Using OpenAM

Deprecated in Liferay DXP 2024.Q4/GA129

Important

OpenAM 13 is deprecated as of Liferay DXP 2024.Q4/GA129. OpenAM 12 and below were deprecated as of Liferay DXP 7.2.

OpenAM is an open source single sign-on solution from the codebase of Sun’s System Access Manager product. You can use OpenAM to integrate Liferay DXP into an infrastructure that contains several different authentication schemes against different repositories of identities.

Installation Notes

Follow the instructions in its documentation to install OpenAM. Note that OpenAM relies on cookie sharing between applications. Thus, in order for OpenAM to work, all applications that require SSO must be in the same web domain. You should also add the following property if you have enabled HTTPOnly cookies due to the way some web containers (like Apache Tomcat™) parse cookies that contain special characters:

com.iplanet.am.cookie.encode=true

You can install OpenAM on the same or different server as Liferay DXP. Be sure to review the context path and server hostname for your OpenAM server.

If you want to install OpenAM on the same server as Liferay DXP, you must deploy the OpenAM .war, downloadable from here. Otherwise, follow the instructions at the OpenAM 13 site to install OpenAM.

Configuring OpenAM

Once you have it installed, you must do two things:

1. Create a Liferay DXP administrative user in OpenAM

2. Enable OpenAM for authentication

   Users are mapped back and forth by screen names, so be sure to match the OpenAM’s user ID to the screen name of your Liferay administrative user. For example, if the Liferay DXP administrative user has a screen name of admin, register the user in OpenAM with the ID of admin and the email address specified in the admin.email.from.address portal property. Once you have the user set up, log in to OpenAM using this user.

3. In the same browser window, log in to Liferay DXP as the administrative user (using the previous admin email address).

4. Go to the Control Panel and click Configuration → Instance Settings → Security → SSO. Then choose OpenSSO in the list on the left.

   

5. Modify the three URL fields (Login URL, Logout URL, and Service URL) so they point to your OpenAM server (in other words, only modify the host name portion of the URLs), check the Enabled box, and click Save.

Liferay then redirects users to OpenAM when they request the /c/portal/login URL—for example, when they click on the Sign In link).

Configuring OpenAM at a Different Liferay Scope

Liferay DXP’s OpenAM configuration can be applied at either the system scope or at the instance scope.

To configure the OpenAM SSO module at the system scope:

1. Navigate to the Control Panel

2. Click on Configuration → System Settings → Security → SSO → OpenSSO. You’ll see the settings below. The values configured here provide the default values for all portal instances. Enter them in the same format as you would when initializing a Java primitive type with a literal value.

Property Label	Property Key	Description	Type
Version	version	OpenAM version to use (12 and below or 13)	String
Enabled	enabled	Check this box to enable OpenAM authentication. Note that OpenAM works only if LDAP authentication is also enabled and Liferay DXP’s authentication type is set to screen name.	boolean
Import from LDAP	importFromLDAP	If this is checked, users authenticated from OpenAM that do not exist in Liferay DXP are imported from LDAP. LDAP must be enabled.	boolean
Login URL	loginURL	The URL to the login page of the OpenAM server	String
Logout URL	logoutURL	The URL to the logout page of the OpenAM server	String
Service URL	serviceURL	The URL by which OpenAM can be accessed to use the authenticated web services. If you are using OpenAM Express 8 or higher, you need to have the server running Java 6.	String
Screen Name Attribute	screenNameAttr	The name of the attribute on the OpenAM representing the user’s screen name	String
Email Address Attribute	emailAddressAttr	The name of the attribute on the OpenAM representing the user’s email address	String
First Name Attribute	firstNameAttr	The name of the attribute on the OpenAM representing the user’s first name	String
Last Name Attribute	lastNameAttr	The name of the attribute on the OpenAM representing the user’s last name	String

To override these default settings for a particular portal instance, navigate to the Control Panel and click Configuration → Instance Settings → Security → SSO. Then choose OpenSSO in the list on the left.