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Configure Active Directory Federation Services

In this topic

  1. Required information
  2. Register AD FS as the SAML IDP with your portal
  3. Register your portal as the trusted service provider with AD FS

You can configure Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) in the Microsoft Windows Server operating system as your identity provider (IDP) for SAML logins in ArcGIS Enterprise. The configuration process involves two main steps: registering your SAML IDP with Portal for ArcGIS and registering Portal for ArcGIS with the SAML IDP.

Note:

To ensure that your SAML logins are configured securely, review the best practices for SAML security.

Required information

Portal for ArcGIS requires certain attribute information to be received from the IDP when a user signs in using SAML logins. The NameID attribute is mandatory and must be sent by your IDP in the SAML response to make the federation with Portal for ArcGIS work. Since Portal for ArcGIS uses the value of NameID to uniquely identify a named user, it is recommended that you use a constant value that uniquely identifies the user. When a user from the IDP signs in, a new user with the user name NameID will be created by Portal for ArcGIS in its user store. The allowed characters for the value sent by NameID are alphanumeric, _ (underscore), . (dot), and @ (at sign). Any other characters will be escaped to contain underscores in the user name created by Portal for ArcGIS.

Portal for ArcGIS supports the inflow of a user's email address, group memberships, given name, and surname from the SAML identity provider.

Register AD FS as the SAML IDP with your portal

  1. Verify that you are signed in as an administrator of your organization.
  2. At the top of the site, click Organization and click the Settings tab.
  3. Click Security on the left side of the page.
  4. In the Logins section, click the New SAML login button, and select the One identity provider option. On the Specify properties page, type your organization's name (for example, City of Redlands). When users access the portal website, this text displays as part of the SAML sign-in option (for example, Using your City of Redlands account).
    Note:

    You can only register one SAML IDP, or one federation of IDPs, for your portal.

  5. Choose Automatically or Upon invitation from an administrator to specify how users can join the organization. Selecting the first option allows users to sign in to the organization with their SAML login without any intervention from an administrator. Their account is registered with the organization automatically the first time they sign in. The second option requires the administrator to register the necessary accounts with the organization using a command line utility or sample Python script. Once the accounts have been registered, users can sign in to the organization.
    Tip:

    It's recommended that you designate at least one enterprise account as an administrator of your portal and demote or delete the initial administrator account. It is also recommended that you disable the Create an account button in the portal website so people cannot create their own accounts. For full instructions, see Configure a SAML-compliant identity provider with your portal.

  6. Provide metadata information for the IDP using one of the options below:
    • URL—If the URL of AD FS federation metadata is accessible, select this option and enter the URL (for example, https://<adfs-server>/federationmetadata/2007-06/federationmetadata.xml).
      Note:

      If your SAML IDP includes a self-signed certificate, you may encounter an error when attempting to specify the HTTPS URL of the metadata. This error occurs because Portal for ArcGIS cannot verify the IDP's self-signed certificate. Alternatively, use HTTP in the URL, one of the other options below, or configure your IDP with a trusted certificate.

    • File—Choose this option if the URL is not accessible. Download or obtain a copy of the federation metadata file from AD FS and upload the file to the ArcGIS Enterprise portal using the File option.
    • Parameters specified here—Choose this option if the URL or federation metadata file is not accessible. Enter the values manually and supply the requested parameters: the login URL and the certificate, encoded in the BASE 64 format. Contact your AD FS administrator to obtain these.
  7. Configure the advanced settings as applicable:
    • Encrypt Assertion—Enable this option to encrypt the AD FS SAML assertion responses.
    • Enable signed request—Enable this option to have Portal for ArcGIS sign the SAML authentication request sent to AD FS.
    • Propagate logout to Identity Provider—Enable this option to have Portal for ArcGIS use a logout URL to sign out the user from AD FS. Enter the URL to use in the Logout URL setting. If the IDP requires the logout URL to be signed, Enable signed request must be turned on.
      Note:

      By default, AD FS requires logout requests to be signed using SHA-256, so you need to enable the Enable signed request toggle button and Sign using SHA256.

    • Update profiles on sign in—Enable this option to have ArcGIS Enterprise update users' givenName and email address attributes if they have changed since they last signed in.
    • Enable SAML based group membership—Enable this option to allow organization members to link specified SAML-based enterprise groups to ArcGIS Enterprise groups during the group creation process.
    • Logout URL—The IDP URL to use to sign out the currently signed-in user.
    • Entity ID—Update this value to use a new entity ID to uniquely identify your portal to AD FS.

    The Encrypt Assertion and Enable signed request settings use the certificate samlcert in the portal keystore. To use a new certificate, delete the samlcert certificate, create a certificate with the same alias (samlcert) following the steps in Import a certificate into the portal, and restart the portal.

