Secure SSO Solution for Emirates Transport

Overview

Established in 1981 by federal Law, Emirates Transport (ET) is the government owned public transport provider for governmental and educational sectors of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is the trade name for Emirates General Transport and Services Corporation. With a workforce of over 10,000 employees and headquarters in Dubai, it is responsible for transporting over a quarter of a million school children to school every day, as well as providing other luxury travel and taxi services to the Emirati population.

Managing such a large workforce necessitates keeping track of accounts, travel routes, transportation logistics, and other details. Due to these requirements, ET uses Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) for accounting and report generation purposes.

Requirement

Having approximately 1500 employees registered in Oracle EBS necessitates the maintenance of that many account credentials, passwords, and authentication IDs. Remembering and storing the authentication IDs to be used every time a user attempts to log into their dashboard can be a nuisance for the organization and its employees. This can also expose organizations to risk, as any theft of stored credentials can lead to phishing attacks, which can result in massive losses in terms of user privacy, financial and company resources, and more. This necessitated the use of a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution.


The Emirates Transport Oracle EBS instance, however, was integrated with multiple other applications that accessed the database to calculate metrics, prepare reports, and backup existing data. This meant that the authentication solution would have to ensure that only a fixed number of database connections were held at any given time for the purposes of Single Sign-On, because adding too many connections would reduce the underlying database's performance.

miniOrange Solution

User Authentication

Emirates Transport had its user information stored in an external SAML IdP. All of these users were authenticated against this external SAML IdP in order to single sign-on into Oracle EBS. The miniOrange SSO Connector for Oracle EBS acted as a broker for this authentication process, without the need for Oracle Internet Directory (OID) or Oracle Access Manager (OAM).

After these users were authenticated, their Oracle EBS login session was managed by their external Identity Provider, which was used to provide seamless login whenever the user attempted to log into other applications. miniOrange facilitated the merging of the Oracle EBS session and the external SAML IdP session.

Login Performance Improvement

miniOrange implemented Database connection pooling with a cap on the number of active/idle connections at any point of time. This meant that after a user authenticated themselves, the database connection was returned to the pool rather than being closed or left inactive. The connection could then be reused for subsequent users during the authentication process.

This ensured that the 1500+ users who used the solution on a daily basis could single sign-on into their accounts without interruptions.

Outcome

As a result of using the miniOrange On-Premise IdP solution, Emirates Transport has successfully eased access to their resources and secured their internal users.