We currently have a webapp running in AWS Region Ireland (service for the UK) and are planing to expand the service into the US.
In order to be sure that the US users get a low latency experience we are considering mirroring the AWS resources used Ireland in the US.
The data for the US users should be stored in the US region, the UK data in Ireland. (There is no need to report across both regions).
We are thinking of building a centralised login services that runs in the Ireland region. After successful login the user will be redirected to the region where his data is stored. (The login service has to know in which region the data is stored)
Has anyone built something similar? Any recommendation how to approach this?
Would Amazon Cognito support such a setup (if we build the login service based on cognito)?
Currently Amazon Cognito does not support this out of the box.
But if you use Cognito User Pools with Federated identities the credentials you get can be used in any AWS region. Along with that you can store a custom attribute for the user defining the region to which that user belongs and then redirect them accordingly.
Related
We have a site for our customers to log onto to get their relevant data. We have set it up on AWS using Cognito for user authentication. Each customer navigates to the same URL, enters their credentials, and then gets shown their own information. One of our customers has a corporate policy for any SaaS offering requiring a SSO (using SAML2.0). Our other customers do not need the SSO mechanism.
I have read through the documents AWS provides: (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/singlesignon/index.html) but these appear to be focused on a single corporation with AWS accounts for services provided by AWS. I have not been able to find any articles that address the situation.
Specific questions I have:
Is the AWS SSO mechanism the correct mechanism to use to achieve the goals? I have read in one Q&A that it is better to manipulate this through Cognito (but I cannot find the relevant article to link here).
If we set up one company to use SSO, can other companies use the credentials we set up to go to the same site?
Can we set up multiple companies to use the SSO separately, or will the application of a second SAML overwrite the first? (this doesn't seem likely as their would be updates to applicable users).
Any articles that can help point me in the best direction is greatly appreciated
AWS SSO would be a different AWS service you would have to integrate your application with.
If you're already using Cognito, you should be adding their SAML provider as a Cognito identity pool instead of adding AWS SSO.
From AWS docs:
When to Create an IAM User (Instead of a Role)
...
You want to use the command-line interface (CLI) to work with AWS.
When to Create an IAM Role (Instead of a User)
- You're creating an application that runs on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance and that application makes requests to AWS.
- You're creating an app that runs on a mobile phone and that makes requests to AWS.
- Users in your company are authenticated in your corporate network and want to be able to use AWS without having to sign in again—that is, you want to allow users to federate into AWS.
But it seems like companies heavily use roles for everything:
Role for groups by creating roles with specific policies and creating custom policies to apply to groups.
Assume role to use the CLI.
Switch role to use different accounts.
Is that excessive or real work based solution?
Is that excessive or real work based solution?
Based on my own experience with AWS, heavily using roles is a real work based solution because, in my company, we use only roles to give access to users (yes, we have 0 users registered in your AWS environments). I'll list the reasons why we chose this way:
We are using AWS Control Tower.
This service enables AWS Organizations with at least 3 AWS accounts to manage your organization. It'd be a mess with we had to create a user for each AWS account. Also, AWS Control Tower enables AWS Single Sign-On.
We're using AWS Single Sign-On.
This service correlates multiples AWS accounts with multiples roles with multiples users. Description:
AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is a cloud SSO service that makes it easy to centrally manage SSO access to multiple AWS accounts and business applications. With just a few clicks, you can enable a highly available SSO service without the upfront investment and on-going maintenance costs of operating your own SSO infrastructure. With AWS SSO, you can easily manage SSO access and user permissions to all of your accounts in AWS Organizations centrally. AWS SSO also includes built-in SAML integrations to many business applications, such as Salesforce, Box, and Office 365. Further, by using the AWS SSO application configuration wizard, you can create Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 integrations and extend SSO access to any of your SAML-enabled applications. Your users simply sign in to a user portal with credentials they configure in AWS SSO or using their existing corporate credentials to access all their assigned accounts and applications from one place.
Please, check out some features offered by this service. There are a lot of benefits using roles instead of users. In my point of view, with AWS SSO, AWS itself facilitates the use of roles.
The only disadvantage I found is that every time I need to use AWS CLI, I need to access AWS SSO portal, copy the credentials and paste in my terminal because credentials expires after some time. But in the end, this disadvantage is small compared to the security that this process offers - if my computer is stolen, AWS CLI couldn't be accessed because of credentials expiration.
I am setting up our telephony system in AWS and we're utilizing AWS Single Sign On for our primary SAML authentication. This has worked fine for normal cli and console access but has kind of been a struggle for implementing Amazon Connect through the SSO Cloud Applications configuration.
Background
I have done a proof of concept with a single Amazon Connect instance and was able to federate login with a number of different permissions sets to simulate admin, developer, and user access for the single instance. This worked fine until I started adding additional instances and each time any user permission set tries to login to Amazon Connect they get Session Expired on the Connect screen.
Our setup is as follows:
Root account contains AWS SSO Directory
Dev Account has 1 Connect instance in the east
QA Account has 2 Connect instances total in east and west
Prod account has 2 Connect instances total in east and west
A lot of the documentation I've been reading seems it assumes the Amazon Connect instances are in the same account as the Amazon SSO service. Additionally the documentation mentions creating additional IAM Identity Providers for each Amazon Connect instance's SAML Metadata file, and a role associated that allows the SSO user to access that instance. I see where this would work in a single account, but I don't understand how to adopt the access role and implement it as a permissions policy in AWS SSO for the user group thats logging into the instance.
