Single sign-on flow using JWT for cross domain authentication

Question

There is a lot of information on the web about using JWT (Json Web Token) for authentication. But I still didn't find a clear explanation of what the flow should be when using JWT tokens for a single sign-on solution in a multiple domains environment.

I work for a company which has a lot of sites on different hosts. Let's use example1.com and example2.com. We need a single sign-on solution, which means if a user authenticates on example1.com, we want him to also be authenticated on example2.com, automatically.

Using the OpenId Connect flow, I understand that the user who wants to authenticate on example1.com will first be redirected to the authentication server (or OP : "OpenId Provider"). The user authenticates on that server which then redirects him back to the original example1.com site with a signed JWT token. (I understand there is another flow which returns an intermediate token that itself can be exchanged for the real JWT token later on, but I don't think this is required for us)...

So now the user is back on example1.com and is authenticated! He can make requests, passing the JWT token in a Authentication header and the server is able to verify the signed JWT and therefore is able to identify the user. Nice!

First question :

How should the JWT token be stored on the client? There is, again, a lot of information about this, and people seem to agree that using Web Storage is the way to go rather than good old cookies. We want the JWT to be persistent between browser restarts so let's use Local Storage, not Session Storage...

Now the user can restart his browser and he will still be authenticated on example1.com, as long as the JWT token is not expired!

Also, if example1.com needs to make an Ajax request to another of our domains, I understand configuring CORS would allow that. But our main use case is not cross-domain requests, it's having a single sign-on solution!

Therefore, the main question :

Now, what should the flow be, if the user goes to example2.com and we want him to be authenticated, using the JWT token he already has? Local Storage doesn't seem to allow cross-domain access so at this point the browser can't read the JWT token to make requests to example2.com!

Should :

• The user be redirected to the authentication server again? When the user authenticated for example1.com, the authentication server may have set a cookie on the user so this new authentication request for example2.com could use that cookie to see that the user is already authenticated and immediately redirects him back to example2.com with the same JWT token?
• Or can the browser, on example2.com, access the JWT token without having to go to the authentication server again? I see there are cross-storage solutions, but are those widely used? Are they the suggested solution to a cross domain SSO environment?

We don't want anything fancy, we would be happy with the mostly used solution!

Answer 1

Redirecting the user to the central authentication service when the user is not logged in to request credentials and issue a new authentication token is the common scenario in Single Sign On systems using well-known protocols like oauth2 or OpenId Connect

However when this schema is used across domains the main drawback is that the user is going to be redirected and authenticated each time he navigates to other domain due to same-origin policy: the access token can not be shared between domains (example2.com can not access data of example1.com), so the target domain will treat user as unauthenticated, redirecting him to the central SSO service.

To prevent the authentication service from re-requesting credentials, it is common to have a session cookie (not an access token), but there is a tecnique to share data across domains using browser localStorage/cookies and a iframe pointing to an intermediate domain sso.example.com

1. To authenticate the user in example1.com, redirect him to the authentication server in sso.example.com, issue a JWT after authenticating and store it in the localStorage of this domain. After this, redirect user to the origin domain example1.com

2. Create an iframe in example2.com pointing to sso.example.com. The iframe in sso.example.com reads the JWT token and sends a message to the parent page

3. The parent page receives the message and gets the attached token continuing with the SSO flow

There is no problem with same-origin policy because sso.example.com has access to its localStorage and the communication between iframe and the parent page is allowed if origin and target domains recognize each other (see http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/cross-domain-messaging-with-postmessage)

To simplify development, we have released recently a cross domain SSO with JWT at https://github.com/Aralink/ssojwt

This method is perfectly compatible with SSO flows. It is just a way to share the authentication token without redirections and avoid unnecessary log-ins when the domains are federated