SAML Authentication Failure in Sonarqube 2025.1 LTA Version

  • Versions(SonarQube Enterprise Edition - 2025.1 LTA)
  • SonarQube deployed: Helm
  • Trying to achieve : Enable SAML Authentication
  • Tried so far to achieve this : Configured Sonar Settings and enabled SAML settings

Hi All,

The New version of SonarQube v2025.1 is suppose to enable SAML based Authentication to users to access SonarQube Portal and its configured with mandatory settings suggested in Sonar documentation

https://docs.sonarsource.com/sonarqube-server/2025.1/instance-administration/authentication/saml/overview/
  1. After enabling SAML we are facing error as mentioned below.
    Note: Saml Sign requests is disabled. If this is enabled then only
    Private key and public cert need to be specified
    Error:
    Processing of request /saml/validation?CSRFToken=xxxxxxx failed
    java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Error while loading PKCS8
    private key, please check the format

  2. The sonar Setting “sonar.auth.saml.certificate.secured” is added with respective X.509 certificate to authenticate SAML already.

Questions:

  1. sonar.auth.saml.signature.enabled is set to false. Still why sonarqube is trying to search for Privatekey? As per documentation Privatekey will come into picture if above setting is set to True

  2. What is the format of certifcate should be configured for setting “sonar.auth.saml.certificate.secured” ?

    • Plain Text ?
    • Actual Certificate value ?
    • Certificate value in single line with —BEGIN CERTIFICATE-- & —END
      CERTIFICATE-- ?
    • Base64 Encoded Cert value?
    • Encrypted Certificate ?