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Single Sign On Solutions for Java Applications
Last updated: January 8, 2024
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
Refactor Java code safely — and automatically — with OpenRewrite.
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1. Overview
Organization users with multiple applications often need to authenticate across multiple systems. As a result, the users must remember multiple accounts and passwords. Single Sign-On (SSO) technology is a solution to this problem. SSO provides a single login credential for a set of systems.
In this tutorial, we’ll briefly explain what SSO is, and then we’ll look at seven different SSO solutions for Java applications.
2. Single Sign-On
Implementing an SSO solution can be performed using either of the two protocols:
- SAML 2.0
- OpenID Connect
SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language) simplifies user authentication. It allows users only to register and authenticate at the identity provider to access multiple services. It is based on XML. The OpenID Connect (OIDC) is the successor to SAML 2.0. Also, it is an extension to OAuth 2.0 protocol used for authentication. The OIDC is simpler to configure than SAML 2.0.
3. Keycloak
Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management (IAM) system. It provides features such as SSO, User Federation, Fine-Grained Authorization, Social Login, Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), and more. In addition, it supports OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML. It has good integration with third-party tools. For instance, it integrates really well with the Spring Boot application. The latest release can be found here. In addition, it provides a friendly admin console for administrators and developers to configure and manage Keycloak. The source code is available on GitHub.
4. WSO2 Identity Server
WSO2 Identity Server is an open-source IAM system developed by WSO2. It offers SSO, 2FA, Identity Federation, Social Login, and more. It also supports almost all popular identity standards. Moreover, it comes up with an admin console and exposes APIs for integration with other applications. However, it is mainly written in Java, and the source code is available on GitHub.
5. Gluu
Gluu is an open-source and cloud-native IAM solution with a variety of features for access management. It provides Strong Authentication, Mobile Authentication, 2FA, and Identity Brokering. Moreover, it also supports open web standards such as OpenID Connect, SAML 2.0, FIDO, and User-Managed Access. It is written in Python language. Also, the scripts to automate deployment and configuration of the Gluu Server is available on GitHub.
6. Apereo CAS
Apereo CAS is an open-source enterprise-grade SSO system. Also, it is part of the Central Authentication Service (CAS) project. Similar to previous solutions, it supports several protocols like SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and more. Also, it can integrate with uPortal, BlueSocket, TikiWiki, Mule, Liferay, Moodle, and others. It is built on top of Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. The source code is available on GitHub.
7. Spring Security OAuth2
We can use Spring Security OAuth project to implement the SSO solutions. It supports OAuth providers and OAuth consumers. In addition, we can implement 2FA functionality with a Soft Token and Spring Security.
8. OpenAM
OpenAM is an open-access management solution that includes Authentication, Authorization, SSO, and Identity Provider. It supports Cross-Domain Single Sign On (CDSSO), SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect. The latest release and source code can be found here.
9. Authelia
Authelia is an open-source authentication and authorization server that provides SSO and 2FA. It provides several hardware-based 2FA leveraging FIDO2 Webauthn compatible security keys. Moreover, it supports Time-based one-time passwords generated by apps like Google Authenticator. The Authelia server is written in the Go language, and its all source code is available on GitHub.
10. Conclusion
Many organizations use the SSO today. In this article, we took a very high-level look at the SSO solutions in the Java ecosystem. Some of the solutions provide a complete IAM, and the others just the SSO server and authentication methods.
