Category: Security

Oracle Cloud Security is Openly Social

Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) protects Oracle IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and On-Premises applications. Oracle IDCS provides federated single-sign on experience to its clients. It follows open standards such as SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect 1.0. In the federation model, Oracle IDCS can either act as an Identity Provider (IdP) or a Service Provider (SP) or both.

Oracle IDCS has a built-in feature that provides multiple social identity providers such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It uses underlying OAuth 2.0 protocol to interact with the Social Identity providers. This article presents how to configure IDCS to allow for Social Logins. Let me explain this concept with the sequence diagram below:

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Hey Dude, where’s my keys?

I was asked recently to speak at a Developer forum about ways to make life easier for developers to secure their applications in the cloud. The session was great and lots of questions were asked but perhaps the most surprising question asked was from a developer who wants to integrate a custom application with Oracle Identity Cloud. This developer needs access to the public keys used by Identity Cloud Service before a user has authenticated to the service. More importantly, the developer needs the keys represented in the JWK format. According to the specification, a JSON Web Key (JWK) is a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data structure that represents a cryptographic key.

There are very valid reasons why the developer needs access to the public keys without an authenticated session. Public keys let someone verify the signature on something signed with the associated private key or encrypt a message to send to you.

The developer asked Can I get a JWK from Oracle Identity Cloud Service without an OAuth Access Token?

The answer is simple… YES!!! There are two important API’s available in Oracle Identity Cloud Service

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Policy Based Multi Factor Authentication

In my previous article, Securing Applications with Multi Factor Authentication I discussed how to roll out basic MFA. While this is great if your requirements are very straightforward, there are times when you’ll need a more sophisticated approach. One of the most common examples that I get asked about is how to challenge users for Multi Factor Authentication only when they are connecting remotely from home or when traveling.

In this article I use an example where the business requirement is to enforce MFA for people in the Customer Relations department who are accessing protected applications when they are not on the corporate network. I’ll explain how to configure policies and rules that allow users connected to the corporate network to login with just their User ID and Password, while users connected remotely will need to use Multi Factor Authentication to access protected applications.

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Teaching best practices to Design, Build, Secure and Monitor APIs

In this blog, I want to share my experience after having created many APIs using different approaches and technologies. I am going to encapsulate a simple process that will help you construct APIs, starting from scratch with an idea or requirement and move it all along to a happy consumption.

The best part of APIs is that they are microservices enablers, which implies that they are not technology prescriptive, so in this blog you will see that your APIs can be implemented using any technology or programming language.

I decided to use “Jokes” as the vehicle to explain the APIs construction best practices, mainly because jokes are a simple concept that anyone can relate to, but also because I want you to feel compelled to consume these APIs and by doing so, get a laugh or two.

My original idea with jokes is to:

  1. Get a random joke.
  2. Translate the joke to any language.
  3. Share the original or the translated joke with a friend via SMS.

This is the high-level view of how our end solution will look like:

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Access Management and Micro-services – Part 4: Enabling Other Teams and Inter-Service Authentication

Previously in this series we have examined what is required on an Access Management side in order to support a micro-services architecture, providing services for authentication, user management, assurance, etc. In this post, we expand the scope, looking at how to enable new services to easily implement access and authorisation appropriately, as well as a discussion about how they can authenticate to each other. Ultimately the creation of a secure system involves security of all parts, not just the access management services which facilitate it, and so this post focuses upon working towards enabling that. Security is also built upon organisational culture, and while it is a little difficult to instil that through a blog post, taking steps to create a technical foundation which allows the Access Management teams to be open and collaborative instead of being the team that says ‘no’ is unlikely hinder such cultural development.

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Access Management and Micro-services – Part 3: Advanced Authorisation and Assurance

Continuing from the previous post which dealt with the core concepts around performing authentication and authorisation in a distributed environment, this post expands upon those concepts, looking at additional factors for authorisation decisions, including supplementary information, authentication challenges and risk assessment. While basic authentication and authorisation requirements can be met through the use of JWTs and OAuth, this post shifts to tackling bespoke requirements, outlining potential services which could provide capabilities above and beyond what is captured in those standards.

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Access Management and Micro-services – Part 2: Authentication and Authorisation

In the previous post in this series we examined at a high-level how responsibilities for authentication and authorisation are distributed in a micro-services architecture. In this post, the strategies and technologies that underpin the implementation of authentication and authorisation will be explored further, with the core access management services providing authentication services, which support individual services performing authorisation. This discussion is actually split across two posts, as authentication and authorisation are core parts of the access management services, and require extensive discussion, with this post focusing upon the core capabilities, and the following post focussing upon more advanced authentication and authorisation requirements.

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