Site Update: Single Sign-on

In this update, we have introduced support for single sign-on.  Single sign-on is a mechanism that allows you to authenticate users in your systems and subsequently tell InfoNeedle that the user has been authenticated. The user is then allowed to access InfoNeedle without being prompted to enter separate login credentials.

At the core of single sign-on is a security mechanism that allows InfoNeedle to trust the login requests it gets from your systems. InfoNeedle only grants access to the users that have been authenticated by you. InfoNeedle SSO relies on a technology called JSON Web Token (JWT) for securing the exchange of user authentication data.

Here are the steps of the single signon authentication process:

1. An unauthenticated user (not already logged in) navigates to your InfoNeedle Venue URL (for example, http://venue.infoneedle.com/).
2. The InfoNeedle SSO mechanism recognizes that SSO is enabled and that the user is not authenticated.
3. The user is redirected to the remote login URL configured for the SSO settings (for example, https://www.example.com/services/login).
4. A script on your side authenticates the user using your proprietary login process.
5. Your script builds a JWT request that contains the relevant user data.
6. You redirect the customer to the InfoNeedle endpoint at https://www.infoneedle.com/access/VENUE_ID/jwt with the JWT payload.
7. InfoNeedle parses the user detail from the JWT payload, generates the user (if she does not already exist) and then grants the user a session.

As you can see, this process relies on browser redirects and passing signed messages using JWT. The redirects happen entirely in the browser and there is no direct connection between InfoNeedle and your systems, so you can keep your authentication scripts safely behind your
corporate firewall.

If you'd like to learn more about InfoNeedle Single Sign-on suport, send an email to [email protected], requesting a copy of our SSO API documentation.

We are hard at work listening to your feedback and making improvements. We want to hear from you. Let us know what you like, what you don’t, and features you’d like to see in the product.

Thanks for your continued support.

The InfoNeedle Team