1. Security Guide
  2. About User Authentication

About User Authentication

Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a user. Siebel Business Applications support multiple approaches for authenticating users. You choose either security adapter authentication or Web SSO authentication for your application users:

  • Security adapter authentication. Siebel Business Applications provide a security adapter framework to support several different user authentication scenarios:

    • Database authentication. Siebel Business Applications support authentication against the underlying database. In this architecture, the security adapter authenticates users against the Siebel database. Siebel Business Applications provide a database security adapter (it is configured as the default security adapter). For more information, see About Database Authentication and Implementing Database Authentication.

      Note: Database authentication is supported for development environments only, it is not supported for production environments.

    • Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication. Siebel Business Applications support authentication against LDAP-compliant directories or Microsoft Active Directories. In this architecture, the security adapter authenticates users against the directory. Siebel Business Applications provide the LDAP Security Adapter to authenticate against directory servers. For more information, see About Authentication for LDAP Security Adapter and Process of Implementing LDAP Security Adapter Authentication.

    • Custom. You can use a custom adapter you provide, and configure the Siebel Business Applications to use this adapter. For more information, see Security Adapter SDK.

  • Web Single Sign-On (Web SSO). This approach uses an external authentication service to authenticate users before they access the Siebel application. In this architecture, a security adapter does not authenticate the user. The security adapter simply looks up and retrieves a user’s Siebel user ID and database account from the directory based on the identity key that is accepted from the external authentication service. For more information, see Single Sign-On Authentication.

You can choose the approach for user authentication individually for each application in your environment, based on the specific application requirements. However, there are administrative benefits to using a consistent approach across all of your Siebel Business Applications, because a consistent approach lowers the overall complexity of the deployment.

Configuration parameter values determine how your authentication architecture components interact. For information about the purpose of configuration parameters, see Authentication Related Configuration Parameters For information about the seed data related to authentication, user registration, and user access that is installed with Siebel Business Applications, see Seed Data.