As I’ve talked about before, I’ll talk about the requirement gathering first.

[Edit for clarity: I am taking a look at the storage and retrieval of users and their credentials, before I actually use SSO. On the one hand: I can create the infrastructure from scratch, on the other hand I have to create the infrastructure from scratch, and can't just gear it all towards my little app, but have to consider a lot of usage scenarios. The information about SSO solutions is more about context, than the focus of my post. - Phill]

But what about the backend? How do you integrate the user database, I hear you ask.

This is the fun part (or frustrating):

Almost all SSO solutions come back, in one way or another, to OpenLDAP (or another LDAPv3 compatible directory service), as storage service for user data. The authentication is, usually, done via Kerberos.

Quoth Wikipedia:

Kerberos is the name of a computer network authentication protocol, which allows individuals communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner.

And while I like to apply a certain extend of.. overkill to a solution, this isn’t really feasible. It is one (1) server that is being used, with three (3) users (current projection). Not concurrent users. Maximum users. Even LDAP is over the top for this solution (however, it allows for ‘true’ SSO on *NIX, via PAM).

Both OpenID and CAS can plug into LDAP, and you can use LDAP as authentication source.

But what about if you cannot use LDAP? Well, the other option is to authenticate a user against /etc/passwd. Ruby surely is able to do that out of the box. It comes with the Etc module, after all. Well, yes, but no. While it does come with the Etc module, I haven’t found a way to use built-in Ruby tools to authenticate against /etc/passwd (well, there’s Ruby-PAM, but the last release was in 2004. Not quite trust-generating for authentication).

So, at the moment I am considering using (parts) of Jamis Buck’s Net::SSH to hack together an OpenID or Ruby-CAS authenticator. This solution has The Smell, though, and already feels brittle. I cringe just thinking about it.

The benefit of this hackish solution would be, though, that no server excpet the SSH daemon would be required. And that one is already available (also, I don’t have to care about details like user maintenance, since the SSH daemon handles that for me).

But would the pain of maintaining something like this outweigh the pain of installing and configuring OpenLDAP? That is for the client to decide. I’ll talk about the actual solution once a decision has been made.

Also, if you have worked with ruby-pam and pam-ruby or have valuable experience regarding OpenLDAP (Especially on FreeBSD 5.4!), it’d be great if you could leave a comment.