Web Service authentication using CA siteminder in winform application

Question

I don't have much experience with CA sitemider so please bear with me, if I am asking silly question.

I am creating a excel add-in which uses win-forms for the interface. I have added a Web reference of a web-service which I need to call to perform operation. The web-service supports the SAML authentication . So my requirement is, I need to validation the user from the Active Directory using CA sitemider and get the token (like access token or auth token) and then pass it to the webservice.

I'm not sure how can I implement this? What should I do to get that token and also do I need to use the web browser control in winform to implement the siteminder authentication flow?

Answer 1

Check the System.IdentityModel namespace for this , you can implement via Windows Identity foundation. The namespace has validators for SAML1/2 tokens. To request a valid SAML token and pass it to your webservice you might need to configure an interface which can get you the token first. How Siteminder sends the token is same as other Identity providers, the user has to be a valid user of IDP (Siteminder in this case), once the request goes to Siteminder, it shows its login page and once user logs in the server returns a SAML token (try using 'SAML parser' extension of firefox to see how the token looks when its returned). You can extract the token in your interface after request is sent back to your end from Siteminder, then validate it (if needed) and send it to your webservice.