I need a way to have decentralized authentication for my microservices using blockchain or whatever technology which facilitates decentralized authentication but without having to pay any transaction fee when user does a transaction.
I will elaborate it more.
If we use OAuth2 we need to have a centralized authentication server which will behave as a single point of failure for the whole system. Yes I can definitely validate the JWT token inside the microservice by maintaining the signature within the microservice without having to hit the authentication server again. But every initial request should go through the authentication server. I need to avoid that and have a decentralized mechanism there in place but without any cost implication.
Blockchain proivdes this facility but with transaction costs called Gas.
I then came across Hyperledger Fabric which doesn't have any cost implication.
Is it possible to use Hyperledger Fabric to authenticate users?
I will give you a scenario.
Let's say I have microservices written . NET. Now I need to authenticate the users. If there is a centralized authentication server then I will have a database table to keep user detail/credentials and when user tries to access a microservice the request will initially go through authentication server and user will be validated and then issue a token if successfully validated.
Can this be done in Hyperledger Fabric without using that centralized authentication server and user detail database?
Or are there any other technologies which cater for the above mentioned purpose?
Rather than for a implementation this is mostly for my knowledge and to get doubts cleared. Thanks in advance.
There is existing emerSSL - decentralized authentication blockchain-based system. In addition, there is existing authorizer.io - public gateway between emerSSL and any OAuth2 web-site.
Of course, you can deploy and maintain your copy of authorizer, or just use emerSSL directly, as same as it used on Emercoin demo pool.
Emercoin core wallet already has built-in GUI submenu to maintain your own emerSSL certificate.
First I would ensure that Web3 / blockchain is the best option for the problem you are trying to solve. You can do that by asking yourself three questions.
Is an Immutable Ledger the Best Fit for Your Back-end?
Does Your Back-end Work Best as Decentralized Computing?
Do You Need Scalability or High Transaction Volumes?
If you answered yes to all of the above questions, you should look into web3.js as a possible solution.
If you need help answering those questions or if you are looking for specific use cases where web3 is the correct solution, you can learn more here.
Related
We have a self-developed proprietary user management and self-developed Single Sign-on. (OpenID Connect wasn't born at that time)
Our authentication server and our thick clients are in a private network, without internet access.
The task is to integrate a third-party thick client - its users should authenticate against our existing authentication server.
The general idea is to use an existing future-oriented framework which offers a standard authentication interface (like Keycloak?) and implement our own OpenID Connect authentication provider (or User storage SPI for keycloack).
Is the way with keycloack and User storage SPI recommendable or are there better approaches?
As you say, this is a good choice for meeting your immediate requirements:
External client uses a modern OpenID Connect flow - eg OIDC for desktop apps
It connects to an Authorization Server with support for standards based endpoints
Authorization Server has extensible support for data sources and can potentially reach out to your existing user data source
As an example, Curity, where I work, supports multiple data sources and there is a free community edition if useful.
Any provider that meets the same requirements would be fine though - and I've heard some good things about Keycloak.
LONGER TERM
It makes sense to then gradually update other apps to use modern OAuth and OIDC behaviour.
At a suitable point it is worth making the Authorization Server the only place from which Personally Identifiable user data is accessed, and moving the storage there. See this data privacy article for some advantages of this.
I can vouch for Keycloak User Storage SPI approach. Recently implemented this for a project and it is working pretty well. For any existing user-database I highly recommend it.
I found some example source on github that you could look at (although needed some modification to run it):
https://github.com/mfandre/KeycloakSPI
I have also written an article summarizing my findings working with Keycloak in case you're interested in other features:
https://dev.to/kayesislam/keycloak-as-oidc-provider-42ip
It's extremely customisable.
We're trying to figure out a best practice for IPC authentication and authorization. I'll explain.
We have a micro-services based architecture SaaS with a dedicated service for authentication. This service is responsible for doing the authentication and managing auth tokens (JWTs).
Everything works perfectly good with users that login and start to consume resources from the different services.
The question now is how to authentication and authorize requests which being initiated by other services (without the context of a specific user)?
Should we generate a dedicated user per service and treat it like
any other user in the system (with appropriate permissions)?
Should
we have a "hard coded"/dynamic token deployed among the services?
Any other ideas?
Our biggest concern is such tokens/passwords will be compromised at some point since requests from one service to another is treated with high level of permissions.
Cheers,
I'm not a microservices expert, just started to get my feet wet in the microservices world. From what I've read until now, this could be handled in many ways, one of which as you mentioned is hard coding api-keys so that services recognise one another. But I never liked this idea personally - also using a user per service like you mentioned. A solution I really liked is using Oauth2 for handling these scenarios - an interesting implementation I found is Gluu Server and I think client credentials grant type is what you're looking for - refer https://gluu.org/docs/integrate/oauth2grants/.
Have fun :)
Normally, API Gateway is integral part of any MS system.
All the services encapsulated and should be not accessible without API Gateway.
Such encapsulation allows direct communication between the services, without providing the requester payload, which should be required if the request comes straight from API Gateway.
In that case the request threated as something different, and follows different logic/middleware pipeline. No additional special users needed.
There is a lot of discussion about microservice architecture. What I am missing - or maybe what I did not yet understand is, how to solve the issue of security and user authentication?
For example: I develop a microservice which provides a Rest Service interface to a workflow engine. The engine is based on JEE and runs on application servers like GlassFish or Wildfly.
