Architectural Design of a Conformative Authentication Service for Security Platforms

Sammanfattning: Authentication services in security platforms often need to handle different types of systems which have various requirements regarding the authentication. These requirements can often interfere with each other and the issue here is that the authentication service often needs to be manually adjusted to comply with these requirements. Therefore there is a need for a flexible architectural design which enables changes and could open up for new emerging technologies and possibilities. This thesis presents an architectural design of a conformative authentication service based on SAML 2.0 to be used in security platforms. In this thesis a requirements analysis was performed and an architectural design was developed. The architectural design presented in this thesis is conformative in various aspects, e.g. usage of various authentication methods, versatile handling of attributes, handling of various SAML 2.0 profiles, possibilities to participate in various identity federations and handling of legacy systems not supporting SAML. In addition, an evaluation comparing the candidate architectural design presented in this thesis with a currently active architectural design was performed. This evaluation showed that the candidate architectural design was considered better for more usage scenarios.