vCloud Director Federation with IBM Cloud Identity

Update: 2019/10/01

The guide was initially written for vCloud Director 9.7. From vCloud Director version 10 the SAML assertion sent from VCD for service initiated login has changed (AssertionConsumerServiceIndex with index value 0 is used instead  of ProtocolBinding). To accommodate the change, the steps 3 and 6 of the guide have small changes. The IdP initiated login will still work.

IBM Cloud Identity is a cloud SaaS Single Sign-On solution supporting multifactor authentication and identity governance. In this article I will describe how to integrate it with vCloud Director, where vCloud Director acts as a service provider and IBM Cloud Identity as an identity provider.

I have already wrote numerous posts how to federate vCloud Director with Microsoft Active Director Federation Service, VMware Identity Manager and vCenter Single Sign-On.  What makes the integration different for IBM Cloud Identity is that it does not accept vCloud Director metadata XML for simple service provider setup and thus the integration requires more steps.

IBM Cloud Identity is a SaaS service and can be for free set up in a few minutes. It is pretty straight forward and I will skip that part.

As usual, in vCloud Director as Organization Administrator we must prepare the organization for federation. It means making sure that in the in the Administration > Settings > Federation the Entity ID is not empty and up-to-date certificate is generated that will be used to trust and secure the SAML2 assertion exchange between IdP and vCloud Director. The vCloud Director autogenerated self-signed certificate has always 1 year validity, which means once a year it must be regenerated (and the IdP reconfigured). The Organization Administrator is alerted via email when the expiration date is approaching. With vCloud API it is possible to provide your own publicly trusted certificate (with possibly longer validity).

Now we can download the metadata XML from the link provided on the same screen. As mentioned above we unfortunately cannot just upload it to IBM Cloud Identity, instead we need to manually retrieve the correct information from the downloaded spring_saml_metadata.xml file.

We will need the federation certificate (<ds:X509Certificate>) saved as properly formated PEM file:
—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–
…
—–END CERTIFICATE—–

Assertion consumer service URL which is in my case: https://vcloud.fojta.com/cloud/org/ibm/saml/SSO/alias/vcd

and entityID – in my case IBM.

Now in IBM Cloud Identity we can set up the application:

1. Upload the vCloud Director federation certificate in Settings  > Certificates > Add Signer Certificate:
   
2. Create new application in Applications > Add > Custom Application and set up General details like Description, icon and Application Owners.
   
3. Now in Sign-On submenu we can enter all details we have collected from vCloud Director:
   – Sign-on Method: SAML2.0
   – Provider ID: <EntityID>
   – Assertion Consumer Service URL
   – optionally check Use identity provider initiated single sign-on checkbox and provide Target URL in BASE64 encoded string (in my case I used H5 tenant endpoint URL: https://vcloud.fojta.com/tenant/ibm which base64 encoded translates to: aHR0cHM6Ly92Y2xvdWQuZm9qdGEuY29tL3RlbmFudC9pYm0
   – Service Provider SSO URL (same as Assertion Consumer Service URL)
   – check Sign authentication response and pick Signature Althorithm RSA_SHA256
   – check Validate SAML request signature and pick the certificate from step #1
   – optionally check Encrypt assertion
   – Name Identifier: preferred_username
   – NameID Format: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:emailAddress
   
   vCloud Director 10+ changes:
   – Check Use unique ID.
   – Click on Add another URL.
   – Type a valid dummy URL that is different than the first one. For example: https://vcloud.fojta.com/login/org/ibm/saml/alias/vcd
   – Adjust Index values so they start from 0.
   
4. Uncheck: Send all known user attributes in the SAML assertion and instead provide custom list of Attributes to be used. vCloud Director supports the following attributes:
   UserName
   EmailAddress
   http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/surname
   http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/givenname
   Groups
   Role
   You can configure the mapping to each. I used preferred_username to be used for vCloud Director username (but alternatively email could be used as well) and did not map Role attribute as I will manage roles in vCloud Director and not leverage Defer to Indentity Provider Role.
   
5. Configure Access Policies and Entitlements to specify which users/groups can use vCloud Director.
6. After saving the application configuration, we can retrieve its SAML2.0 federation metadata from the link provided on the right side of the Sign-On screen.
   vCloud Director 10+ change:
   Use the (Unique ID) link below:
   
7. Back in vCloud Director > Administration > Settings > Federation check Use SAML Identity Provider and upload the downloaded metadata.xml file from the previous step.
   
8. Finally we need to import SAML users/groups and assign their role.
   

If everything done correctly you should be able to login both from IBM Cloud Identity and vCloud Director with the IdP user.

vCloud Director Federation with VMware Identity Manager

Although in the past I have already blogged about vCloud Director federation with VMware Workspace and Microsoft AD FS I still have not wrote a guide how to achieve organization federation with VMware Identity Manager.

VMware Identity Manager (VIDM) is Single Sign-On solution that integrates with multiple identity providers (such as Active Directory) and offers App Store like access to multiple subscribed services with adaptive access (including multi factor authentication such as VMware Verify, DUO or RSA SecurID).

Users can easily log in into multiple different cloud services from a single page thanks to SSO. One such service can be vCloud Director and this article describes how to achieve this.

