Identity federation in AWS
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Identity federation is a system of trust between two parties for the purpose of authenticating users and conveying information needed to authorize their access to resources.
In this system, an identity provider (IdP) is responsible for user authentication, and a service provider (SP), such as a service or an application, controls access to resources.
By administrative agreement and configuration, the SP trusts the IdP to authenticate users and relies on the information provided by the IdP about them.
After authenticating a user, the IdP sends the SP a message, called an assertion, containing the user's sign-in name and other attributes that the SP needs to establish a session with the user and to determine the scope of resource access that the SP should grant.
Federation is a common approach to building access control systems which manage users centrally within a central IdP and govern their access to multiple applications and services acting as SPs.
AWS supports commonly used open identity standards, including Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0), Open ID Connect (OIDC), and OAuth 2.0.
Corporate user accesses the corporate Active Directory Federation Services portal sign-in page and provides Active Directory authentication credentials.
AD FS authenticates the user against Active Directory.
Active Directory returns the user’s information, including AD group membership information.
AD FS dynamically builds ARNs by using Active Directory group memberships for the IAM roles and user attributes for the AWS account IDs, and sends a signed assertion to the users browser with a redirect to post the assertion to STS.
Temporary credentials are returned using STS AssumeRoleWithSAML.
The user is authenticated and provided access to the AWS management console.