Provisioning Steps

In order to make your application use MIT Touchstone, or Shibboleth, for authentication, several steps have to be performed. MIT Information Services offers consulting services to make this process easier. However, many people at MIT are able to perform each of these simple steps with minimal intervention from IS&T.

The information below is intended to help guide you through your configuration.

IS&T currently supports new customers intending to use Shibboleth 2.x. New installations must use Shibboleth 2.x based SPs.

Some other Linux distributions also maintain binary installers available from the OS distribution point. If you have questions about other distributions please contact touchstone-support and indicate what operating distribution and version you are using.

However, if you need to build from source, please read the following pages:

• Building Shibboleth SP on Linux  
• Building Shibboleth SP on Solaris
• Building Shibboleth SP on Mac OS X

Once you have built the software successfully, you will need to configure and customize it for use.

Please make sure that you use lower case server names in your certificate request. The server name within the certificate is case sensitive.

Information about how to generate a certificate request and where to send the request can be found in https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/WSWG/How+to+acquire+and+verify+a+M.I.T.+x509+Server+Certificate

The authentication request by the SP includes a timestamp, and the IdP verifies that the timestamp is current, to prevent replay attempts. Requests with an invalid timestamp (either too far in the past, or too far in the future), will be rejected by the IdP, resulting in an error. Therefore, it is essential that your server's system clock is accurate. On Linux servers, this is typically accomplished by running ntpd, the Network Time Protocol daemon. Please make sure that such time synchronization is configured on your server.

On a Linux server, the quickest way to get started is to copy the following files from the Touchstone locker (/mit/touchstone/config/shibboleth2-sp) into /etc/shibboleth:

• attribute-map.xml
• gen-shib2.sh
• shibboleth2.xml.in

Note: If you do not have AFS installed on your server, then you can access the above files via http, either from a browser or using wget. The URL is http://web.mit.edu/touchstone/config/shibboleth2-sp/

Then run the gen-shib2.sh script, and answer the prompts, to generate shibboleth2.xml. For example:

# cd /etc/shibboleth
# cp /mit/touchstone/config/shibboleth2-sp/* .
# sh gen-shib2.sh

Note that any changes to the shibboleth2.xml, attribute-map.xml, and attribute-policy.xml files will be detected automatically, i.e. without requiring a restart of shibd.

Note: The gen-shib2.sh procedure described above is currently supported on Linux systems only; it should be portable to other UNIX-based systems with minimal effort. Please contact touchstone-support if you are using another operating system and having problems with the gen-shib2.sh script.

The $prefix/etc/shibboleth directory will contain apache.config, apache2.config, and apache22.config, which contain needed and example directives for Apache 1.3, Apache 2.0, and Apache 2.2, respectively; copy and/or include the appropriate file in your Apache config, and customize as needed.

The directory also contains a shibd init script for Red Hat (shibd-redhat) and Debian (shibd-debian) systems. The current Red Hat RPMs also install the init script into /etc/init.d/shibd, and adds it as a managed service.

On Solaris machines, the gen-shib.sh script will generate a shibd init script (from shibd.in); this should be installed into /etc/init.d, and configured to start at boot time, after httpd has started.

NOTE: shibd is a daemon that must be running, so make sure it is started at boot time, after Apache httpd has been started.

On Windows/IIS machines, the shibboleth2.xml.windows-example file in the locker is a good starting point for the shibboleth2.xml file. You will need to edit the file for it to work on your server; please see the comments at the top of the file for the details. The attribute-map.xml file in the locker should work without modification.

The Shibboleth Apache module logs by default to $prefix/var/log/httpd/native.log.

This file must be writable by Apache, which may require that you set its directory's ownership and/or permissions to allow write access by the user Apache is configured to run under. You may also choose to change the location of the file (for example to /var/log/shibboleth/httpd/native.log), by modifying the log4j.appender.native_log.fileName setting in $prefix/etc/shibboleth/native.logger, and appropriately creating the containing directory.

The Shibboleth daemon logs to shibd.log and transaction.log in $prefix/var/log/shibboleth/.

For information on configuring Shibboleth to protect content, see the Shibboleth wiki at Internet2, as well as the information in the sections below.

You will probably also want to customize the error pages and support contact information listed in the <Errors> element in $prefix/etc/shibboleth/shibboleth.xml, e.g.:

<Errors supportContact="myservice-help@mit.edu"
    logoLocation="/shibboleth-sp/logo.jpg"
    styleSheet="/shibboleth-sp/main.css"/>

The error template files are located in $prefix/etc/shibboleth/ (you can override these locations in the <Errors> element). For more information, see https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/SHIB2/NativeSPErrors

We also encourage you to send the following optional information with your registration information:

• The application URL. The actual URL which will be used to access your application.
• Your server platform. (RHEL 4, RHEL 5, Windows, Debian, Solaris, ...)

The IdP doesn't really need to know your hostname. It does need to know the Provider ID that uniquely identifies your application. Typical MIT installations that use the gen-shib.sh script (see above) hide this detail from you so that we simply need the hostname. If you want to learn more about provder ID naming please see EntityNamingat the Internet2 wiki site.

A single Shibboleth SP installation is designed to support multiple applications installed on that server, but there are different deployment and configuration strategies to support multiple applications. At MIT we recommend that each application be configured to use a separate Apache vhost, in addtion to simply creating additional ProviderIDs for each application. More information is available here:

• Shib 1.3 Add Separate Application
• Shib 2.x - NativeSPApplicationOverride

Once your SP is properly registered with the IdP, you can test your SP's configuration by visiting either the Shibboleth handler's session initiation location (https://myhost/Shibboleth.sso/DS if using the standard configuration generated by gen-shib2.sh, or https://myhost/Shibboleth.sso/Login if using the new <SSO> element available in Shibboleth 2.4 or later), or a resource protected in your Apache configuration or Shibboleth request map, e.g. https://myhost/secure. After you have authenticated successfully, you can then visit https://myhost/Shibboleth.sso/Session to display the Shibboleth session information, including a list of the available attributes. To include the attribute values in this display, edit shibboleth2.xml, and set the handler's showAttributeValues property to "true":

    <!-- Session diagnostic service. -->
    <Handler type="Session" Location="/Session" showAttributeValues="true"/>

We have some pointers to example code written in various lanaguages. We do expect the examples to increase over time. We are also creating some local documentation that covers the configuration of third party software. However, users are encouraged to look at resources outside of MIT as well. If you do find useful information please do bring it to our attention.

Some simple examples:

• Display the results of the SAML assertion in various languages.

Third party applications:

• Drupal

Web: MIT Touchstone
Email: touchstone-support@mit.edu