Hi experts.
In our Apache 2.4(+mod_perl) setups, we use the following kind of thing :
...
PerlAddAuthzProvider UMA-user AUTH::UMA2->authz_user
...
<Location "/esearchs/">
AuthName ALUtop
AuthType shibboleth
PerlSetVar UMA_AuthType "SAML2"
ShibRequestSetting requireSession 1
ShibRequestMapperAuthz Off
ShibUseHeaders On
ShibUseEnvironment Off
PerlSetVar UMA_Debug 3
<RequireAll>
Require UMA-user valid-user
Require shibboleth
</RequireAll>
...
</Location>
which basically means :
we combine 2 AAA methods :
- one is our own (AUTH::UMA2 above, mod_perl based)
- the other is SAML, via Shibboleth (and all the directives above with "shib" in them,
correspond to the Shibboleth installation instructions)
(The reason being : the corporate user authentication happens via SAML, but it does not
provide us enough information about the user. So we run another additional scheme, which
supplements the user information, in order to feed more complete data to our applications.)
Our own AAA method is such, that once the user has been authenticated once, we set a
token, such that for subsequent requests we do not need to re-authenticate the user.
But no matter what we do at that level, the Shibboleth authentication runs
anyway.(*)
And my question is : considering the above setup, would mod_perl provide a way, through
some mod_perl API, to disable the Shibboleth authentication (on a request-by-request
base), when our own authz module determines that we do not need it to run anymore for the
current request ?
(replace Shibboleth by any other authentication that would be configured in addition to
our own; I'm looking for some "generic" mechanism, not only for Shibboleth).
Or is it so that different authentication methods/modules don't insert themselves in any
standard way which can easily be interfaced with in order to dynamically disable them ?
Note: Shibboleth itself does caching of its prior authentication, and it is not really a
big performance hit to re-run it each time, and we can live with it as it is. But in the
absolute, it is unnecessary for 90% of the accesses to the applications, so it just sounds
like disabling it would be a nice/efficient thing to do.
I thought of dynamically removing the "Require shibboleth" e.g., but there does not seem
to be an API to do that.