I've configured everything as close as possible to the Amazon Connect SAML Setup Guide, and I'm working on troubleshooting the permissions policy stuff to configure access, I'm just at a loss.
If anyone has previous Amazon SSO experience, or has done something similar with Amazon Connect that would be greatly appreciated. I just want to be able to validate whether this is feasible in the current iteration of Amazon SSO (granted its a newer service), or we need to architect and integrate a 3rd party SSO for Amazon Connect.
Thanks!
We recently have this kind of setup and requirements and still in the testing phase but so far, it is working as expected.
In the Amazon Connect SAML Guide that you linked, there's a lacking piece of information in there with regards to the Attributes Mapping (Step 10)
Change From:
Field: https://aws.amazon.com/SAML/Attributes/Role
Value:
arn:aws:iam::<12-digit-account_id>:saml-provider/,arn:aws:iam::<12-digit-account_id>:role/
To This:
Field: https://aws.amazon.com/SAML/Attributes/Role
Value:
arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT-ID:saml-provider/IDP_PROVIDER_NAME,arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT-ID:role/ROLE_NAME
Sample Value:
arn:aws:iam::123456301789:saml-provider/AWSSSO_DevelopmentConnect,arn:aws:iam::123456301789:role/AmazonConnect_Development_Role
The Setup:
Root AWS
Configured with AWS SSO
In AWS SSO page, you can have 1 or more Amazon Connect Applications here
AmazonConnect-Development
AmazonConnect-QAEast
AmazonConnect-QAWest
Dev AWS:
You have setup Amazon Connect
AmazonConnect-Development as the Instance Name (Record the ARN)
Create a new Identity Provider (for ex: AWSSSO_DevelopmentConnect)
Create a Policy (to be attached in the Role)
Create a Role (for ex: AmazonConnect_Development_Role)
See more here for the content of Policy
In Root AWS, configure your AmazonConnect-Development application to have the Attribute Mapping pattern same with my above example value.
You also specify the Relay State URL for you want the users to be redirected to a specific Amazon Connecct application.
xxx AWS:
Same steps will be applied as the above
Key Points:
For each AWS Account:
You will need to Create Identity Provider, name it with a pattern
Create a Policy to be attached in the Role
Create a Role and Choose SAML 2.0 Federation
Checked: Allow programmatic and AWS Management Console access
Link the Identity Provider with the Role
For the Applications that you configure in the AWS SSO page, make sure the additional Attribute Mappings have the correct value
I'm doing some analysis for a customer regarding multiple end-user applications they run. Right now, both have a separate user databases and now want to provide an SSO experience.
They threw out a bunch of SSO providers, specifically the new AWS SSO service. From reading what AWS SSO, my question is, AWS SSO seems more applicable for managing internal users for a company (ie using the same credentials for JIRA, sharepoint, and their company portal) and not really applicable for handling hundreds of thousands of end-user customer accounts.
Is my understanding of the purpose of AWS SSO correct? Like, I'm sure AWS SSO could work with end-user clients, but is that the applicable use case here? Is there a better SSO provide in this case to deal with SSO for end users?
Definitely, is not a good choice for end-users.
This is the entry splash at AWS Console.
Before you can start managing SSO access to your AWS accounts, you must go to the AWS Organizations console and create an organization with All features enabled. For more information, see AWS SSO Prerequisites
Look at this splash from AWS Console
AWS Organizations console and create an organization
That phrase explains what target was created for. So you're right:
AWS SSO seems more applicable for managing internal users for a company (ie using the same credentials for JIRA, sharepoint, and their company portal) and not really applicable for handling hundreds of thousands of end-user customer accounts.
I recommend you to use AWS Cognito as Single-sign-on
Using Cognito you will have a few challenges:
The problem would be passing token(with an expiry value) from site A to B securely. There is no built in SSO facility provided by Cognito. You would have to manage the encrytion, storage & transfer of tokens yourself. Reference: How to use AWS Cognito as Single-sign-on?
Take a look at this post:
Use Amazon QuickSight Federated Single Sign-On with Amazon Cognito User Pools
Hope this gives you a little more information to accomplish your scenario.
For our product we are currently storing customer credentials hashed in db (3 tier architecture) . We want the authentication to be done at 1st tier itself ,which aws solution can be used for this ,May be AWS HSM but what changes need to be done at app layer to do this .
This is a website
using cloudfront to route across across edge
using database replication
also we have active-active multi region .
any suggestions would be useful
thanks
I agree that some further details on your architecture would help. Is this a web application, mobile app, other fat client? How are you achieving the active-active multi-region architecture at the DB? I would like to suggest AWS Cognito but the multi-region needs become a bit more complex in that scenario.
Today how do you determine which region your users are routed to? If using AWS Cognito you'd likely need to create a user pool per region but this means your users would need to be routed to the correct user pool based on their region.
I have had great luck with AWS Cognito identities from web, mobile, and fat client apps and have even used many of the Lambda integrations with Cognito for commercial grade applications. Some good examples -
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/using-amazon-cognito-user-identity-pools-javascript-examples.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/walkthrough-using-the-ios-sdk.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/setting-up-android-sdk.html