Implementing Splunk SSO with Google Apps

Trying to setup Splunk with Google Apps authentication?

1. You can download a reverse proxy module for Nginx released by Bit.ly's engineering team. It requires installing Go (apt-get install go). You can compile it by typing go build, and the binary should be built.  The download link is listed below:

https://github.com/bitly/google_auth_proxy

The instructions in the README walk you through what you need to do to setup with Google's API console. Since Google is phasing out OpenID support, using Google Oauth is now the expected way to authenticate.

To start running the proxy, you'll need the accepted Google Apps domain, the callback URL (should end with /oauth2/callback), client ID, and client secret from the Google API console.

./google_auth_proxy -cookie-domain=mydomain.com -cookie-secret=abcd -google-apps-domain=googleappsdomain.com -http-address=127.0.0.1:4180 -redirect-url=http://myhost.com/oauth2/callback -upstream=http://www.cnn.com --client-id=1234.apps.googleusercontent.com --client-secret=1234

2. Setup your Nginx configuration to reverse proxy to 4180:

server {
  listen 80;

  location / {
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:4180;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Scheme $scheme;
      proxy_connect_timeout 1;
      proxy_send_timeout 30;
      proxy_read_timeout 30;
  }
}

3. Next, you'll have to setup your configuration in etc/system/local/web.conf with this config. The goal is to use the email address used during login, which gets passed as X-Forwarded-Email, to Splunk. SSOMode set to strict will require all logins to depend on this header.  The tools.proxy.on seems to be used for older Apache reverse proxy setups, but doesn't need to be used for this setup.

SSOMode = strict
trustedIP = 127.0.0.1
remoteUser = X-Forwarded-Email
tools.proxy.on = False

4. Before you restart Splunk, make sure to create your usernames as the email address.  If you need to rename your existing ones, you'll need to edit the Splunk etc/passwd entries manually.

5. Once you restart, Splunk provides a /debug/sso endpoint, which lets you verify that the X-Forwarded-Email is being set correctly.   If you have any issues, turn off SSOMode = permissive until your are confident that the reverse proxy is setup correctly.