The Federated Authentication Plugin adds support for authentication via Federated Identity and then database access via IAM. Currently, only Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is supported.

What is Federated Identity

Federated Identity allows users to use the same set of credentials to access multiple services or resources across different organizations. This works by having Identity Providers (IdP) that manage and authenticate user credentials, and Service Providers (SP) that are services or resources that can be internal, external, and/or belonging to various organizations. Multiple Service Providers can establish trust relationships with a single IdP.

When a user wants access to a resource, it authenticates with the IdP. From this a security token generated and is passed to the SP then grants access to said resource. In the case of AD FS, the user signs into the AD FS sign in page. This generates a SAML Assertion which acts as a security token. The user then passes the SAML Assertion to the SP when requesting access to resources. The SP verifies the SAML Assertion and grants access to the user.

How to use the Federated Authentication Plugin with the AWS Advanced Python Driver

Enabling the Federated Authentication Plugin

Note

AWS IAM database authentication is needed to use the Federated Authentication Plugin. This is because after the plugin acquires SAML assertion from the identity provider, the SAML Assertion is then used to acquire an AWS IAM token. The AWS IAM token is then subsequently used to access the database.

  1. Enable AWS IAM database authentication on an existing database or create a new database with AWS IAM database authentication on the AWS RDS Console:
  2. Set up an IAM Identity Provider and IAM role. The IAM role should be using the IAM policy set up in step 1.
  3. Add the plugin code federated_auth to the plugins value, or to the current driver profile.
  4. Specify parameters that are required or specific to your case.

Federated Authentication Plugin Parameters

Parameter Value Required Description Default Value Example Value
db_user String Yes The user name of the IAM user with access to your database.
If you have previously used the IAM Authentication Plugin, this would be the same IAM user.
For information on how to connect to your Aurora Database with IAM, see this documentation.
None some_user_name
idp_username String Yes The user name for the idp_endpoint server. If this parameter is not specified, the plugin will fallback to using the user parameter. None jimbob@example.com
idp_password String Yes The password associated with the idp_endpoint username. If this parameter is not specified, the plugin will fallback to using the password parameter. None some_random_password
idp_endpoint String Yes The hosting URL for the service that you are using to authenticate into AWS Aurora. None ec2amaz-ab3cdef.example.com
iam_role_arn String Yes The ARN of the IAM Role that is to be assumed to access AWS Aurora. None arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/adfs_example_iam_role
iam_idp_arn String Yes The ARN of the Identity Provider. None arn:aws:iam::123456789012:saml-provider/adfs_example
iam_region String Yes The IAM region where the IAM token is generated. None us-east-2
idp_name String No The name of the Identity Provider implementation used. adfs adfs
idp_port Integer No The port that the host for the authentication service listens at. 443 1234
rp_identifier String No The relaying party identifier. urn:amazon:webservices urn:amazon:webservices
iam_host String No Overrides the host that is used to generate the IAM token. None database.cluster-hash.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com
iam_default_port String No This property overrides the default port that is used to generate the IAM token. The default port is determined based on the underlying driver protocol. For now, there is support for PostgreSQL and MySQL. Target drivers with different protocols will require users to provide a default port. None 1234
iam_token_expiration Integer No Overrides the default IAM token cache expiration in seconds 870 123
http_request_connect_timeout Integer No The timeout value in seconds to send the HTTP request data used by the FederatedAuthPlugin. 60 60
ssl_secure Boolean No Whether the SSL session is to be secure and the server's certificates will be verified False True

Sample code

MySQLFederatedAuthentication.py PGFederatedAuthentication.py