DEV Community: Mark Smith

Security Operations Solution Packs

Mark Smith — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 01:38:21 +0000

Okta Workflows has just released a number of templates focused on Security Operations Centre (SOC) processes. These Workflow templates are designed to help solve specific identity-based automation challenges for the Security Operations team using a bundled collection of pre-built and fully customizable flows. The categories include: Some of the main benefits are: To find all … Continue reading Security Operations Solution Packs →

Setup Auth0 as an External IDP

Mark Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 02:12:39 +0000

If users are mastered in an Auth0 tenant and you would like to provide those users access to an Okta tenant, then this is how you can configure Auth0 as an external IDP using OIDC. Step 1 – Configure Auth0 Perform the following steps in your Auth0 tenant: Step 2 – Configure Okta Perform the … Continue reading Setup Auth0 as an External IDP →

Generate Auth0 Access Token via Okta Workflows

Mark Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 02:08:01 +0000

Okta Workflows makes it easy to automate identity processes at scale – without writing code. Using the if-this-then-that logic, Okta’s pre-built connector library and the ability to connect to any publicly available API, anyone can innovate with Okta.

The Customer Identity Cloud (aka Auth0 Identity Platform), a product unit within Okta, takes a modern approach to identity and enables organizations to provide secure access to any application, for any user. Auth0 is a highly customizable platform that is as simple as development teams want, and as flexible as they need. In todays product landscape, it’s becoming more common to see both Okta and Auth0 working together as there are many benefits in facilitating integration.

In this scenario, it’s likely that Okta Workflows will be calling the Auth0 Management API v2. The primary way that this API is called is by passing an Access Token in the Authorization header. This blog entry looks at how we can generate an Access Token via Okta Workflows using the client credential flow. The Client Credential flow is designed for Machine to Machine communication.

… Continue reading Generate Auth0 Access Token via Okta Workflows →

Auth0 Integration with Okta Workflows – Part Two

Mark Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 02:06:03 +0000

This blog post is part two in the series. The first post can be found here: Auth0 Integration with Okta Workflows – Part One For large organizations comprised of numerous independently managed business units, centralizing identity can be extremely challenging. Okta hub-spoke architecture model has been key in solving this issue for many organizations for … Continue reading Auth0 Integration with Okta Workflows – Part Two →

Okta Devices SDK Sample App

Mark Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 01:58:28 +0000

Powered by the Okta Devices Platform Service, the Okta Devices SDK and the Devices API offer a single integration to unify user identity and device identity, along with all of the tools necessary to build passwordless sign-in flows through branded push notifications and biometric capabilities. All of these powerful functionalities come together to deepen security … Continue reading Okta Devices SDK Sample App →

Inline Hooks with Okta Workflows

Mark Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 01:53:53 +0000

Now that Low Latency Flows are available, Inline Hooks can use Okta Workflows to implement the hook endpoint. The Low-latency feature ensures consistent execution times for your flows by running flows that meet a specific set of criteria separately from those that don’t. Okta routes low-latency flows to an optimized processing queue with minimal wait … Continue reading Inline Hooks with Okta Workflows →

Low Latency Flows

Mark Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 01:52:47 +0000

Okta Workflows doesn’t guarantee execution latency. Usually flows run very fast. However, Workflows is a multi-tenant system and doesn’t have a latency SLA. Flows execution times depend on: Because specific latency can’t be guaranteed, up until now, Workflows shouldn’t be used in any flows where execution time is critical to the scenario, such as token … Continue reading Low Latency Flows →

Okta Workflows Connector Builder

Mark Smith — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 06:51:45 +0000

Okta’s Workflows Connector Builder is a no-code development tool for creating connectors on the Workflows platform. It leverages the same Workflows functionality used by Okta customers to turn their use cases into automated pre-canned flows. Flogrammers (Workflow Programmers) can use Connector Builder to package their flows with authentication and branding to be used by customers in their own tenants, or submitted to the Okta Integration Network for inclusion in the public catalog for use by all Okta customers on the Workflows platform. For additional information on Okta Workflows, see the documentation here and for additional information on Connector Builder, see the documentation here.