  8. Click Save.

Register your portal as the trusted service provider with AD FS

  1. Open the AD FS management console.
  2. Choose Relying Party Trusts > Add Relying Party Trust.
  3. In the Add Relying Party Trust Wizard, click the Start button.
  4. For Select Data Source, choose one option for obtaining data about the relying party: import from a URL, import from a file, or enter manually. URL and file options require that you obtain the metadata from your organization. If you don't have access to the metadata URL or file, you can enter the information manually. In some cases, entering the data manually may be the easiest option.
    • Import data about the relying party published online or on a local network

      This option uses the URL metadata of your ArcGIS Enterprise organization. The URL is https://organization.example.com/<context>/sharing/rest/portals/self/sp/metadata?token=<token>, for example, https://samltest.domain.com/arcgis/sharing/rest/portals/self/sp/metadata?token=G6943LMReKj_kqdAVrAiPbpRloAfE1fqp0eVAJ-IChQcV-kv3gW-gBAzWztBEdFY. You can generate a token using https://organization.example.com/<context>/sharing/rest/generateToken. When entering the URL on the Generate Token page, specify the fully qualified domain name of the AD FS server in the Webapp URL field. Selecting any other option, such as IP Address or IP Address of this request's origin, is not supported and may generate an invalid token.

    • Import data about the relying party from a file

      This option uses a metadata.xml file from your ArcGIS Enterprise organization. There are two ways you can get a metadata XML file:

      • On the organization page, click the Settings tab and click Security on the left side of the page. In the Logins sections, under SAML login, click the Download service provider metadata button to download the metadata file for your organization.
      • Open the URL of the metadata of your ArcGIS Enterprise organization and save as an .xml file on your computer. The URL is https://organization.example.com/<context>/sharing/rest/portals/self/sp/metadata?token=<token>, for example, https://samltest.domain.com/arcgis/sharing/rest/portals/self/sp/metadata?token=G6943LMReKj_kqdAVrAiPbpRloAfE1fqp0eVAJ-IChQcV-kv3gW-gBAzWztBEdFY. You can generate a token using https://organization.example.com/<context>/sharing/rest/generateToken. When entering the URL on the Generate Token page, specify the fully qualified domain name of the AD FS server in the Webapp URL field. Selecting any other option, such as IP Address or IP Address of this request's origin, is not supported and may generate an invalid token.
    • Enter data about the relying party manually

      With this option, the Add Relying Party Trust Wizard displays additional windows where you enter the data manually. These are explained in steps 6 through 8 below.

  5. For Specify Display Name, enter the display name.

    The display name is used to identify the relying party in AD FS. Outside of this, it doesn’t have any meaning. This should be set to either ArcGIS or to the name of the organization within ArcGIS, for example, ArcGIS—SamlTest.

    Tip:

    If you chose to import the data source from a URL or file, proceed to step 9.

  6. (Manual data source only) For Choose Profile, choose the AD FS profile that's applicable in your environment.
  7. (Manual data source only) For Configure URL, check the Enable support for the SAML 2.0 WebSSO protocol box and enter the URL for the relying party SAML 2.0 SSO service.

    The relying party URL should be the URL where AD FS sends the SAML response after authenticating the user. This should be an HTTPS URL: https://organization.example.com/<context>/sharing/rest/oauth2/saml/signin.

  8. (Manual data source only) For Configure Identifiers, enter the URL for the relying party trust identifier.

    This should be portal.domain.com.arcgis.

  9. For Choose Issuance Authorization Rules, choose Permit all users to access this relying party.
  10. For Ready to Add Trust, review all the settings for the relying party. The metadata URL is only populated if you chose to import the data source from a URL.

    Click Next.

    Tip:

    If the Monitor relying party option is enabled, AD FS will periodically check the federating metadata URL and compare it with the current state of the relying party trust. However, monitoring will fail once the token in the federating metadata URL expires. Failures are recorded in the AD FS event log. To suppress these messages, it is recommended that you disable monitoring or update the token.

  11. For Finish, check the box to automatically open the Edit Claim Rules dialog box after you click the Close button.
  12. To set the claim rules, open the Edit Claim Rules wizard and click Add Rule.
  13. For the Select Rule Template step, select the Send LDAP Attributes as Claims template for the claim rule you want to create. Click Next.
  14. For the Configure Claim Rule step, follow the instructions below to edit the claims rules.
    1. For Claim rule name, provide a name for the rule, such as DefaultClaims.
    2. For Attribute store, select Active Directory.
    3. For Mapping of LDAP attributes to outgoing claim types, use the following table as a guide to specify how the LDAP attributes will map to the outgoing claim types that will be issued from the rule.

      LDAP attributeOutgoing claim type

      The LDAP attribute that contains the unique user names (for example, User-Principal-Name or SAM-Account-Name)

      		NameID

      Given-Name

      		Given Name

      Surname

      Surname

      E-Mail-Addresses

      		E-Mail Address

      Token-Groups - Unqualified Names

      		Group

    Configure Rule - DefaultClaims

    With this claim, AD FS sends attributes with the names givenname, surname, email, and group membership to Portal for ArcGIS after authenticating the user. Portal for ArcGIS then uses the values received in the givenname, surname, and email attributes and populates the first name, last name, and email address of the user account. The values in the group attribute are used to update the user's group membership.

    Note:

    If you selected the Enable SAML based group membership option when registering AD FS as the SAML IDP, membership for each user is obtained from the SAML assertion response received from the identity provider every time the user successfully signs in. For information on linking SAML groups, see Create groups.

  15. Click Finish to finish configuring the AD FS IDP to include Portal for ArcGIS as a relying party.

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In this topic
  1. Required information
  2. Register AD FS as the SAML IDP with your portal
  3. Register your portal as the trusted service provider with AD FS