Category: Identity and Access Management

Technical blog posts on Identity & Access Management, federated identity, and all things authorization.

golden statuette and stars on yellow background
Identity and Access Management, XACML Bites

XACML 3.0 wins award at the European Identity Conference 2011 #EIC11

Cybersecurity award goes to XACML European Identity Conference 2011, Munich. Today was a great day at EIC 2011 where Axiomatics is currently demoing its fine-grained authorization capabilities based on the latest version of the XACML standard, XACML 3.0.It ended with the usual ceremony awards where Tim Cole et al. handed out awards to various projects in the identity space (cloud security, IAM, entitlements management).A special award was handed to the XACML Technical Committee for its outstanding work on the latest version of XACML, XACML 3.0. Hal Lockart of Oracle and co-chair of the TC stepped up to accept the award and thanked the entire TC for a great group effort. He also thanked the editor of the XACML 3.0 specification, […]

Identity and Access Management

When OpenID meets XACML: externalize authentication and authorization from your business apps

Background About a year ago, a few months into my new job at Axiomatics, I pulled together a web-based app using J2EE (JSF, servlets, POJOs) and Icefaces (AJAXfied JSF) to illustrate fine-grained access control for web applications and portals. To secure the application, I used Tomcat’s authentication mechanism (its implementation of the HTTP FORM-based authentication protocol) and Axiomatics‘s off-the-shelf Authorization filter for servlets. What I then got – at zero development effort – was a sturdy, secure, finely-grained controlled web app where users could access certain pages and/or parts of pages based on the set of attributes a given user had potentially combined with attributes of the targeted resource (the page, the portlet, the individual GUI element of the page…), […]

Identity and Access Management

DSML: new XACML transport binding for e-healthcare projects

Readers of this blog and avid followers of the XACML TC will of course remember that the XACML standard does not provide any particular transport binding for its request / response protocol making XACML a particularly loosely coupled and versatile standard. To date, the XACML TC has defined one profile, the SAML 2.0 Profile of XACML, which does offer the means to transport XACML requests and responses inside a signed SAML assertion. But it is possibly not enough for all deployments and there has been a lot of buzz around a REST-based transport binding. A few years ago, Axiomatics was chosen to implement XACML-based fine-grained authorization for patient data in the National Patient Record service in Sweden. The idea is […]

charts on black wooden table - XML visualization with Ajax
XACML Bites

XACML 102 – Pimp my XACML – Part III: XSLT, Ajax, and stats

In a previous installment of ‘Pimp My XACML’, we illustrated how a bit of XSLT magic could actually change the structure of a XACML policy to convert into another document such as an HTML page be it XML-compliant or not. What about XML visualization with Ajax? Today, we will push the tricks further and add a bit of AJAX magic as well as some basic statistics regarding our policy. For those of you who missed on the previous episode, check it out here. It describes how to run the samples using ant and xalan. Adding some stats to the XSLT This is the easy bit. All we need to do is count the number of items that match a certain […]

XACML Bites

XACML 102 – Pimp my XACML – Part II: with XSLT

In my previous post on making XACML look pretty, we had a look at a very simple and easy way to add some colors / borders / general style to the XML via CSS. The CSS was interpreted by your browser and the result displayed there. CSS is simple and straightforward but it is also limited (not to mention it is probably not the most adequate tool for our purpose). The next level up is to use XSLT (part of the W3C XSL group of standards). At our level, in a very reductive and simple way, the key difference between CSS and XSLT is that CSS doesn’t touch the XML source. It merely adds style. XSLT, on the other hand, […]