JumpCloud invited us to a webinar ‘Set Up & Secure The Modern Office in 30 Minutes – Without Active Directory‘ (available to view on YouTube). One of the topics was how to secure web applications through Single Sign On (SSO). We wanted to bring two tools to our readers attention to make this process easier.

The first is ‘PuTTY Key Generator‘, a RSA and DSA key generation utility that can be used on your windows machine. There are more traditional ways to generate a private key and public certificate, but for the SSO beginner this is probably the easiest way to do this. When setting up the SSO connection between your Identity Provider (IDP) (ie. JumpCloud) and desired application(s) in most cases you will be asked to generate a Private Key (which you should not share with anyone except your Identity Provider (ie JumpCloud) and a Public Certificate that will need to be sent to both your IDP and specific application(s).

An image of the application is below and can be downloaded at: https://goo.gl/bJ59yQ

The second is an encryption tool that is used to encrypt and decrypt Text, URL and Email addresses. This is sometimes necessary when establishing an SSO connection. For example when connecting RingCentral to JumpCloud we are required to encrypt the email address. The tool is appropriately titled ‘URL Decoder/Encoder’ and can be found at: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder