Single Sign On without cookies in Java

问题:

I keep on facing this question from my manager how SSO will work if client disable cookies but I don't have any answer. We are currently using JOSSO for single sign on. Do we have any open source framework which support single sign on without using cooking mechanism.

回答1:

In the absence of cookies, you're going to have to embed some parameter in each url request. e.g. after logging in you assign some arbitrary id to a user and embed that in every link such as http://mydomain.com/main?sessionid=123422234235235. It could get pretty messy since every link would have to be fixed up before it went out the door which slows down your content. It also has security, logging and session history implications which are not such a huge deal when the state is in a cookie.

It may be simpler to do a simple cookie test on logged in users and send them off to an error page if they do not have cookies enabled.

回答2:

The CAS project passes a "ticket" from the sign on server to the consuming application as a url query parameter, the consuming app then makes a back channel request back to the sign on server to validate the ticket's authenticity. This negates the need for cookies and therefore works across domains however it is a bit "chatty"

Another arguably more robust solution is to use a product based on SAML which is an industry standard for cross domain single sign on. There are a couple of open source products out there which use SAML and CAS itself has a SAML extension however they are typically quite complex to setup. Cloudseal is also based on SAML and is much simpler to use. The Cloudseal platform itself is delivered as a managed service but all the client libraries are open source

Of course with all these solutions you are simply passing a security context from one server to another, the consuming application will no doubt create it's own local session so you would then need to use URL rewriting instead of cookies

Disclaimer: I work for Cloudseal :)