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BENGALURU

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Identity Federation
with AWS Cognito
Kumaravel Ponnusamy | 25-09-2018

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Objective
• To share the knowledge and learnings in the Identity federation with
Cognito.
• Outlining the challenges and solutions pertaining to Single Sign On,
IAM policies and securing the tokens.
• Communicating with third party authentication provider and federating it
with the help of Cognito identity pool to access the AWS resources in
secure way of access to the AWS services.

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Introduction
• We developed a web based front end application, which would connect
with AWS Serverless architecture.
• We have implemented the application with a custom authentication &
Authorization method to communicate with AWS.

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Over All Flow

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Business case
• Low cost of authentication and authorization.
• Interoperability within AWS Services.
• Secure communication with IoT Devices.
• Managing secure tokens between user sessions.
• Serverless application to achieve single-sign-on.

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• Auth0
• AWS IAM
• AWS Cognito federated identity
• AWS Resources
Tools & Components

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Challenges:
• Secured way of sharing the temporary credentials to front end.
• Time expiry of temporary credentials from Cognito.
• Attaching AWS Resource policies to the Authenticated identity.
• Connecting MQTT to AWS IoT using temporary credentials based on
RBAC.

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Solutions
• Auth0 connectivity with IAM
• Adding Auth0 in IAM Identity provider using
following params:
• Client ID
• Client secret
• Identity provider URL

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Solutions (Contd..)
• Cognito Identity pool
• Create federated identity which
should be mapped with following
params:
• IAM Authenticated role
• IAM Unauthenticated role
• Identity provider in OpenID

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Solutions (Contd..)
• The session token and security key is passed to the front end using
lambda. Using sigv4 and crypto libraries front end will connected to the
AWS resources using temporary credentials.
• The session token will get expired in a particular time period even the
user in active mode.
• To avoid that use the auto renewal token to get session token before it
gets expired.

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Questions?

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Thank you