The Shibboleth IdP V4 software has reached its End of Life and is no longer supported. This documentation is available for historical purposes only. See the IDP5 wiki space for current documentation on the supported version.
The authn/IPAddress login flow applies the user agent's address to a mapping of address range(s) to username(s) as a form of pseudo-authentication. This isn't the same as authorizing access to something by address, because a real user identity is produced as a result.
This flow is implemented as a "fall-through" so that under normal error conditions (no address available, no valid mapping), it passes control back to select another flow to run, so it can easily be combined with other methods. Of course, as shipped, the IdP will communicate that the form of authentication done was not based on a password.
Enabling Module (V4.1+)
For V4.1+, configuring and using this feature requires that you first enable the "idp.authn.IPAddress" module if it isn't already enabled. Systems upgraded from older releases generally come pre-enabled due to the prior state of the configuration tree.
Use conf/authn/ipaddress-authn-config.xml to configure this flow.
The shibboleth.authn.IPAddress.Mappings bean is the map between usernames and lists of CIDR address ranges. An IP CIDR Calculator may help in calculating the CIDR notation for an IP range. Note that en empty map, which is the default, essentially makes this flow non-operable in practice.
The following example maps only the IPv4 and IPv6 localhost addresses to the name "jdoe":
The shibboleth.authn.IPAddress.Transforms bean allows for address transformations before comparing them to the address ranges, essentially a kind of on-the-fly address translation. A transform is a Pair object containing a regular expression and a replacement expression.
Reference
The beans defined in authn/ipaddress-authn-config.xml follow:
SAML 1 does not define an AuthenticationMethod constant for this kind of authentication, so only a SAML 2 AuthnContextClassRef is applied. An "unspecified" method constant will be used with SAML 1 unless otherwise configured.
To replace the internally defined flow descriptor bean, the following XML is required:
In older versions and upgraded systems, this list is defined in conf/authn/general-authn.xml. In V4.1+, no default version of the list is provided and it may simply be placed in conf/global.xml if needed.