This tutorial shows how to enable Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) SSO for an Oracle JD Edwards (JDE) application via Datawiza. Datawiza works as a super lightweight reverse proxy integrating any identity provider, like Azure AD, Okta, Ping, Google, AWS SSO, to enable SSO, MFA and granular access control for any applications.
The benefits of integrating applications with Azure AD via Datawiza includes:
- Improved Zero Trust security through Azure AD SSO, MFA and Conditional Access
- No-Code easy integration between Azure AD and any web applications, including JDE, E-Business Suite, Sibel, Peoplesoft and homegrown apps
- A single control plane, Datawiza Cloud Manage Console, to manage access to applications in public clouds and on-premises
Scenario description
This scenario study focuses on solving the problem when modern identity providers integrate with the classic Oracle JDE application. We could accomplish the integration because JDE supports HTTP Authorization Headers.
In many cases, legacy applications have great difficulty integrating modern SSO, mainly due to the absence of modern protocol support.
The Datawiza Solution effectively reduces the cost of integration, overcomes the gap, and significantly improves application security.
Architecture
The solution for this scenario contains the following components:
- Azure AD: Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service, which helps users sign in and access external and internal resources.
- Oracle JDE Application: The legacy application to be protected by Azure AD.
- Datawiza Access Proxy: A super lightweight container-based reverse-proxy implements OIDC/OAuth or SAML for user sign-on flow and transparently passes identity to applications through HTTP headers.
- Datawiza Cloud Management Console (DCMC): A centralized management console that manages DAB. DCMC provides UI and RESTful APIs for administrators to manage the configurations of DAB and its granular access control policies.
Both SP initiated flow and IdP initiated flow are supported by the architecture discussed here. Below we will use SP initiated flow for demonstration purposes.
Steps Description
- The user accesses the application URL, which hits the DAB.
- The DAB checks the user’s authentication state. If it doesn’t receive a session token, or the supplied session token is invalid, then it redirects the user to Azure AD (OIDC IdP in this example, you can use SAML IdP as well).
- Azure AD pre-authenticates user and applies any enforced Conditional Access policies, and then the user is redirected back to DAB and SSO is performed using issued OIDC token.
- The DAB evaluates its own access policies and generates attribute values to be included in HTTP headers and forwarded to the application. During this step, the DAB may call out to the identity provider to retrieve the information needed to set the header values correctly. The DAB then sets the header values and sends the request to the application.
- The user is now authenticated and has access to the application.
Prerequisites
Prior Datawiza Access Proxy experience isn’t necessary, but you need:
- An Azure subscription. If you don’t have a subscription, you can get a trial account
- An Azure AD tenant that’s linked to your Azure subscription
- Docker and docker-compose are required to run DAB
- User identities synchronized from an on-premises directory to Azure AD or created directly within Azure AD and flowed back to your on-premises directory
- An account with Azure AD application admin permissions
- (Optional) An SSL Web certificate for publishing services over HTTPS, or use default Datawiza self-signed certs while testing
- An existing Oracle JDE environment
Getting started with Datawiza
To integrate JDE with Azure AD, login to Datawiza Cloud Management Console (DCMC).
Welcome to the DCMC homepage! Let’s get started:
Click the orange “Getting started” button, which will guide you through the configuration steps.
- Specify a Name and a Description, and click Next.
Add Application
Configure your application with the following values:
- Platform: Since JDE is a web application, select WEB
- App Name: The name of your application. Put a meaningful name here. I use the Oracle JDE App.
- Public Domain: The external facing URL of the application. For example https://jde-external.example.com. You can use localhost DNS for testing purposes. I use https://jde.datawiza.net
- Listen Port: This is the port that the Datawiza Access Proxy listens on. For simplicity, you can use the same port as the one in Public Domain above if you are not deploying the Datawiza Access Proxy behind a Load Balancer.
- Upstream Servers: the URL and port combination of the Oracle JD Edwards Implementation is being protected. Mine is https://10.0.0.122:8080.
Select Next.
IdP Configuration
DCMC provides an innovative one-click integration to help you complete the Azure AD configuration. This is the easiest way to install Azure AD. DCMC will automatically complete the configuration for you. With one-click integration, you no longer have to fill out the tedious configuration on Azure AD or copy the configuration to DCMC. DCMC calls the Graph API to do all the work for you. In this way, management costs are reduced and configuration errors are less likely to happen, ensuring smooth configuration to a large extent.
Note Down a Docker-Compose File
Once clicking on the Create button, the basic configuration on the management console is finished. You will see the final step of the guide, which presents you with a page showing the simple steps to deploy Datawiza Access Proxy with your application. Note down the docker-compose file of your deployment. The file includes the image of the Datawiza Access Proxy and a pair of PROVISIONING_KEY and PROVISIONING_SECRET, which are used by Datawiza Access Proxy to pull the latest configuration and policies from DCMC.
Single Sign-On & HTTP Headers
The DAB gets user attributes from IdP and passes them to the upstream application via header or cookie.
In order to let the Oracle JDE application recognize the user correctly, there is one more step to configure, which instructs DAB to pass the values from the identity provider to the application under what name through HTTP header.
Such configuration will be done in the Applications tab on the left panel and go to Attribute Pass sub-tab.
For Oracle JDE, please refer to the screenshot below to configure the attribute pass.
- Field: email
- Expected: JDE_SSO_UID
- Type: HEADER
Important: This configuration will use Azure AD’s user principal name as login username used by JDE, if you want to use another user identity, you can go to the Mappings tab to change it.
SSL Configuration
- Certificate Configuration: Select Advanced tab in your application page:
2. Enable SSL and select a proper Cert Type:
3. We provide a self-signed certificate for localhost. It can be used for testing purposes
4. Optionally, you can choose to upload your own certificate from a file:
5. Click Save.
Enable Single Sign-On in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne console
To enable single sign-on in the JD Edwards environment:
1. Sign in to the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Server Manager Management console as an administrator.
2. In Select Instance, select EnterpriseOne HTML Server.
3. In the Configuration tile, select View as Advanced, and then click Security
4. Select the Enable Oracle Access Manager check box, and then enter /datawiza/ab-logout in the Oracle Access Manager Sign-Off URL field.
In the Security Server Configuration section, click Apply.
5. Click Stop and confirm that you want to stop the managed instance.
If a message indicates that the web server configuration (jas.ini) is out-of-date, click Synchronize Configuration.
6. Click Start and confirm that you want to start the managed instance.
Test a JD Edwards based application
Testing a JD Edwards application involves validating application headers, validating policy and overall testing. Testing using header and policy simulation allows you to validate header fields and policy execution if required.
Complete testing should always be performed to validate that the application is behaving as expected for all URIs.
The easiest way to confirm everything is correct is when you access the JDE application, it will ask you to use an Azure Ad account to login, after checking your Azure AD credentials you should see the JDE properly.
Here is a video clip showing the user experience after a successful integration between Azure AD and Oracle JDE via Datawiza.
Summary
In this article, you learned how to:
- Configure and Deploy the Datawiza Access Proxy
- Integrate the Datawiza Access Proxy with Oracle JDE
- Enable Azure AD SSO login for Oracle JDE
