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EduGAIN Connectivity Check Service - ECCS

  1. Introduction
  2. Check Performed on the IdPs
  3. Limitations
  4. Disable Checks
  5. On-line interface
  6. Requirements Hardware
  7. Requirements Software
  8. HOWTO Install and Configure
  9. ECCS API Server (UWSGI)
  10. ECCS API JSON
  11. User Interface
  12. Utility for web interface
  13. Utility for developers
  14. Authors

Introduction

The purpose of the eduGAIN Connectivity Check is to identify eduGAIN Identity Providers (IdP) that are not properly configured. In particular it checks if an IdP properly loads and consumes SAML2 metadata which contains the eduGAIN Service Providers (SP). The check results are published on the public eduGAIN Connectivity Check web page (https://technical.edugain.org/eccs). The main purpose is to increase the service overall quality and user experience of the eduGAIN interfederation service by making Federation and Identity Provider operators aware of configuration problems.

The check is performed by sending a SAML authentication request to each eduGAIN IdP and then follow the various HTTP redirects. The expected result is a login form that allows users to authenticate (typically with username/password) or an error message of some form. For those Identity Providers that output an error message, it can be assumed that they don't consume eduGAIN metadata properly or that they suffer from another configuration problem. There are some cases where the check will generate false positives, therefore IdPs can be excluded from checks as is described below.

The Identity Providers are checked once per day. Therefore, the login requests should not have any significant effect on the log entries/statistics of an Identity Provider. Also, no actual login is performed because the check cannot authenticate users due to missing username and password for the IdPs. Only Identity Providers are checked but not the Service Providers.

Check Performed on the IdPs

The check follows the steps:

  1. It retrieves the eduGAIN IdPs from eduGAIN Operator Team database via a JSON interface

  2. For each IdP, that hasn't been disabled manually by the eduGAIN Operations Team or dynamically by robots.txt (explained below) and that has a valid SSL certificate on its HTTP-Redirect Location, it performs an IdP-initiated SSO with SAML Authentication Request for two SP belonging two different NREN, members of eduGAIN interfederation, and for one fake SP. It expects to find the HTML form with username and password fields on the "good" SPs and an error or other on the "bad" SP. If an IdP uses frames on its Login page, the check follows only the first one on each redirected pages. If an IdP uses HTTP Basic Authentication, the check searches '401 Unauthorized' string into the web page content presented and establish the correct behaviour of the IdP. Therefore, no complete login will happen at the Identity Provider because the check stops at the login page or at SSL Certificate validation. The SAML authentication request is not signed. Therefore, an authentication request for any eduGAIN SP could be created because the SP's private key is not needed. The SPs HTTP-Post Assertion Consumer Service URLs used by the check are retrieved by sps-metadata.xml into the "input" directory. The 'validation' method used to validate the "sps-metadata.xml" is a deployer decision, but a solution is provided on the README-SPS-METADATA.md file.

  3. If the check fails for an IdP the first time, it will be checked again at the end of the execution for a second time before exit.

  4. It keeps the results of the last 7 days, but it can be increased by the deployers.

Limitations

There are some situations where the check cannot work reliably. In those cases it is possible to disable the check for a particular IdP. The so far known cases where the check might generate a false negative are:

  • IdP does not support HTTP or HTTPS with at least SSLv3 or TLS1 or newer (these IdPs are insecure anyway)
  • IdP is part of a Hub & Spoke federation (some of them manually have to first approve eduGAIN SPs)
  • IdP does not use web-based login form (e.g. Account Chooser Authentication or X.509 login)

Disable Checks

In cases where an IdP cannot be reliably checked, it is necessary to create or enrich the robots.txt file on the IdP's web root dir with:

User-agent: ECCS
Disallow: /

If an IdP is not able to create its own robots.txt, it can be disabled by an eduGAIN Operation Team member by setting the dictionary IDPS_DISABLED_DICT into eccs_properties.py with a line in the form:

<idp-entity-id>':'<eccs-check-disabling-reason>

On-line interface

The tool uses following status for IdPs:

  • ERROR (red):
    • The IdP's response contains an HTTP Error or the web page returned does not look like a login page.
      • Unable-To-Check: considers those IdPs that do not load a standard username/password login page and do not return messages like "No return endpoint available for relying party" or "No metadata found for relying party".
      • Timeout: considers those IdPs that do not load a standard username/password login page within 60 seconds.
      • Connection-Error: considers those IdPs that are not reachable due to a connection problem. View the "Page Source" value to discover which problem the IdP has.
      • IdP-Error: considers those IdPs that the web page returned does not contain a Login Form and reports an unspecified error such as "An error occured". This has been seen on Micrsoft ADFS based IdPs
    • The IdP most likely does not consume the eduGAIN metadata correctly. A typical case that falls into this category is when an IdP returns a message "No return endpoint available for relying party" or "No metadata found for relying party":
      • No-eduGAIN-Metadata
    • The IdP has a problem with its SSL certificate:
      • SSL-Error
  • OK (green):
    • The IdP most likely correctly consumes eduGAIN metadata and returns a valid login page. This is no guarantee that login on this IdP works for all eduGAIN services but if the check is passed for an IdP, this is probable.
  • DISABLED (white)
    • The IdP is excluded because it cannot be checked reliably. The "Page Source" column, when an entity is disabled, shows the reason of the disabling.

Requirements Hardware

  • OS: Debian 9, CentOS 7.8 (tested)
  • HDD: 10 GB
  • RAM: 4 GB
  • CPU: >= 2 vCPU (suggested)
  • ARCH: 64 Bit

Requirements Software

  • Apache Server + WSGI
  • Python 3 (tested with v3.9.1, v3.10.4)
  • Selenium + Google Chrome Web Brower (tested with v91.0.4472.164, v100.0.4896.127)
  • Chromedriver (tested with v91.0.4472.101, v100.0.4896.60)
  • Git
  • PHP

HOWTO Install and Configure

Download ECCS Repository

  • cd $HOME ; git clone https://gitlab.geant.org/edugain/eccs.git

Install Python 3

CentOS 7 requirements

  1. Update the system packages:

    • sudo yum -y update
  2. Install the YUM utils:

    • sudo yum install yum-utils
  3. Install needed packages to build python:

    • sudo yum-builddep python3

    If you want to use Python 3.10, you need OpenSSL >= 1.1.1:

    • sudo yum install openssl11 openssl11-devel
    • sudo mkdir /usr/local/openssl11
    • sudo cd /usr/local/openssl11
    • sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/openssl11 lib
    • sudo ln -s /usr/include/openssl11 include
  4. Install Git:

    • sudo yum -y install git

Debian requirements

  1. Update the system packages:

    • sudo apt update ; sudo apt upgrade -y
  2. Install needed packages to build python3:

    • sudo apt-get build-dep python3 libffi-dev libssl-dev zlib-dev
  3. Install Git:

    • sudo apt install git

Install

  1. Download the last version of Python 3 from https://www.python.org/downloads/source/ into your home:

    • wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.10.4/Python-3.10.4.tgz -O $HOME/eccs/Python-3.10.4.tgz
  2. Extract Python source package:

    • cd $HOME/eccs/
    • tar xzf Python-3.10.4.tgz
  3. Build Python from the source package:

    • Debian:

      • cd $HOME/eccs/Python-3.10.4
      • ./configure --prefix=$HOME/eccs/python
      • make
    • Centos 7:

      • cd $HOME/eccs/Python-3.10.4
      • ./configure --prefix=$HOME/eccs/python --with-openssl=/usr/local/openssl11
      • make
  4. Install Python 3 under $HOME/eccs/python:

    • make install
    • $HOME/eccs/python/bin/python3 --version
    • $HOME/eccs/python/bin/python3 -c "import ssl; print (ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION)"

    This will install python3 under your $HOME/eccs/python directory.

  5. Remove useless things:

    • rm -Rf $HOME/eccs/Python-3.10.4 $HOME/eccs/Python-3.10.4.tgz

Install Google Chrome needed by Selenium

  • Debian (64 bit):

    • cd $HOME/eccs
    • sudo wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
    • sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
  • CentOS (64 bit):

    • cd $HOME/eccs
    • sudo wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
    • sudo yum install ./google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

Install the Chromedriver

  1. Find out which version of Chromium you are using:

    • Debian 9 (stretch):
      • google-chrome -version => Google Chrome 100.0.4896.127
    • CentOS 7.8:
      • google-chrome -version => Google Chrome 100.0.4896.127
  2. Take the Chrome version number, remove the last part, and append the result to URL "https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE_". For example, with Chrome version 100.0.4896.127, you'd get a URL "https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE_100.0.4896".

  3. Use the URL created in the last step to discover the version of ChromeDriver to use. For example, the above URL will get your a file containing "100.0.4896.60".

  4. Use the version number retrieved from the previous step to construct the URL to download ChromeDriver. With version 100.0.4896.60, the URL would be "https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html?path=100.0.4896.60/"

  5. Download the Chromedriver and extract it with:

    • cd $HOME/eccs
    • wget https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/100.0.4896.60/chromedriver_linux64.zip
    • unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip
    • rm chromedriver_linux64.zip google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Note: After the initial download, it is recommended that you occasionally go through the above process again to see if there are any bug fix releases.

ECCS Script

Install and Configure the Virtual Environment

  • cd $HOME/eccs
  • ./python/bin/python3 -m pip install virtualenv
  • $HOME/eccs/python/bin/virtualenv --python=$HOME/eccs/python/bin/python3 eccs-venv
  • $HOME/eccs/eccs-venv/bin/python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
  • source eccs-venv/bin/activate (deactivate to exit Virtualenv)
    • python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Configure ECCS

  1. Configure ECCS properties:

    • cp $HOME/eccs/eccs_properties.py.template $HOME/eccs/eccs_properties.py
    • vim $HOME/eccs/eccs_properties.py (and change it upon your needs)
  2. Change PATH by adding the virtualenv Python bin dir:

    • CentOS:

      • vim $HOME/.bash_profile

      • Add the following lines at the tail:

        # set PATH for ECCS
        if [ -d "$HOME/eccs" ]; then
           PATH="$HOME/eccs/eccs-venv/bin:$PATH"
        fi
      • source $HOME/.bash_profile

    • Debian:

      • vim $HOME/.bash_profile

      • Add the following lines at the tail:

        # set PATH for ECCS
        if [ -d "$HOME/eccs" ]; then
           PATH="$HOME/eccs/eccs-venv/bin:$PATH"
        fi
      • source $HOME/.bash_profile

  3. Configure the cron job that runs the ECCS script:

    • crontab -e

      SHELL=/bin/bash
      
      0 4 * * * /bin/bash $HOME/eccs/cleanAndRunEccs.sh > $HOME/eccs/logs/eccs-cron.log 2>&1

      The script takes about 2 hours to check 4666 IDPs, so its execution is suggested in the early morning,before the users start using the tool. The eccs-cron.log file will contains:

      • The execution time of the entire ECCS script
      • Each failed IdP checked again and its result
      • The result of the entire ECCS script executed

Execute

  • cd $HOME/eccs
  • ./cleanAndRunEccs.py (to run a full and clean check)
  • ./runEccs.py (to run a full check on the existing inputs)
  • ./runEccs.py --idp <IDP-ENTITYID> (to run check on a single IdP)
  • ./runEccs.py --test (to run a full check without effects)
  • ./runEccs.py --idp <IDP-ENTITYID> --test (to run check on a single IdP without effects)
  • ./runEccs.py --idp <IDP-ENTITYID> --replace (to run check on a single IdP and replace, or add, a result)

If something prevent the good execution of the ECCS's check, the logs/failed-cmd.sh file will be not empty at the end of the execution.

The "--test" parameter will not change the result of ECCS, but will write the output on the logs/stdout_idp_YYYY-MM-DD.log,logs/stderr_idp_YYYY-MM-DD.log and logs/failed-cmd-idp.sh files if the argument "--test" will be used.

ECCS API Server (uWSGI)

Install

  1. Install requirements:
    • Debian:
      • sudo apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libapache2-mod-proxy-uwsgi build-essentials python3-dev unzip
    • CentOS:
      • sudo yum install mod_proxy_uwsgi unzip
      • Configure SElinux to enable ECCS:
        • sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t $HOME/eccs/eccs.conf
        • sudo restorecon -v $HOME/eccs/eccs.conf
        • sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t $HOME/eccs/html(/.*)?
        • sudo restorecon -R -v "$HOME/eccs/html/"
        • sudo setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

Configure

  1. Add the systemd service to enable ECCS API:

    • cd $HOME/eccs
    • cp eccs.ini.template eccs.ini
    • cp eccs.service.template eccs.service
    • vim eccs.ini (and change "uid", "gid" and "base" values opportunely)
    • vim eccs.service (and change "User","Group","WorkingDirectory","RuntimeDirectory","ExecStart" values opportunely)
    • sudo cp $HOME/eccs/eccs.service /etc/systemd/system/eccs.service
    • sudo systemctl daemon-reload
    • sudo systemctl enable eccs.service
    • sudo systemctl start eccs.service
  2. Configure Apache for ECCS web side:

    • Debian:
      • sudo cp $HOME/eccs/eccs-debian.conf /etc/apache2/conf-available/eccs.conf
      • sudo vim /etc/apache2/conf-available/eccs.conf (and change the file opportunely)
      • sudo a2enconf eccs.conf
      • sudo a2enmod proxy_uwsgi
      • sudo chgrp www-data $HOME ; sudo chmod g+rx $HOME (Apache needs permission to access the $HOME dir)
      • sudo systemctl restart apache2.service
    • CentOS:
      • sudo cp $HOME/eccs/eccs-centos.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/eccs.conf
      • sudo chgrp apache $HOME ; sudo apache g+rx $HOME (Apache needs permission to access the $HOME dir)
      • sudo systemctl restart httpd.service
  3. Restart API WSGI server each day before the ECCS script:

    • crontab -e

      SHELL=/bin/bash
      
      0 3 * * * /usr/bin/touch $HOME/eccs/eccs.ini

      This cron job must be executed prior to the ECCS script because it updates the date to the current day.

Utility

To perform a restart after an API change use the following command:

  • touch $HOME/eccs/eccs.ini

ECCS API JSON

  • /api/eccsresults (Return the results of the last check ready for ECCS web interface)
  • /api/eccsresults?<parameter1>=<value1>&<parameter2>=<value2>:
    • date=2020-02-20 (select date)
    • idp=https://idp.example.org/idp/shibboleth (select a specific idp)
    • status= (select specific ECCS status)
      • 'OK'
      • 'ERROR'
      • 'DISABLED'
    • check_result=
      • OK
      • Timeout
      • Connection-Error
      • IdP-Error
      • No-eduGAIN-Metadata
      • SSL-Error
      • Unable-To-Check
      • DISABLED
    • reg_auth=https://reg.auth.example.org (select a specific Registration Authority)
    • format=simple (retrieve results in a simple format)
  • /api/fedstats
  • /api/fedstats?reg_auth=https://reg.auth.example.org:

User interface

The eduGAIN Connectivity Check Service web page is available at https://technical.edugain.org/eccs

User interface parameters

Parameter name Example
date date=2020-02-20
reg_auth reg_auth=https://reg.auth.example.org
idp idp=https://idp.example.org/idp/shibboleth
status status=ERROR
check_result check_result=Timeout

Example:

https://technical.edugain.org/eccs?reg_auth=http://www.idem.garr.it/&check_result=SSL-Error

Utility for web interface

The available dates are provided by the first and the last file created into the output/ directory, remember to change its path into web/eccs.php file.

Clean old results

To clean the ECCS results from files older than last 7 days use (modify it on your needs):

  • crontab -e

    SHELL=/bin/bash
    
    0 10 * * * /bin/bash $HOME/eccs/clean7daysOldFiles.sh > $HOME/eccs/logs/clean7daysOldFiles.log 2>&1  

    This cron job is useful to reduce the considered days selectable on the ECCS Web GUI.

    It is suggested to configure it after the execution of ECCS script to get the hoped result

Utility for developers

ECCS API Development Server

  • cd $HOME/eccs ; ./api.py

Search files created on the current date

  • cd $HOME/eccs
  • find . -name *$(date +%Y-%m-%d)*

Delete files created on the current date

  • cd $HOME/eccs
  • rm -rf html/$(date +%Y-%m-%d) output/eccs_$(date +%Y-%m-%d).log logs/*_$(date +%Y-%m-%d).log

Authors

Original Author