SAML authentication with firebase

Question

Is there a way to authenticate a user with SAML token using firebase as a backend? The company I am working with requires that SAML is used within the authentication system and I am not sure if this is possible with firebase as a backend.

Thanks

Answer 1

Maybe new GCP service "Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners" (in beta for now) could help you.

Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners (CICP) provides an identity platform that allows users to authenticate to your applications and services, like multi-tenant SaaS applications, mobile/web apps, games, APIs and more. CICP is built on an enhanced Firebase Authentication infrastructure, so it's perfect if you're building a service on Firebase, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or on another platform, and need secure, easy-to-use authentication.

You can check SAML provider, Firebase is behind the scene.

This guide shows how to enable an existing web application for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, with Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners (CICP). This will include accepting SAML assertions from identity providers (IdP) as a SAML service provider, verifying their contents, and producing a lightweight JWT that you can use in your application to verify authentication and perform authorization.

Hope it will help.

Updated on February 25th, 2020 :

I published a tutorial on how to integrate SAML authentication with Firebase and Angular app.

Answer 2

You can now use SAML provider with the new Cloud Identity platform. This platform works in combination with Firebase too.

Check Thierry's answer for more details.

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Old/outdated answer below:

At the moment there is no built-in SAML provider for Firebase Authentication. See this discussion on the firebase-talk mailing list. From that post:

To support SAML authentication with Firebase Auth, you need to use custom authentication.

When the SAML response is posted to your server, your convert the SAML assertion to a custom token (minted via Firebase Admin SDK) and then pass that token to the client where you signInWithCustomToken. You can add any additional SAML claims to the custom token claims and they will propagate to the Firebase ID token JWT.

It's a valid feature request though, so I highly recommend to file a feature request.