If your clients do not provide SAML tokens but your business services require them, you can configure a proxy service to map the client's identity to a SAML token.

1. Configure a proxy service to authenticate clients using any of the following techniques:

   • HTTP or HTTPS basic (client provides user name and password in the request)

   • HTTPS client certificate

   • Message-level authentication (using any of the supported token profiles)

     If a client request includes a WS-Security security header, you must configure the proxy service to process this header on the proxy service side of the message. In Service Bus, you cannot add a SAML header (or any other WS-Security header) to a SOAP envelope that already contains a WS-Security header, neither can you add SAML (or other) security tokens to an existing security header.

   • Third-party authentication

   When the proxy service authenticates the user, the proxy automatically generates a Subject before forwarding the message to a business service.

2. Configure the business service to include a SAML client policy. The policy generates a SAML token for the authenticated user in the Subject.

If your clients provide SAML tokens to a pass-through proxy service, you can propagate the client's SAML token to the business service.

If your clients provide SAML tokens to an active intermediary proxy service, you can configure the proxy service to assert the client's identity.

1. When configuring the Identity Assertion provider, note the following requirements:

   • The confirmation method from the policy must match the SAML profile in the SAML asserting party.

   • Specify the asserting party target URL to be the relative URL of the proxy service (omitting the protocol and host information).

   • For signed assertions, add the certificate to the Identity Asserter registry.

2. Create an active intermediary proxy service that communicates over the HTTP, HTTPS, or JMS protocol. The proxy service must be a web service with a policy statement that requires authentication and accepts SAML tokens.

   A proxy service that communicates over the "local" transport type cannot use a SAML token profile to authenticate.

If you are using SAML-based authentication with the SB transport, follow these configuration requirements.

Oracle Web Services Manager provides a wss11_saml_token_identity_switch_with_message_protection_client_policy that lets you perform identity switching.

The policy, which you attach to a business service, propagates a different identity than the one based on the authenticated Subject from the proxy service. For more information about the policy, see Configuring SAML Web Service Clients for Identity Switching in Securing Web Services and Managing Policies with Oracle Web Services Manager.

If you set the policy property subject.precedence = false and provide a credential store format (CSF) key for the identity you want to switch to, the business service ignores the current subject and creates a SAML token with the credentials in the csf-key.

If you set subject.precedence = true, the current subject is used to create the SAML token. However, if the subject is anonymous, Oracle Web Services Manager attempts to use the csf-key to perform the identity switching.

For information on working with CSF, see Developing with the Credential Store Framework in Securing Applications with Oracle Platform Security Services.

This section provides answers to some commonly asked troubleshooting questions.

Question: I am trying to propagate my proxy service transport identity to a destination business service and keep receiving error, Unable to add security token for identity. What does this mean?

Answer: There are various causes for this error. Generally this means one of the following problems:

• The SAML Credential Mapper is not configured correctly. Double check that the configuration is in accordance with the instructions in Configuring SAML in Securing Web Services and Managing Policies with Oracle Web Services Manager.

• Another common source of this error is that there is no subject information to propagate. To generate a SAML token, you must have a transport-level or message-level subject. Make sure that the client has a subject. This can be done by inspecting the $security message context variable.

Question: I am trying to propagate my proxy service transport identity to a destination business service using SAML holder-of-key and keep receiving error, Failure to add signature. What does this mean?

Answer: There are various causes for this error, but most likely is that the credentials are not configured for the business service's service key provider. When Service Bus generates an outbound holder-of-key assertion, it also generates a digital signature over the message contents, so that the recipient can verify not only that a message is received from a particular user but that the message has not been tampered with. To generate the signature, the business service must have a service key provider with a digital signature credential associated with it.

Question: I am trying to configure an active intermediary proxy service that receives SAML identity tokens and keep receiving errors that look like: The SAML token is not valid. How do I fix this?

Answer: This is generally caused by a missing SAML Identity Asserter or SAML Identity Asserter asserting party configuration for the proxy service. For a proxy service to receive SAML assertions in active intermediary mode, it must have a SAML Identity Asserter configured. For more details, see Configuring a SAML Identity Assertion Provider in Administering Security for Oracle WebLogic Server.