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

It’s already day 2 of the Cloud Identity Summit 2013. 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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′

Axiomatics seeks serious contender – impressions of Gartner Catalyst 2011 (#CAT11) 30,000 ft up.

I had the opportunity to fly with Axiomatics CEO, Babak Sadighi, on our trip back from San Diego to Stockholm. During the 15-hour journey, Babak and I shared our experience and impressions of the conference. Gearing up to Catalyst 2011 The week of the 23rd of July turned out to be a pretty busy one at Axiomatics. As solutions architect, I flew over to San Diego for the much anticipated Catalyst Conference. I was keen on getting the dial tone in the Identity and Access Management space. Catalyst was to be the perfect place to catch up with Gartner analysts as well as colleagues from partner companies. As a vendor of XACML solutions and pioneers of the XACML technology, my […]