Open Source Digital Identity
The sky’s the limit with the Gluu Server, based on the world’s most
advanced authentication and authorization components.
The Gluu Server is a distribution of open source identity components, integrated together and delivered as a stable supported product. Use Gluu to build an innovative identity platform, the cornerstone of your digital transformation journey.
Why use the Gluu Server to secure your identity perimeter?
Scales to Billions
Need to handle many thousands of authentications per second? If so, it’s better to scale out (by adding more servers), not up (by adding more memory and compute). Gluu enables you to horizontally scale both the web and persistence resources as needed to meet any level of burstiness.
Cloud Native
Open Source
Enteprises are moving to open source infrastructure software for a reason: community-developed software results in more innovation and less bugs. Nothing builds trust like source code. At Gluu, we’re comitted to both leading and contributing to the open source projects which comprise our distribution.
Extreme Flexibility
The key to the Gluu Server’s success has been its ability to handle the most challenging requirements–quickly. Whether you need to connect legacy data sources, create special audit logs, implement advanced authentication workflows, interact with end users to get consent, add special data into OAuth access tokens, or a myriad of other special requirements–you can get it done with the Gluu Server. If you can describe it, you can do it with Gluu. The sky’s the limit.
Business Outcomes
Improved Cybersecurity Posture
Authentication is the front door to your digital enterprise. The best bang for your buck in security is to improve the lock on that door!
Using advanced adaptive authentication techniques, you can stop the hackers before they get in.
Digital Transformation
Digital Identity is the foundation on which all your services are built. It is imperative to identify not just people, but software that is acting on behalf of people and organizations.
Mastering digital identity is a requirement for building the next generation of e-services.
Get this right and your organization will be able to roll-out new services more quickly.
Improved User Experience
People have high expectations. We’re used to using advanced digital services from consumer giants like Google and apple.
We might still listen to music from the 90’s, but no one wants to go back to those old web experiences.
With Gluu, you can authenticate like a consumer giant without having to re-invent the wheel-with your branding, and in your language.
Open Web Standards
OpenID Connect
FIDO
Everyone knows passwords are not secure. FIDO offers an alternative to passwords–crytpographic authentication using hardware or software. FIDO is not limited to just Yubikeys. Laptops and smart phones are building FIDO into their hardware. Gluu has a full FIDO server stack.
User Managed Access
The UMA standard provides a way to interact with a person post-authentication. A common use case is to get consent. Other use cases arise around asynchronous interactions, like when two people need to sign a check, and maybe one is not online at the moment. Gluu has a complete UMA 2.0 stack.
SAML 2.0
SAML is used by lots of existing web applications and SaaS services. It’s old, but reliable. You won’t want to use SAML for mobile applications or SPA’s. But if you have an off-the-shelf application that supports SAML, it’s a reasonable way to integrate it. The Gluu Server maintains SSO across OpenID and SAML websites.
OAuth 2.0
Plain old OAuth should be your goto strategy to secure API’s. Developers know it, and there are many products and libraries that make it easier. Gluu supports both reference and value tokens (JWTs). And using the Gluu interception scripts, you can call API’s or add business logic to add extra information into access tokens.
SCIM
If you need to add user information into the Gluu Server, the best way to do so is to call the /Users endpoint using the SCIM protocol. To do so, you’ll need to present an authorized access token. Network protection is also recommend for the SCIM API. Using SCIM for integration protects you from needing to know database implementation details, like schema.
LDAP
The Gluu LDAP Server is our fork of the OpenDJ directory server. While we generally don’t recommend exposing the LDAP interface to the network, sometimes the Gluu LDAP server provides a convenient central publication point for user information. Using the Cache Refresh service, you can also synchronize data from other LDAP sources.
Radius
Gluu ships with a very small Radius Server. It’s not meant for high performance requirements. For scale and concurrency, we recommend the open source Radius server called Radiator. But if you just have some ad hoc unix logins, and you want to use Super Gluu for authentication, this little Radius server can get the job done for you!
Distributions
Virtual Machine
Gluu publishes linux packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Centos and RedHat. Customers with a VIP subscription can also use our Cluster Manager deployment tool to quickly setup a highly available cluster of Gluu Servers.
Cloud Native
Cloud native is the way to go if you have the skills. There are just so many advantages: auto-scaling, zero downtime updates, declaritive configuration, advanced tooling.
We love cloud native.
And we’re working hard to keep developing the tools you need to maintain the ease-of-use we’re famous for in the VM world.
Snap
Snaps are a new software distribution strategy. They are similar to mobile application packages-self contained to achieve security isolation (versus traditional unix packages).
Many linux distributions now have a Snap installer. It’s a great way to install and update software. We’re proud to offer the Gluu Server on the Snapcraft Store.
Use Cases
Single Sign-on
SSO is an important use case for employee productivity, and for customer-facing user experience. With Gluu, SSO is maintained simultaneously across OpenID and SAML websites. Gluu also provides some great strategies to manage the equally as important SLO: single logout.
Mobile Authentication
API Access Management
The Gluu Server is an OAuth Authorization Server (“AS”), one of the important components of any API access management infrastructure. The AS authenticates clients (like websites) and issues access tokens. Gluu supports both reference tokens and value tokens (i.e. JWT’s).
Two-factor Authentication
Gluu ships with out-of-the-box support for many 2FA mechanisms, like FIDO, OTP, SMS, smart card, Duo, and many more. The Gluu Platform also offers a unique self-service portal called Casa, which enables end users to manage their 2FA credentials, much like they would do at Google.
Customer Identity and Access
One of the key use cases for Gluu is CIAM. That’s because Gluu gives you incredible flexibility and control over the user experience and backend integration. If you have millions of customers (or citizens), Gluu is an excellent choice to serve as the central authentication service.
Identity Brokering
Sometimes your organization is not the source of identity–you may need to rely on a customer or partner’s identity provider. Gluu enables you to rely on a SAML, OpenID or social identity provider, and to map user claims for each to meet the needs of your business.
Why open source works for identity and access
Open source = freedom
Once you implement an access
management infrastructure, switching costs are high, and your organization’s bargaining leverage evaporates. Modern organizations are opting for freedom over lock-in.
Open source - innovation
A collaborative approach is more effective to address long term innovation-it’s more immune to the inherent ups and downs of the business corporate ownership
lifecycle.
Open source = trust
Hiding the code does not result in more secure code. Hackers don’t need the source code to hack your infrastructure. More eyes on the code leads to better code-fewer bugs per thousand lines of code. Transparency is a best practice.