Securing the Splunk Platform

About Single Sign-on using SAML

Splunk Enterprise lets you use SAML authentication for single sign-on (SSO). To enable SSO you use information provided by your IdP to configure Splunk Enterprise to work with SAML.

To enable single sign-on for a configuration you use information provided by your IdP (Splunk Enterprise supports Ping Identity's PingFederate product), to configure Splunk Enterprise to work with SAML through Splunk Web or by editing authentication.conf directly.

To configure SSO with SAML you must have the following:

• An identity provider (IdP). Currently, PingFederate is the only identity provider tested to work with SAML SSO. If you need help configuring your identity provider, refer to your identity provider's documentation or support resource.
• A configuration that uses an on-premises search head.
• An admin role with the change_authentication Splunk capability. This permissions level lets you enable SAML and edit authentication settings on a Splunk search head. (You must configure SSO for each search head in your configuration,)

To set it up:

1. Set up your IdP, or make sure you have access to your IdP configuration. You will need the information from the IDP to tell Splunk how to authenticate to it. The IdP must be configured to provide the attributes:

• role

• realName

• mail

2. Map the groups returned by the IdP to Splunk roles. Multiple groups can map to a single Splunk role.

3. Distribute the login URL to your users, IdP users assigned to roles will be able to login with SSO.

For more information:

• Configure SAML SSO in Splunk Web
• Configure SAML SSO in the configuration files