Why should you use Atlassian Crowd and 2FA with SecSign?

With the ever growing threat of internet offenses it is important to secure every and all access points. Atlassian Crowd and the Two-Factor Authentication aid in locking down security vulnerabilities.

What is Atlassian Crowd?

Atlassian Crowd is a centrally managed user management system that offers convenient management of all users that can access a system. It offers support for existing user management systems like Active Directory to facilitate the extension of systems rather than building a new one.

What are the advantages of Atlassian Crowd compared to other LDAP systems?

Crowd acts as a connector between Atlassian web services with local user management services to built a central identity management system. Atlassian crowd is compatible with all other Atlassian products. It can easily be used as a user management system for JIRA and Confluence as well as BitBucket, FishEye, Crucible and Bamboo. It can also be integrated in existing systems like Active Directory or Sun Java System Directory Server to be managed via Crowd.

Single Sign on with Atlassian Crowd

Atlassian Crowd offers the Single Sign On (SSO) option for all Atlassian Products.If the login to one system was successful (for example JIRA), the user is automatically logged into all other Atlassian products, for example Crowd, Confluence and Bamboo.
Setting up a SSO is a simple procedure that is described in the Crowd setup tutorial.

Using Atlassian Crowd for separate applications

Crowd can not only be used for Atlassian products but also for managing separate applications. To integrate the user management function Crowd offers a REST-API. It offers all common options for a user management without requiring advanced knowledge. A setup tutorial for the interface as well as additional information are available on the Atlassian website. This allows for using other devices with Crowd, for example Typo3.

CrowdID as an OpenID server

Crowd also offers an OpenID provider to support user management for other services. If the required service supports OpenID the login can be managed with Crowd.

2FA and SSO with SecSign and Crowd

SecSign ID offers a plugin for Crowd to support Two-Factor Authentication for Crowd access, securing all other services as well.
It also supports the SecSign ID login via SSO. The user can simply login to Crowd with the SecSign ID secure Two-Factor Authentication and is automatically authenticated for all connected services (for example Bamboo, Confluence, Crucible, FishEye, BitBucket,…). The user only needs to authenticate once to access all services.

It is also possible to login to JIRA and Confluence with the SecSign ID and manage the IDs via Crowd. To do that one has to link JIRA/Confluence to Crowd (Tutorial for JIRA, Tutorial for Confluence). Then, the SecSign ID plugins have to be installed.

To enable to use of 2FA the option “synchronizeable IDs” has to be activated. If IDs have already been secured in Crowd please use the import and activate option.

If the option “synchronizeable IDs” has been activated the IDs can be managed via Crowd and can be used in JIRA or Confluence. They are automatically updated.

Then, SSO can be used and a login at JIRA or Confluence authenticates the user for other connected services as well.