Configure the authentication chain - Alfresco Content Services - 23.4 - 23.4 - Ready - Alfresco - external

You can add to or completely replace the default authentication chain.

Chained functions combine authentication subsystems. The chain is controlled by the authentication.chain global property. When a user logs in, Content Services tries the user’s credentials against each of the subsystems in the order specified in the chain, until the credentials are accepted (the login is successful) or until each subsystem has been tried (and the login fails).

If Kerberos is configured along with basic authentication in a chain, all the calls to the repository will only support Kerberos. The response from the server only contains the WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate header.

To enable the fallback mechanism for basic authentication, do the following:

• Set the following property (true, by default):

    kerberos.authentication.sso.fallback.enabled=true
  

• Send a basic authentication header in all the requests.

    Authorization: Basic <encoded_string>
  

  where <encoded_string> is a base64 encoded username and password separated by a single colon (:). For more information, see Basic Authentication Scheme.

1. Open the alfresco-global.properties file.

2. Locate, or if it does not already exist, create the authentication.chain global property.

   This is a comma separated list of the form:

    instance_name1:type1,...,instance_namen:typen
   

   for example,

    authentication.chain=alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm
   

3. Set the property to the required values.

   The default authentication chain specifies one instance of the alfrescoNtlm subsystem type with ID alfrescoNtlm1.

   For example, set the property to the following value:

    alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm,ldap1:ldap
   

   When you navigate to the Alfresco:Type=Configuration,Category=Authentication,id1=manager MBean in global property overrides, a new authentication subsystem instance called ldap1 is created and added to the end of the authentication chain.

4. Save the file.

The following examples specify an advanced Active Directory chain, and an advanced LDAP chain.

You can integrate Content Services with Active Directory so that:

• Built-in Content Services users and Windows users can log in, with Content Services taking precedence
• LDAP synchronizes user and group details

1. Configure the following authentication chain:

    alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm,ldap1:ldap
   

2. Activate chained password-based login and target synchronization (but not authentication) at ldap1 by setting the following properties:

   • ldap1

     ldap.authentication.active=false ldap.synchronization.active=true

You can integrate Content Services with two LDAP directories so that:

• User passwords are validated directly against the LDAP servers for web, SharePoint and FTP login
• LDAP is used to synchronize user and group details from both directories
• Users in the first directory, ldap1, take precedence over those in the second directory, ldap2

<configRootShare>/classes/alfresco/subsystems/Authentication/<LDAP Provider
					Name>/ldap-authentication.properties

1. In the alfresco-global.properties, specify this setting:

    authentication.chain=ldap1:ldap,ldap2:ldap
   

2. Copy ldap-authentication.properties to both the <classpathRoot>/alfresco/extension/subsystems/Authentication/ldap/ldap1/ldap-authentication.properties and <classpathRoot>/alfresco/extension/subsystems/Authentication/ldap/ldap2/ldap-authentication.properties files.
3. Edit the properties for ldap1 and ldap2 with appropriate settings to complete the configuration. See LDAP configuration properties for information on each of the properties.