VIDM is provided as virtual appliance that can be deployed in  a load balanced distributed or simple configuration with external Microsoft SQL database or for evaluation purposes with embedded PostgreSQL. It is also provided as a cloud service.

I have deployed in my lab VIDM 3.2 in a single embedded database configuration and connected it to my lab Active Directory. VIDM also provides its own internal IdP (System Domain) so can be used also without an external AD/LDAP.

1. In vCloud Director Organization enable Federation by setting Entity ID to Org Name (or any other unique string), generate fresh certificate and download Metadata from the link provided (file spring_saml_metadata.xml). This can be done as system or Organization Administrator.
2. In VIDM go to Catalog and create new web application. You have to be logged in as VIDM Administrator. Write application name, description and upload nice icon and choose category. 
3. In the next screen keep Authentication Type SAML 2.0 and paste the xml metadata from step #1 into the URL/XML window. Scroll down to Advanced Properties. 
4. In Advanced Properties we will keep the defaults but add Custom Attribute Mappings which describe how VIDM user attributes will translate to VCD user attributes. Here is the list:

Name                                                               Value
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UserName                                                           ${user.userName}
EmailAddress                                                       ${user.email}
http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/surname      ${user.lastName}
http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/givenname    ${user.firstName}
Groups                                                             CokeAdmins
Roles                                                              ${user.employeeID}

Format is always basic and namespace is blank. Let me explain what is going on here. The first two mappings should be clear. UserName specify how will the user be recognized by vCloud Director and EmailAddress will be his/her email address for notifications. The next two parameters contain given name and surname which VCD will combine into full name. Not sure why the assertion name needs to be specified in such long format but only this way it worked for me. In theory you could also pass ‘fullname’ if you have field in your directory that contains full name (my Active Director does not).

Next we have Groups. I do not know how to pass AD groups in a dynamic way, so this is a hardcoded example – all users who use this SaaS definition will belong to CokeAdmins group. You can obviously omit this if you will only import users by name.

The last property is Role – again this is optional and should be used only if we want to manage roles in IdPs and not in VCD, where we would import the user with Defer to Identity Provider role – see here for more details. I am using here unused AD Employee ID field. 

5. Now we can finish the wizard by clicking next, select access policy (keep default) and reviewing the Summary on the next screen. As last step we can click Save & Assign, where we are presented to select users that should have this newly created App in their catalog.
6. Next we need to retrieve metadata configuration of VIDM – this is by going back to Catalog (all the way up) and clicking Settings. From SAML Metadata download Identity Provider (IdP) metadata. 
7. Now we can finalize SAML configuration in vCloud Director. Still on Federation page click Use SAML Identity Provider checkbox and import the downloaded metadata (idp.xml) with Browse and Upload buttons and click Apply. 
8. From now on, login screen will default to SAML authentication, but you can always revert to local authentication with: https://<vcloud_fqdn>/cloud/org/<org-name>/login.jsp
   However, we first need to import some users/groups to be able to use SAML. You might need to re-login to see the option to add SAML users and groups. You can import VIDM users by their user name or group (the hardcoded name CokeAdmins). We can assign role or optionally leverage Defer to IdP (if you have role field populated in AD). 
9. Login to VIDM and click on the application tile to be logged straight into VCD Organization (the Flex legacy UI). 

You can also directly enter the Flex or HTML 5 URL and you will be redirected to VIDM login screen.

As mentioned in step 4, I am managing user roles from Active Directory so I just need to import one group into VCD with Defer to IdP role and I am done with user management in VCD. The role field that VIDM uses is EmployeeID, however that field in AD can have only numerical value and VCD expects role as text string. The workaround I am using is that in AD I actually use User Description field and then in VIDM I have changed the mapping. So lets first have a look how it looks in AD:

Here is my VIDM custom AD IdP mapping:

 

How To Disable Local System Administrator Accounts in vCloud Director

For some time there has been a hidden security feature in vCloud Director that allows disabling local system administrator accounts. During vCloud Director installation a default local system administrator account is created. The user credentials are stored encrypted in the vCloud Director database but there is no way to enforce complex password policies other than Account Lockout Policy.

It is possible to configure external identity sources such us generic LDAP for basic authentication and SAML2 IdP (such as vCenter SSO). The authentication and thus also the password policies are than managed externally. However, when you try to delete or disable all local system administrator accounts you will get the following error:

Cannot delete or deactivate the last system administrator.

This is a built in protection against completely locking yourself out when the external identity sources are not available.

Some customers can have the need to enforce strict security rules on all vCloud Director system administrator logins. There is a non-documented way to disable all local system administrator accounts with a single command. The system administrator can run the following cell-management-tool  command to enable config property local.sysadmin.disabled.

$VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n local.sysadmin.disabled -v true

Immediately after the property is enabled, authentication with local accounts will stop working. It means authentication for all local system administrator accounts that exist in vCloud Director (not just the default account created during installation) will be rejected. Organization local accounts will not be affected.

In case access to external IdPs is lost, the system admin can again disable the property to regain access to vCloud Director:

$VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n local.sysadmin.disabled -v false