If you have usernames containing (German) Umlauts in Confluence or Jira authenticated by Active Directory, the automatic Single Sign On with Kantega’s SSO plugin won’t work by default.

Manual login with username and password will work as expected.

Cause of Problem

The Java Kerberos Library does not allow non UTF-8 characters (= Windows coded Umlauts) by default. Windows uses non UTF-8 encoding for Umlauts in usernames. 😞

Solution

Non UTF-8 special characters must be enabled explicitly by adding the parameter “-Dsun.security.krb5.msinterop.kstring=true” to the (Tomcat) startup script.

Configuration Example

This applies to Atlassian’s server and data-center product family.

  1. Locate the startup script for your product.
    It’s usualy below the base directory in in/setenv.sh.
  2. Add a line like 
    CATALINA_OPTS="-Dsun.security.krb5.msinterop.kstring=true ${CATALINA_OPTS}"
    before export CATALINA_OPTS.
  3. And restart your Atlassian application.
  • Kantega vendor page in the Atlassian Marketplace
    Currently the plugin is available for …
    • Confluence
    • JIRA
    • Bitbucket
    • Bamboo
    • Crucible
  • Kantega Support FAQ for this plugins