Eh, if you don't have SAML support, I can find a product that does. Not a problem. \o/
(Or to be more clear, it is mostly unacceptable for an enterprise product to have opinionated decisions about what authentication it works with. You either work with what we use or you are not viable as a product for our need. It's kinda simple. I would expect someone whose authentication was OIDC-based to be similarly dismissive if you told them you only would do SAML.)
This is only a reasonable stance at the very surface level.
1. "You either work with what we use" - so whatever organization you represent isn't capable of evaluating and shifting to more secure technologies?
2. "it is mostly unacceptable for an enterprise product to have opinionated decisions about what authentication it works with" - you think companies that care about security should not care about integrating with flawed protocols?
A potential customer making bad choices does not obligate a business to make bad choices for their business.
As a SaaS vendor, interacting with our customers about SAML usually involves:
a) them knowing what they want because they already have SAML-based SSO and it works for them; and
b) our contact on their side being some unfortunate support dude who got given SAML as their subject area for whatever reason, and who knows very little about it, and who is 4 levels in the org away from anyone empowered to make decisions as significant as moving away from SAML.
As a SaaS customer, interacting with SaaS vendors tends to entail:
1. Finding out a company wants several grand to flip the "allow SAML" switch on the tenant config, and a few thousand a year in additional licensing to leave it on. (I had a vendor both tell me it "takes five minutes" to get it set up, and then quote me $4,800 to "implement" it.)
2. Having to yell at the SaaS vendor for routing the identity connection between two or three other identity providers in different various clouds because, you know "modern stuff". (A vendor I am working with has not less than five different accounts to access various parts of their infrastructure, none of which are connected at all. I assume people there listened to "switch to OIDC" nonsense, completed half the job, and now have OIDC sites and SAML sites forever.)
3. Discovering the SaaS vendor knows how Entra works, how Okta works, and how Google auth works, and having no idea how SAML works. Or OIDC or anything else for that matter.
4. Eventually finding an engineer far enough from the sales and implementation teams who can answer how the product actually works. :D This point is reached after a lot of yelling.
1. Finding out a company wants several grand to flip the "allow SAML" switch on the tenant config, and a few thousand a year in additional licensing to leave it on. (I had a vendor both tell me it "takes five minutes" to get it set up, and then quote me $4,800 to "implement" it.)
If I’m paying for at least one Senior to build and support this awful enterprise authentication pattern, I’m looking at around 200k per year in total cost - you damn well bet I’m billing you for it!
A potential customer making bad choices does not obligate a business to make bad choices for their business.
Indeed it does not. If you feel that strongly that you are willing to lose out on that customer, that's your right. But that does not mean the foregone customer is unreasonable for expecting you to work with their constraints in order to get their business.
Honestly, it's an addressable market versus development cost question... How many clients will you lose if you support OIDC but not SAML? Does the delta justify carrying a SAML implementation? If so, do it. But the post is still correct that SAML is a fractal of bad design either way. And it's good to say this openly, and to run this calculus each time you are considering a new SAML implementation.
Realistically, what modern IdP supports SAML but not OIDC though? To me, it seems like more of a case of 'I know and am comfortable with SAML, why learn something new?'.
The requirement for connected network topology is a non-starter for many SaaS products. I don't want my systems to be open to some backchannel communication from the SaaS providers service.
SAML is even worse than the article describes, problems like needing to check what the signature actually signs. But I'm optimistic about the future, instead of relying on libraries that do a lot, such as general xml parsing, we can support a subset of SAML and only the dialects of the top ~10 providers. Extreme niche providers can be added ad-hoc and only if the deal size makes it worthwhile.
SAML is bad, but OAuth and OIDC are showing major cracks with identity and agents. Go to any major company right now and ask them how they are dealing with delegated authorization or OBO flows that hop service boundaries.
The XSW part of the article was new to me though and kinda shocking
It's called design by committee. It's when you get everyone in a room and nobody can make a tradeoff because it would hurt someone else's pet use case, so you don't actually design anything at all, just build a framework within which a design can exist.
Anyone who has used Wireguard and OpenVPN will spot the difference. OpenVPN is the design-by-committee, Wireguard is the focused opinionated design by someone with a vision. OpenVPN does more things, but if your use case is one that suits Wireguard, Wireguard does it much better.
You also see it with OSI stack versus IP. OSI invented all these layers for proving identity, establishing circuits, sessions, different billing models, collect calls, quality of service, all that stuff. IP looked at that and said: fuck that noise - we send packets, if they don't arrive we send them again, job done.
It’s such a product of “Ooh! Markup languages! What can we use a markup language to solve!” When authentication is just not a document or data stream that needs marked-up.
The article rightly connects this to XML, which was indeed the hammer to everything’s nail at the time
I think we aren’t done with this problem yet, though. OIDC makes a lot of assumptions in service to Google and others. And tailscale as mentioned, despite “holding the line,” already reveals the cracks when things like GitHub accounts have to be treated differently from others.
What we are missing is a provider-independent way to do this. I should be able to create an account and log in just about anywhere using a backend I control. It can be done, but not with what we have today
Eh, if you don't have SAML support, I can find a product that does. Not a problem. \o/
(Or to be more clear, it is mostly unacceptable for an enterprise product to have opinionated decisions about what authentication it works with. You either work with what we use or you are not viable as a product for our need. It's kinda simple. I would expect someone whose authentication was OIDC-based to be similarly dismissive if you told them you only would do SAML.)
