Part 2: Custom Login and Logout with Detached Credential Collector (DCC)

INTRODUCTION

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available. In Part 1: Getting under the covers of Detached Credential Collector (DCC), I spent time talking about DCC in general and walked through a sequence diagram explaining what is happening with DCC, to try and explain how it works including contrasting it with ECC. So in this blog, Part 2, I want to expand into a more practical angle on the requirements of a totally custom login and logout. Creating a custom login and logout does not require the Perl scripts login.pl or logout.pl, though these are perfectly great options and can also be customized. If you do want to take the route of using the OAM out-of-the-box Perl scripts you can find more information about it and its implementation in the Oracle Developer Guide for OAM 11g (11.1.2) in section 4.4 Developing User the Detached Credential Collector or see Debasish Bhattacharya’s blog article Detached Credential Collector Configuration --- OAM 11gR2. Moving forward, and as promised, I am going to guide you on how to create a totally custom login and logout using DCC without requiring any hardcore developer skills --- I promise.

OAM Post Authentication operation

Since OAM 10g days, keeping track of Protected Resource that user wanted to access throughout custom authentication process has been a challenge. In OAM 10g, it was possible to create custom OBFormLoginCookie to overcome that challenge. With the introduction of Encrypted OAM_REQ cookie in OAM 11g, it is not feasible. That makes it difficult to do post Authentication operations or any customizations in Authentication process.

OAM 11gR2 introduced a feature where you can redirect user to a URL post successful Authentication (On Authentication success event in Authentication policy as defined in the screen shot below). OAM while doing that redirect, adds end_url query parameter to URL with the value of protected resource that user tried to access. You can do any post Authentication processing required on Authentication success URL and then redirect user to end_url.

A Beginner's HowTo on Social Federation with OAM Mobile & Social

Introduction

Social Federation: a somewhat fancy name for a simple concept. We want to leverage identities in Social Network providers in our own applications. For example, granting access to either cloud or on-premise applications to end users using their Google identities. In this post we're going to take a close look at the necessary configuration in OAM M&S (Oracle Access Manager Mobile & Social) server to have Java Web applications leveraging Google and LinkedIn identities.

Conceptually, this is very similar to SAML-based federation model indeed. The difference is that we are now dealing with different protocols, like OpenID and OAuth. And the main appeal for federation keeps being the acceptance of third party identities by a service provider (a.k.a. relying party) without the need of having end user passwords stored locally.

Exposing User System Attributes in OIM 11gR2PS2 GUI Customization

Introduction

Recently while working with a customer to help with an upgrade from OIM 11gR1 to 11gR2PS2, one interesting request came up regarding OIM GUI customization.

The requirement was to expose some User System Attributes that in R1 were directly available in the GUI customization data but in R2 are not exposed in the GUI Customization options.

There is a way in R2 to easily expose the data using a custom Managed Bean along with some GUI tweaks.

The process for customizing the OIM UI is easy enough and well documented in the OIM Customization Guide.

The following content takes you through the steps for exposing the User System Attributes.

Part 1: Getting under the covers of Detached Credential Collector (DCC)

Introduction

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available. The Detached Credential Collector (DCC) feature was introduced with the release of OAM 11gR2 --- 11.1.2.0.0.   DCC brought some very interesting changes in the authentication model that in my opinion are very welcome; more on that later.  There is already Oracle documentation out there on this feature, along with an A-Team blog article Debasish Bhattacharya created (Detached Credential Collector Configuration – OAM 11GR2) , which adds some more insight on configuring DCC.  This blog is to enlighten everyone with some more information on what is going on with DCC, both for login and logout.  Then in Part 2 – Custom Login and Logout with Detached Credential Collector, I want to clear up some confusion on how many may think using DCC can only be done with the Oracle supplied login.pl and logout.pl Perl scripts; that is far from the truth.   So let’s dig in and expose some of the mysteries of the Detached Credential Collector.