Passport-SAML

This is a SAML 2.0 authentication provider for Passport, the Node.js authentication library.

Passport-SAML has been tested to work with Onelogin, Okta, Shibboleth, SimpleSAMLphp based Identity Providers, and with Active Directory Federation Services.

Installation

npm install @node-saml/passport-saml

Usage

The examples utilize the Feide OpenIdp identity provider. You need an account there to log in with this. You also need to register your site as a service provider.

Configure strategy

Most of the configuration options for the Strategy constructor are passed through to the underlying node-saml library. For more details on the configuration options and how the underlying SAML flows work, see the node-saml documentation

Config parameter details

These are the Strategy parameters related directly to passport-saml. For the full list of parameters, see the node-saml documentation

additionalParams: dictionary of additional query params to add to all requests; if an object with this key is passed to authenticate, the dictionary of additional query params will be appended to those present on the returned URL, overriding any specified by initialization options' additional parameters (additionalParams, additionalAuthorizeParams, and additionalLogoutParams)
passReqToCallback: if truthy, req will be passed as the first argument to the verify callback (default: false)
name: Optionally, provide a custom name. (default: saml). Useful If you want to instantiate the strategy multiple times with different configurations, allowing users to authenticate against multiple different SAML targets from the same site. You'll need to use a unique set of URLs for each target, and use this custom name when calling passport.authenticate() as well.

Examples

The SAML identity provider will redirect you to the URL provided by the path configuration.

const SamlStrategy = require('@node-saml/passport-saml').Strategy;
[...]

passport.use(
  new SamlStrategy(
    {
      path: "/login/callback",
      entryPoint:
        "https://openidp.feide.no/simplesaml/saml2/idp/SSOService.php",
      issuer: "passport-saml",
      cert: "fake cert", // cert must be provided
    },
    function (profile, done) {
      // for signon
      findByEmail(profile.email, function (err, user) {
        if (err) {
          return done(err);
        }
        return done(null, user);
      });
    },
    function (profile, done) {
      // for logout
      findByNameID(profile.nameID, function (err, user) {
        if (err) {
          return done(err);
        }
        return done(null, user);
      });
    }
  )
);

Configure strategy for multiple providers

You can pass a getSamlOptions parameter to MultiSamlStrategy which will be called before the SAML flows. Passport-SAML will pass in the request object so you can decide which configuration is appropriate.

const { MultiSamlStrategy } = require('@node-saml/passport-saml');
[...]

passport.use(
  new MultiSamlStrategy(
    {
      passReqToCallback: true, // makes req available in callback
      getSamlOptions: function (request, done) {
        findProvider(request, function (err, provider) {
          if (err) {
            return done(err);
          }
          return done(null, provider.configuration);
        });
      },
    },
    function (req, profile, done) {
      // for signon
      findByEmail(profile.email, function (err, user) {
        if (err) {
          return done(err);
        }
        return done(null, user);
      });
    },
    function (req, profile, done) {
      // for logout
      findByNameID(profile.nameID, function (err, user) {
        if (err) {
          return done(err);
        }
        return done(null, user);
      });
    }
  )
);

The options passed when the MultiSamlStrategy is initialized are also passed as default values to each provider. e.g. If you provide an issuer on MultiSamlStrategy, this will be also a default value for every provider. You can override these defaults by passing a new value through the getSamlOptions function.

Using multiple providers supports validateInResponseTo, but all the InResponse values are stored on the same Cache. This means, if you're using the default InMemoryCache, that all providers have access to it and a provider might get its response validated against another's request. Issue Report. To amend this you should provide a different cache provider per SAML provider, through the getSamlOptions function.

Please note that in the above examples, findProvider(), findByNameId(), and findByEmail() are examples of functions you need to implement yourself. These are just examples. You can implement this functionality any way you see fit. Please note that calling getSamlOptions() should result in done() being called with a proper SAML Configuration (see the TypeScript typings for more information) and the done() callbacks for the second and third arguments should be called with an object that represents the user.

