Identity & Access Management

Ready to roll at the Cloud Identity Summit 2013, Napa #CISNapa

It’s already day 2 of the Cloud Identity Summit. Day 1 focused on workshops and so will day 2 along with bootcamps and interops including workshops on Microsoft Identity & the Cloud. Standards will be hailed like never before: OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SCIM will be represented in a standards-focused workshop while SAML, the star of the conference, will be highlighted in a hands-on demo of PingFederate by John Da Silva. In the afternoon, I will have the privilege of completing the standards quintet as I take on my developer hat to talk about XACML, and the latest efforts around REST and JSON APIs / encoding for XACML 3.0. I will be uploading my slides later for those of […]

Policy Enforcement Points

How to send a XACML request using Perl

In a previous post, I mention how I used cURL to send a XACML request to an Axiomatics XACML Policy Decision Point (PDP). My goal, however, wasn’t to use cURL but rather whip up a sample in Perl. Perl is perhaps my third love in terms of programming languages. As a kid, I learned programming with Pascal. Later, as a teen, I went across to web programming and PHP. In my first uni. student placement I was tasked with writing Perl code which opened up a whole new world of scripting. These days, most of what I do revolves around XACML, the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language. XACML defines an architecture to apply fine-grained, externalized authorization to any type of […]

XACML Bites

How to send a XACML request using cURL – the world’s smallest Policy Enforcement Point

Recently, I’ve been asked to write a policy enforcement point (PEP) in Perl. I haven’t touched Perl in a long while but I remember having had fun using it to parse documents on a file system back in 2003 when working at the Natural Languages Lab at BT Adastral Park. I started looking around at different resources. The obvious ones are: http://www.perl.org/: the home of all Perl resources. ActiveState Perl: possibly the de facto Perl distribution Perlmonks: a great Perl forum where I used to hang out, and Perl for Eclipse: EPIC, the Perl Editor and IDE for Eclipse – pretty much all I do these days is in and around Eclipse (from SQL and LDAP to ALFA, the Axiomatics […]

XACML Bites

Call out to a XACML Policy Decision Point (PDP) from PHP

Today, I have the pleasure to invite a fellow colleague, Patrick McDowell, to post on my blog. Today’s topic is around reaching out to other languages other than just Java and C# for XACML-based authorization. Today’s choice? PHP, naturellement as both Patrick and I are huge WordPress fans. If you have been programming in PHP it is very likely that you have interacted with an external authentication service. For example Google and Facebook provide external authentication services that people can use to allow other providers to authenticate users for you using standard protocols such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID. Once a user has been authenticated, we then need to determine what that user is authorized to do inside of an […]

XACML Bites

A neat MS SQL treat: convert from count(*) to a bit (or boolean)

I was busy writing a sample application for a retail company where I wanted to express a XACML authorization policy that would state that a user can sell an item if it hasn’t already been sold. I knew whether the item was sold by simply running a SQL PIP retrieving the count(*) of that item id in the sales contracts. But I wanted to have a boolean attribute in the XACML policy: A user can sell if the item is not sold (i.e. sold==false). So I went looking around for a means to convert count(*) into a MS SQL bit (the boolean datatype). And the answer is: select cast(count(*) as bit) as sold from salecontracts where identifier=’9700E2EA-8545-4F26-91A1-1F5E7953E3A4′