django-cognito-saml

Library to implement django authentication using cognito (via pyjwt).

Assumptions made:

• Using authorization code flow. Implicit grant is insecure as the access token is transferred over in the request parameters without encryption.

Settings

The following settings should be set in your settings file against a COGNITO_CONFIG dictionary.

Installation

1. Add the above settings to your settings.

COGNITO_CONFIG = {
    "ENDPOINT": "",
    "CLIENT_ID": "",
    "CLIENT_SECRET": "",
    "JWKS_URI": "",
    "REDIRECT_URI": "",
    "RESPONSE_HOOK": ""
}

2. Define your authentication backend. Subclass off django_cognito_saml.backends.CognitoUserBackend.

   Define the username field of your user by customizing the authenticate method. If you wish to add additional fields to the user or modify the user's permissions, override the configure_user method. The configure_user method has access to self.cognito_jwt which contains the decoded jwt token with the cognito saml assertions.

   Set create_unknown_user = False if you want to disable automatic creation of users.

class CustomCognitoBackend(CognitoUserBackend):
    # Change this to False if you do not want to create a remote user.
    create_unknown_user = True

    def authenticate(  # type: ignore[override]
        self, request: HttpRequest, cognito_jwt: dict[str, Any], **kwargs: Any
    ) -> Optional[AbstractBaseUser]:
        # Customizing the username field used to create the user
        remote_user = cognito_jwt["username"]
        user = super().authenticate(request, remote_user=remote_user, **kwargs)
        return user

    def configure_user(  # type: ignore[override]
        self, request: HttpRequest, user: AbstractBaseUser, created: bool = True
    ) -> AbstractBaseUser:
        # Configuring the user post login
        if created:
            user.name = self.cognito_jwt["name"]
            user.save()
        return user

3. Add CustomCognitoBackend to your authentication backends.

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    ...
    "apps.backends.CustomCognitoBackend",
    ...
)

4. Add the cognito saml urls to your urls.py

urls = [
    ...
    path("/", include("django_cognito_saml.urls")),
]