Provide the authentication callback

You need to provide a route corresponding to the path configuration parameter given to the strategy:

The authentication callback must be invoked after the body-parser middleware.

const bodyParser = require("body-parser");

app.post(
  "/login/callback",
  bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false }),
  passport.authenticate("saml", {
    failureRedirect: "/",
    failureFlash: true,
  }),
  function (req, res) {
    res.redirect("/");
  },
);

Authenticate requests

Use passport.authenticate(), specifying saml as the strategy:

app.get(
  "/login",
  passport.authenticate("saml", { failureRedirect: "/", failureFlash: true }),
  function (req, res) {
    res.redirect("/");
  },
);

...or, if you wish to add or override query string parameters:

app.get(
  "/login",
  passport.authenticate("saml", {
    additionalParams: { username: "user@domain.com" },
  }),
  function (req, res) {
    res.redirect("/");
  },
);

In addition to passing the additionalParams option to passport.authenticate, you can also pass samlFallback, either as "login-request" or "logout-request". By default, this is set to "login-request". However, in the case of the req.query and the req.body not containing a SAMLRequest or SAMLResponse, this can be used to dictate which request handler is used in cases where it can not be determined by these standard properties.

generateServiceProviderMetadata( decryptionCert, signingCert )

For details about this method, please see the documentation at node-saml.

The generateServiceProviderMetadata method is also available on the MultiSamlStrategy, but needs an extra request and a callback argument (generateServiceProviderMetadata( req, decryptionCert, signingCert, next )), which are passed to the getSamlOptions to retrieve the correct configuration.

Usage with Active Directory Federation Services

Here is a configuration that has been proven to work with ADFS:

  {
    entryPoint: 'https://ad.example.net/adfs/ls/',
    issuer: 'https://your-app.example.net/login/callback',
    callbackUrl: 'https://your-app.example.net/login/callback',
    idpCert: 'MIICizCCAfQCCQCY8tKaMc0BMjANBgkqh ... W==',
    authnContext: ['http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/authenticationmethod/windows'],
    identifierFormat: null
  }

Please note that ADFS needs to have a trust established to your service in order for this to work.

For more detailed instructions, see ADFS documentation.

SLO (single logout)

Passport-SAML has built in support for SLO from Node-SAML.

Note: Fully functional IdP initiated SLO support is not provided out of the box. You have to inspect your use cases / implementation / deployment scenarios (location of IdP in respect to SP) and consider things / cases listed e.g. at issue(s) #221 and #419. This library provides you a mechanism to veto "Success" result but it does not provide hooks/interfaces to implement support for IdP initiated SLO which would work under all circumstances. You have to do it yourself.

ChangeLog

See Releases to find the changes that go into each release. Additionally, see the CHANGELOG.

FAQ

Is there an example I can look at?

Gerard Braad has provided an example app at https://github.com/gbraad/passport-saml-example/

Node Support Policy

We only support Long-Term Support versions of Node.

We specifically limit our support to LTS versions of Node, not because this package won't work on other versions, but because we have a limited amount of time, and supporting LTS offers the greatest return on that investment.

It's possible this package will work correctly on newer versions of Node. It may even be possible to use this package on older versions of Node, though that's more unlikely as we'll make every effort to take advantage of features available in the oldest LTS version we support.

As each Node LTS version reaches its end-of-life we will remove that version from the node engines property of our package's package.json file. Removing a Node version is considered a breaking change and will entail the publishing of a new major version of this package. We will not accept any requests to support an end-of-life version of Node. Any merge requests or issues supporting an end-of-life version of Node will be closed.

We will accept code that allows this package to run on newer, non-LTS, versions of Node.

Project History

The project was started by @bergie in 2012 based on Michael Bosworth's express-saml library. From 2014 - 2016, @ploer served as primary maintainer. @markstos served the primary maintainer from 2017 till 2020 when he created the node-saml organization. With a goal to create a team of maintainers, invitations were sent to major contributors and fork authors to work together to maintain all the improvements in one place.

Since 2020, @cjbath emerged as the primary maintainer, with major contributions from @gugu and @zoellner. Major updates from the team included rewriting the project in TypeScript and splitting off a node-saml module which can be used without Passport. Almost 100 other developers have contributed improvements to the project.

The project continues to be maintained by volunteers. Contributions small and large are welcome.

Copyright Notices

“OASIS”, “SAML”, and “Security Assertion Markup Language” are trademarks of OASIS, the open standards consortium where the SAML specification is owned and developed. SAML is a copyrighted © work of OASIS Open. All rights reserved.

node-saml / passport-saml

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