This tutorial provides a walk though of how to use the Okta Workflows Connector Builder.

Sample Use Case

Okta provides a number of Workflow Connectors in the public facing catalogue. The list of available connectors can be found here. The Slack connector provides a number of actions that can be used to interact with your Slack workspace. On occasions, you may need to interact with Slack in a more user interactive way via modals. Modals are the Slack app equivalent of alert boxes, pop-ups, or dialog boxes. They capture and maintain focus within Slack until the user submits or dismisses the modal. Because modals require a Slack app definition, they fall outside of what the current Workflow connector provides. In this tutorial, we will create a custom connector that can be used to interact with Slack modals. For further information on Slack modals and creating a Slack application, see the Slack documentation here.

See the fill article here: okta-workflow-connector-builder

Manage Short Term Users with Okta Workflows

Mark Smith — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 05:38:48 +0000

Many organizations utilize short term as well as full time employees. Short term employees are sometimes known as contractors as they are usually contracted to perform a specific task over a specified time period. A contractor would usually have a contract expiry date. That is the date at which their current contract is due to expire. Certain people within the organization, like the contractors manager, will need to be notified ahead of the expiry date, so they can potentially renew the employees contract or plan for the employee to leave the organization. It also should be noted that often for legal reasons, an employee on a contract, can not be at the employers place of work, or perform any tasks for their employer, if they do not have a current active contract. I have seen situations in the past where an employees contract expired and they had to leave the worksite for a number of days until a new contract was put in place.

Okta Workflows is the perfect solution to this use case. In this tutorial we will use a pre-configured template to create a number of flows designed to demonstrate this use case.

See the fill article here: manage-short-term-users-with-okta-workflows

Event Hook Filtering and Okta Workflows

Mark Smith — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 03:54:00 +0000

Event Hooks are outbound calls from Okta, sent when specified events occur in your tenant. They take the form of HTTPS REST calls to a URL you specify, encapsulating information about the events in JSON objects in the request body. These calls from Okta are meant to be used as triggers for process flows within your own software systems. Okta defines the REST API contract for the requests that it will send. Event Hooks are Okta’s implementation of the industry concept of webhooks. Okta’s Event Hooks are related to, but different from Okta Inline Hooks. Event Hooks are meant to deliver information about events that occurred, not offer a way to affect execution of the underlying Okta process flow. Also, Event Hooks are asynchronous calls, meaning that the process flow that triggered the Event Hook continues without stopping or waiting for any response from your external service.

To handle Event Hook calls from Okta, you have two main options:

Implement a web service with an Internet-accessible endpoint. It’s your responsibility to develop the code and to arrange its hosting on a system external to Okta. See this blog post for a Java example of how to code a web service endpoint: Password Import Hook with Java Endpoint
Use Okta Workflows. Using workflows to handle these events is super easy as Okta provides an Out of the Box connector that will automatically receive each type of event. Your workflow can then be used to process the event as desired. Now that Event Hook Filters are available (currently in beta at the time of writing this post), we now have an alternative way to handle Okta Events in Workflows in a more performant way.

See the fill article here: event-hook-filtering-and-okta-workflows

Pagination with Okta Workflows

Mark Smith — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 02:09:29 +0000

When working with large result sets, its impractical to try and process them in one single block. Pagination turns big archives of data into smaller, more digestible pieces. Clicking through an archive of pictures, or turning the page of a book, are examples of pagination. How is this important in API structure?

When we use a GET API request to request information from a server via API endpoint, there could be thousands of entries in the returned JSON file. The API response sending us thousands of entries at once is a drain of resources and a waste of our time, both in sending the request as well as processing the results. We want to search through a database a little bit at a time, and paging helps us query databases efficiently. In Okta Workflows it also helps in processing the results faster as we can spin off a new instance of a Helper flow to process each page of results.

But how would you structure a flow to take advantage of pagination? This blog entry provides one way to do just that.

See the fill article here: pagination-with-okta-workflows