That mindset is indicative of security theatre to me. But as security theatre is common in entrprise IT that does not surprise me.
This is only a reasonable stance at the very surface level.
1. "You either work with what we use" - so whatever organization you represent isn't capable of evaluating and shifting to more secure technologies?
2. "it is mostly unacceptable for an enterprise product to have opinionated decisions about what authentication it works with" - you think companies that care about security should not care about integrating with flawed protocols?
A potential customer making bad choices does not obligate a business to make bad choices for their business.
It seems fair to me.
As a SaaS vendor, interacting with our customers about SAML usually involves:
a) them knowing what they want because they already have SAML-based SSO and it works for them; and
b) our contact on their side being some unfortunate support dude who got given SAML as their subject area for whatever reason, and who knows very little about it, and who is 4 levels in the org away from anyone empowered to make decisions as significant as moving away from SAML.
As a SaaS customer, interacting with SaaS vendors tends to entail:
1. Finding out a company wants several grand to flip the "allow SAML" switch on the tenant config, and a few thousand a year in additional licensing to leave it on. (I had a vendor both tell me it "takes five minutes" to get it set up, and then quote me $4,800 to "implement" it.)
2. Having to yell at the SaaS vendor for routing the identity connection between two or three other identity providers in different various clouds because, you know "modern stuff". (A vendor I am working with has not less than five different accounts to access various parts of their infrastructure, none of which are connected at all. I assume people there listened to "switch to OIDC" nonsense, completed half the job, and now have OIDC sites and SAML sites forever.)
3. Discovering the SaaS vendor knows how Entra works, how Okta works, and how Google auth works, and having no idea how SAML works. Or OIDC or anything else for that matter.
4. Eventually finding an engineer far enough from the sales and implementation teams who can answer how the product actually works. :D This point is reached after a lot of yelling.
If I’m paying for at least one Senior to build and support this awful enterprise authentication pattern, I’m looking at around 200k per year in total cost - you damn well bet I’m billing you for it!
Indeed it does not. If you feel that strongly that you are willing to lose out on that customer, that's your right. But that does not mean the foregone customer is unreasonable for expecting you to work with their constraints in order to get their business.
You use Entra. Entra can do jwt’s.
Saml is just not reasonable in our modern security environment.
Entra is just allowing the Chinese government in your environment. Why bother with authentication at all?
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/428899... (Microsoft has solely discontinued this practice for the DoD tier. Commercial, GCC, and GCC High are still impacted because foreign labor is cheaper than the risk to your security.)
Honestly, it's an addressable market versus development cost question... How many clients will you lose if you support OIDC but not SAML? Does the delta justify carrying a SAML implementation? If so, do it. But the post is still correct that SAML is a fractal of bad design either way. And it's good to say this openly, and to run this calculus each time you are considering a new SAML implementation.
Realistically, what modern IdP supports SAML but not OIDC though? To me, it seems like more of a case of 'I know and am comfortable with SAML, why learn something new?'.
We took that exact stance, and it’s largely been a success. Most people asking for SAML can actually do OIDC and are happy to do so.
The requirement for connected network topology is a non-starter for many SaaS products. I don't want my systems to be open to some backchannel communication from the SaaS providers service.
Implementing all the main authentication mechanisms is hell.
Oauth2 is utter utter shite as well.
Why are you using an authorization protocol for authentication? Try OIDC.
SAML is even worse than the article describes, problems like needing to check what the signature actually signs. But I'm optimistic about the future, instead of relying on libraries that do a lot, such as general xml parsing, we can support a subset of SAML and only the dialects of the top ~10 providers. Extreme niche providers can be added ad-hoc and only if the deal size makes it worthwhile.
SAML is bad, but OAuth and OIDC are showing major cracks with identity and agents. Go to any major company right now and ask them how they are dealing with delegated authorization or OBO flows that hop service boundaries.
The XSW part of the article was new to me though and kinda shocking
It's called design by committee. It's when you get everyone in a room and nobody can make a tradeoff because it would hurt someone else's pet use case, so you don't actually design anything at all, just build a framework within which a design can exist.
Anyone who has used Wireguard and OpenVPN will spot the difference. OpenVPN is the design-by-committee, Wireguard is the focused opinionated design by someone with a vision. OpenVPN does more things, but if your use case is one that suits Wireguard, Wireguard does it much better.
You also see it with OSI stack versus IP. OSI invented all these layers for proving identity, establishing circuits, sessions, different billing models, collect calls, quality of service, all that stuff. IP looked at that and said: fuck that noise - we send packets, if they don't arrive we send them again, job done.
Also, when you consider the age difference between the two, Wireguard is OpenVPN plus the learnt lessons.
We should remember that we learn by failing.
It’s such a product of “Ooh! Markup languages! What can we use a markup language to solve!” When authentication is just not a document or data stream that needs marked-up.
The article rightly connects this to XML, which was indeed the hammer to everything’s nail at the time
I think we aren’t done with this problem yet, though. OIDC makes a lot of assumptions in service to Google and others. And tailscale as mentioned, despite “holding the line,” already reveals the cracks when things like GitHub accounts have to be treated differently from others.
What we are missing is a provider-independent way to do this. I should be able to create an account and log in just about anywhere using a backend I control. It can be done, but not with what we have today
One more reason to hate SAML is its incompatibility with SameSite cookies.