Federated Authentication Plugin

The Federated Authentication Plugin adds support for authentication via Federated Identity and then database access via IAM. Currently, only Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is supported.

What is Federated Identity

Federated Identity allows users to use the same set of credentials to access multiple services or resources across different organizations. This works by having Identity Providers (IdP) that manage and authenticate user credentials, and Service Providers (SP) that are services or resources that can be internal, external, and/or belonging to various organizations. Multiple Service Providers can establish trust relationships with a single IdP.

When a user wants access to a resource, it authenticates with the IdP. From this a security token generated and is passed to the SP then grants access to said resource. In the case of AD FS, the user signs into the AD FS sign in page. This generates a SAML Assertion which acts as a security token. The user then passes the SAML Assertion to the SP when requesting access to resources. The SP verifies the SAML Assertion and grants access to the user.

How to use the Federated Authentication Plugin with the AWS Advanced Python Driver

Enabling the Federated Authentication Plugin

Note

AWS IAM database authentication is needed to use the Federated Authentication Plugin. This is because after the plugin acquires SAML assertion from the identity provider, the SAML Assertion is then used to acquire an AWS IAM token. The AWS IAM token is then subsequently used to access the database.

Enable AWS IAM database authentication on an existing database or create a new database with AWS IAM database authentication on the AWS RDS Console:
- If needed, review the documentation about IAM authentication for MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
Set up an IAM Identity Provider and IAM role. The IAM role should be using the IAM policy set up in step 1.
- If needed, review the documentation about creating IAM identity providers. For AD FS, see the documentation about creating IAM SAML identity providers.
Add the plugin code federated_auth to the plugins value, or to the current driver profile.
Specify parameters that are required or specific to your case.

Federated Authentication Plugin Parameters

Parameter	Value	Required	Description	Default Value	Example Value
`db_user`	String	Yes	The user name of the IAM user with access to your database. If you have previously used the IAM Authentication Plugin, this would be the same IAM user. For information on how to connect to your Aurora Database with IAM, see this documentation.	`None`	`some_user_name`
`idp_username`	String	Yes	The user name for the `idp_endpoint` server. If this parameter is not specified, the plugin will fallback to using the `user` parameter.	`None`	`[email protected]`
`idp_password`	String	Yes	The password associated with the `idp_endpoint` username. If this parameter is not specified, the plugin will fallback to using the `password` parameter.	`None`	`some_random_password`
`idp_endpoint`	String	Yes	The hosting URL for the service that you are using to authenticate into AWS Aurora.	`None`	`ec2amaz-ab3cdef.example.com`
`iam_role_arn`	String	Yes	The ARN of the IAM Role that is to be assumed to access AWS Aurora.	`None`	`arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/adfs_example_iam_role`
`iam_idp_arn`	String	Yes	The ARN of the Identity Provider.	`None`	`arn:aws:iam::123456789012:saml-provider/adfs_example`
`iam_region`	String	Yes	The IAM region where the IAM token is generated.	`None`	`us-east-2`
`idp_name`	String	No	The name of the Identity Provider implementation used.	`adfs`	`adfs`
`idp_port`	Integer	No	The port that the host for the authentication service listens at.	`443`	`1234`
`rp_identifier`	String	No	The relaying party identifier.	`urn:amazon:webservices`	`urn:amazon:webservices`
`iam_host`	String	No	Overrides the host that is used to generate the IAM token.	`None`	`database.cluster-hash.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com`
`iam_default_port`	String	No	This property overrides the default port that is used to generate the IAM token. The default port is determined based on the underlying driver protocol. For now, there is support for PostgreSQL and MySQL. Target drivers with different protocols will require users to provide a default port.	`None`	`1234`
`iam_token_expiration`	Integer	No	Overrides the default IAM token cache expiration in seconds	`870`	`123`
`http_request_connect_timeout`	Integer	No	The timeout value in seconds to send the HTTP request data used by the FederatedAuthPlugin.	`60`	`60`
`ssl_secure`	Boolean	No	Whether the SSL session is to be secure and the server's certificates will be verified	`False`	`True`

Sample code

MySQLFederatedAuthentication.py PGFederatedAuthentication.py