5 posts tagged with "osso"

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Add SAML SSO to a Rails 6 app

Sam Bauch

Sam Bauch

Co-founder
rails saml abstract

SAML Background#

SAML SSO refers to an authentication mechanism preferred by enterprise companies. The SSO part stands for Single Sign-On. From the enterprise’s perspective, they desire a centralized service where their employees can authenticate, which then provides authenticated access to the applications they use for work. These services are called Identity Providers (IDPs), and they are the Single place where enterprise employees Sign-On. This is an alternative to employees using password-based authentication for each of the various applications they use.

The SAML part stands for Secure Assertion Markup Language. SAML utilizes a domain-specific flavor of XML that describes an authenticated user, encoded to a string and passed to your application in a query parameter. Your application decodes the SAMLResponse using a key that the enterprise provides to you.

All about Identity Providers

Sam Carmichael

Sam Carmichael

Co-founder
IDP

The ABCs of IDPs#

Identity Providers (IDPs) are a category of software applications responsible for managing employee access to the various third party applications (AKA Service Providers) that modern enterprise companies rely on.

SAML vs. OAuth

Sam Bauch

Sam Bauch

Co-founder

An Engineer’s Guide to Enterprise-grade Single Sign-on#

OAuth and SAML are both open specifications for exchanging access credentials for a specific user between an identity provider and an application. When a user wants to sign in to an app using either SAML or OAuth, they are sent to a third party where the user must already be registered. They sign in to this third party, and get sent back to the application. The mechanisms differ, but both SAML and OAuth involve using secrets to securely exchange information about the user in order for the application to begin an authenticated session for the user.

What is SAML?

Sam Carmichael

Sam Carmichael

Co-founder

So, you’ve started a SaaS company...#

You launched, iterated, proved product / market fit, wooed early customers and built up a strong funnel of new leads. Congrats! 🥳

Then one day, one of your sales team members comes to you with a request from a new lead: “We're SO close to closing a huge enterprise customer, but... they just asked me if we support SAML SSO. Do we have that?”

You might not, not yet. But you probably should if you want to move upmarket 📈.

Introducing Osso

Sam Bauch

Sam Bauch

Co-founder

👋 Hi!#

For the past few months we've been hard at work building Osso, a free, open-source service for adding SAML-based Single Sign-On (SSO) to your application. It will allow your company to enable SSO integration in hours instead of days, freeing your team up to build the innovative features your customers really want.

Customers