The Internet of Everything (IoE) is coming. There’s no denying that. Security professionals are screaming for solutions to avoid a security disaster with the proliferation of connected devices. Every week we see announcements of smart devices entering the market. Manufacturers are rushing to get their newest and smartest things and gadgets out to the consumers, sometimes forgetting to secure those things.
We are doing our work to help improve the situation. With the latest release of our identity and access management (IAM) solution, we’re extending our support towards OAuth 2.0, one of the candidates to offer security for the IoE. OAuth is not about just using Facebook to authenticate a website visitor. It’s a simple and easy to integrate protocol for authorizing an entity (user, service or a device) to access a resource or application.
What Can I Do With the New Release
Ubisecure SSO supports over 20 authentication methods out-of-the-box from social to multi-factor out-of-band methods. This means that you can just flip a switch in the management interface of Ubisecure SSO, and a new authentication option will be available for the end user.No need to code a new module for your Identity Provider.
Naturally, Ubisecure SSO can act as an OAuth client, and provide all those social identities for your online services through simple configuration. But, the more interesting use cases are related to the IoE.
For basic OAuth use case for IoE, this means that any application, mobile app, or a devices can be connected to the Ubisecure SSO OAuth Authorization Server with only a few lines of code, and the client (application, app, device) can utilize any of the authentication methods supported by Ubisecure SSO. This removes the need to develop native support for authentication within the client. Once the OAuth functionality is developed within the client and connected to Ubisecure SSO, new authentication options and authentication schemes can be deployed simply through configuring Ubisecure SSO. This will streamline the development and maintenance of mobile apps, devices and applications requiring authentication.
To extend this use case, where an entity has been authorized to use a resource, Ubisecure SSO supports something called “On Behalf” use case. This allows the online service to access further resources acting on behalf of the user and authorizing the transactions with the user identity. This is particularly useful if the information the user needs is distributed in multiple systems and requires authorized access.
We live in an API economy. Loads of online services request data from external sources through APIs. Some of these APIs are commercial, and to use them, you have to subscribe / license the use of the API (and the data). OAuth provides an easy-to-implement way for managing access to these commercial APIs from one online service to another. Ubisecure’s IAM solution also has the tools necessary to efficiently manage thousands of customer accounts for commercial data providers.
In a nutshell, the new version of Ubisecure SSO can:
- Integrate any OAuth identity such as Facebook or LinkedIn for your online service to capture visitors and turn them into paying customers
- Shorten the time-to-market of your application, mobile app or device requiring authentication
- Provide easy to implement authentication through code examples and developer support
- Streamline your client and resource server development and maintenance
- Allow you to use any of the 20+ supported authentication methods within your product
- React quickly to changing authentication requirements by simply removing or adding new methods through configuration of Ubisecure SSO without the need to touch the code in your client or resource server
- Simplify the management of your commercial API users, and secure the APIs properly
Ubisecure SSO is a Liberty-Alliance / Kantara interoperability certified Identity Provider product. Even in on-premise installations, Ubisecure SSO can be deployed in less than a day. Contact us to hear how quickly we can solve your authentication problems, and how your organization can start using Ubisecure’s IAM solution.
About The Author: Petteri Ihalainen
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