Getting Started with SAML and PHP

Question

I'm beginning work on adding SAML SSO support to a project and am looking for any helpful resources specifically geared towards PHP. I understand the basic concepts and have poked around for any libraries that could help but have come up empty. The only thing I've found is simpleSAMLphp which appears to be an entire stack.

Any tips for integrating SAML into an existing project? Bonus points for Zend-Framework related suggestions!

Answer 1

I think that SimpleSAMLPHP is the way to go to make your application act as a full-fledged SAML 2.0 Service Provider. It's indeed a complete stack, but you can narrow down the functionalities to the bare minimum.

From my experience, configuration is a lot simpler than with Shibboleth. This step is simplified with the configuration website that ships with the distribution package.

The impact on each PHP page is relatively small: http://simplesamlphp.org/docs/1.8/simplesamlphp-sp#section_6

This is the solution we opted for on our Zend environment.

Answer 2

We used the PHP-SAML toolkit from OneLogin for a project that worked used non-transparant proxies (simpleSAMLphp didn't like not knowing the URL it was hosted on).

It is dead simple supporting the most basic login, but SAML 2.0 is a huge spec and it may not support what you want from it (for instance it doesn't support signing Authentication Requests).