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Introduction and audience
PSU provides Single-Sign On (SSO) to authenticate and identify institutional users for web-based applications. The Shibboleth Identity Provider supports SAML and CAS protocols to provide this service. This document provides essential details required to configure an application to authenticate users with PSU’s SSO service.
While the “Steps to implement” section is guidance accessible to institutional administrative staff who might be evaluating or on-boarding a new application, this document is intended primarily as a reference for technical staff and, as such, includes terms and acronyms without further elaboration that said staff are assumed to be familiar with or that appear commonly on vendor’s intake forms.
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Steps to implement
With the vendor’s support or documentation:
Determine if accounts can be provisioned upon login or accounts must be created beforehand.
Some vendors are able to automatically create accounts for any unknown user upon successful login, sometimes called “Just-In-Time” (JIT) provisioning, while other vendors require accounts to be created before users are able to login. For the latter case, arrangements need to be made outside of SSO, such as with an integration by IAM or Banner/Enterprise Solutions, manual account creation, etc.Determine if SAML or CAS will be used.
Some applications only offer one option. If there is a choice, SAML is recommended.Determine if attributes are needed in addition to the attributes released by default.
Complete the PSU Single Sign-On Application Request Form. Provide information to the vendor about PSU’s SSO configuration.
Contact OIT's Identity and Access Management (IAM) team for assistance with the vendor’s forms or questionnaires for implementing SSO.Configure a test instance.
We recommend using a test application instance to get the application working with the SSO testing environment. If possible, keep the test instance to validate future SSO changes before they are moved to production.Configure a production instance.
Use the production information below to configure a production instance of the application.
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Organization: Portland State University
Contact: IAM Team <oit-iamteam-group@pdx.edu>
Member of InCommon: Yes
Identity Provider (IdP): Shibboleth 4.0
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Odin usernames are occasionally renamed due to special circumstances. Administrators of SSO enabled applications should subscribe to the OIT account rename notification list.
This will allow you to handle account renames in your application if necessary.
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Often a vendor will request a test account for use in setting up SSO. We do not currently have test accounts in production, but departments can set up affiliate accounts for vendors. Learn more about affiliate accounts.
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Note also that mail is often not “uid@pdx.edu” due to the possibility of aliases. Also, the domain for mail is different between production and non-production environments: @pdx.edu for production and @gtest.pdx.edu for stage.
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Inactive users will not have “member@pdx.edu” among those roles; do not use the presence of “none@pdx.edu” as this is the result of a limitation of a part of our identity management systems and should not be relied upon.
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These attributes use a controlled vocabulary from the eduPerson specification. Permissible values are faculty, student, staff, alum, member, affiliate, employee, library-walk-in. Read an explanation of what these values mean as part of the eduPersonAffiliation definition.