PingFederate provides an optional configuration to evaluate user attributes, as well as other runtime variables (such as authentication context), for authorization purposes. This feature, known as token authorization, provides a way for administrators to extend access policy directly to many areas, such as Browser SSO, STS, and OAuth events, by conditionally allowing or disallowing the issuance of relevant security tokens (for example, SAML assertions, STS tokens, OAuth access tokens, or session cookies). The option is also available for extending authorization policy to attribute-query responses, IdP adapter contracts, and authentication policy contracts.

Administrators can configure token authorization using Issuance Criteria screens immediately following the configuration of attribute mapping at all applicable points in the administrative console (see Defining issuance criteria for IdP Browser SSO, as an example).

Issuance criteria

The token-authorization configuration consists of one or more rules that evaluate attribute values against selected conditions. You can choose from among several sources for the attributes, depending on the type of configuration that contains the token-authorization setup. The sources always consist of all of those available for attribute mapping, including data stores (when configured) and runtime information related to the context of an event. In addition, values of mapped attributes are available to provide access to any plain-text mappings or the runtime results of any attribute mapping expressions.

Tip:

When more than one condition is configured, all are evaluated and all the conditions must be met at runtime (evaluated as true) for authorization to succeed and processing to continue. In cases where you might need “or” conditions or layered evaluations, you can create one or more attribute mapping expressions.

Note:

When authorization fails and a transaction is halted, a configurable Error Result code is passed back up through the system, potentially to an application layer or as a variable on a PingFederate user-facing template. How this code is interpreted depends on the use case and application integration.

Single and multivalued conditions

Each token-authorization configuration provides a choice of conditions for evaluating attribute values:

  • equal to
  • equal to (case insensitive)
  • equal to DN
  • not equal to
  • not equal to (case insensitive)
  • not equal to DN
  • multi-value contains
  • multi-value contains (case insensitive)
  • multi-value contains DN
  • multi-value does not contain
  • multi-value does not contain (case insensitive)
  • multi-value does not contain DN
Note:

The first six conditions are intended for single-value attributes. Use one of the multi-value ... conditions when you want PingFederate to validate whether one of the attribute values matches (or does not match) the specified value. Using a single-value condition when an attribute has multiple values causes the criteria to fail consistently.