What is the 'de facto' answer for environments where AD isn't present?
I was going to say something about AD not supporting SAML, or federation, but it appears that my knowledge is dated. But in an enterprise where there are no Windows machines (to my knowledge,) much less Windows servers, what's the fill-in?
A lot of enterprises use SiteMinder (aka ChannelSecure), which used to be Netegrity's before they got bought out by CA. It supports both Apache and IIS, although I'm not 100% sure what the policy servers run on, it might be Windows. But I have seen LAMP apps that integrate with it, for example. It really is just an intercept-and-forward system that functions as a module on the web server and puts a few things on the HTTP headers to allow apps to handle authorization by themselves.
After about a decade of testing people's web applications, SiteMinder has defnitely emerged as the standard third-party tool for SSO.
Many years ago, it seemed like people were fairly evenly split between Siteminder and another one (I think it was called GetAccess, but the fact that I can barely remember it is probably an indication of it's current popularity).
Siteminder is a good solution (and I've probably tested about ~150 web applications over the years that are using it).
It's caused my attack plan to go from "Let's see how fundamentally broken this company's home-grown SSO solution is" to "Oh good, they use Siteminder. Let's see what areas they haven't implemented it properly in."
That's an important distinction, and the bulk of issues I've found with Siteminder over the years have all been in identifying specific pages or transactions which aren't properly using the SMSESSION. I found a forehead-slapping issue recently where there was one page that wasn't properly validating the SMSESSION (it was just checking to see that it existed). That page happened to be the "reset password" page, and it was possible through a series of redirects to modify anyone's password to whatever you wanted, even if you didn't have a valid account on the system.
And that's kind of the problem, which is that even using someone else's SSO mechanism (which, again, Siteminder is as good as any one I've seen over the years), If you've screwed up the implementation for any transaction or on any page, you're still screwed.
I was going to say something about AD not supporting SAML, or federation, but it appears that my knowledge is dated. But in an enterprise where there are no Windows machines (to my knowledge,) much less Windows servers, what's the fill-in?
*Edited the snark out.