One of the core concepts of the workflow engine is, that each call is user centric. This means depending of the role and access level of the current user, the workflow engine produces individual results (e.g. a user-centric tasklist or processing an open task which depends on the users role in the process).
In my eyes, thus a service is not accessible from everywhere. For example if someone plans to implement a modern Ajax based JavaScript application which should use the workflow microservice there are two problems:
1) to avoid the cross-scripting problem from JavaScript/Ajax the JavaScript Web application needs to be deployed under the same domain as the microservice runs
2) if the microservice forces a user authentication (which is the case in my scenario) the application need to provide a transparent authentication mechanism.
The situation becomes more complex if the client need to access more than one user-centric microservices forcing user authentication.
I always end up with an architecture where all services and the client application running on the same application server under the same domain.
How can these problems be solved? What is the best practice for such an architecture?
Short answer: check OAUTH, and manage caches of credentials in each microservice that needs to access other microservices. By "manage" I mean, be careful with security. Specially, mind who can access those credentials and let the network topology be your friend. Create a DMZ layer and other internal layers reflecting the dependency graph of your microservices.
Long answer, keep reading. Your question is a good one because there is no simple silver bullet to do what you need although your problem is quite recurrent.
As with everything related with microservices that I saw so far, nothing is really new. Whenever you need to have a distributed system doing things on behalf of a certain user, you need distributed credentials to enable such solution. This is true since mainframe times. There is no way to violate that.
Auto SSH is, in a sense, such a thing. Perhaps it may sound like a glorified way to describe something simple, but in the end, it enables processes in one machine to use services in another machine.
In the Grid world, the Globus Toolkit, for instance, bases its distributed security using the following:
X.509 certificates;
MyProxy - manages a repository of credentials and helps you define a chain of certificate authorities up to finding the root one, which should be trusted by default;
An extension of OpenSSH, which is the de facto standard SSH implementation for Linux distributions.
OAUTH is perhaps what you need. It is a way provide authorization with extra restrictions. For instance, imagine that a certain user has read and write permission on a certain service. When you issue an OAUTH authorization you do not necessarily give full user powers to the third party. You may only give read access.
CORS, mentioned in another answer, is useful when the end client (typically a web browser) needs single-sign-on across web sites. But it seems that your problem is closer to a cluster in which you have many microservices that are managed by you. Nevertheless, you can take advantage of solutions developed by the Grid field to ensure security in a cluster distributed across sites (for high availability reasons, for instance).
Complete security is something unattainable. So all this is of no use if credentials are valid forever or if you do not take enough care to keep them secret to whatever received them. For such purpose, I would recommend partitioning your network using layers. Each layer with a different degree of secrecy and exposure to the outside world.
If you do not want the burden to have the required infrastructure to allow for OAUTH, you can either use basic HTTP or create your own tokens.
When using basic HTTP authentication, the client needs to send credentials on each request, therefore eliminating the need to keep session state on the server side for the purpose of authorization.
If you want to create your own mechanism, then change your login requests such that a token is returned as the response to a successful login. Subsequent requests having the same token will act as the basic HTTP authentication with the advantage that this takes place at the application level (in contrast with the framework or app server level in basic HTTP authentication).
Your question is about two independent issues.
Making your service accessible from another origin is easily solved by implementing CORS. For non-browser clients, cross-origin is not an issue at all.
The second problem about service authentication is typically solved using token based authentication.
Any caller of one of your microservices would get an access token from the authorization server or STS for that specific service.
Your client authenticates with the authorization server or STS either through an established session (cookies) or by sending a valid token along with the request.
I am working on a security component to use with an ESB for a client with very concrete high level requirements:
Integrate into an existing IWay service manager version 5.5 ESB (there is no security system in the existing set up).
Provide authentication and authorisation level information from source data stored in an existing active directory server used for another system (preferably using LDAP).
Authentication and authorisation should be performed in the ESB as the interface for the ESB will be exposed to both internal and external clients so total control over the client is not possible.
The client can not be relied up to have a certificate to allow bilateral SSL authentication, however unilateral authentication, where the client checks to see he is hitting the correct server is possible, so HTTPS connections can be established.
The service should sit on Weblogic (but I will be happy to take suggestions regardless)
Further information:
IWay ESB is a commercial, closed and fairly poor solution, in version 5.5 it provides no out of the box solution which fits the requirements. it is also stateless so no sessions can be maintained other than using a cookie or some method similar to store information.
Current ideas:
To implement a SSO service that is added to the messaging bus which provides a identity provider, service provider functionality, so an initial authentication will provide a token, which can then be stored by the client and passed with each subsequent request to be authenticated and an authorisation level passed (which i believe to be a fairly standard design pattern).
Research has been carried out on SSO + SAML implementation, openAM, Shibboleth, CAS all seem to provide a too complete solution which caters more for a portal type architecture (like CAS) or from a system where the initial SAML identity token is received from another sever altogether and then brought to the system (like googles implementation of SAML for some of its services).
I have also looked into JBossESB, openESB and service mix solutions which seem to use a bespoke implementation of SAML which can't be ported onto Weblogic and Zxid which has limited documentation.
It is a complex undertaking so I am expecting more high level architectural styles and library/project suggestions rather than complete solutions. I am under the impression that this should be a reasonably common requirement, a authentication and authorisation service for a ESB which uses a token system to prevent credentials having to be continually entered or stored in plain text but I am unable to find much information, what am I missing?
Any further questions I would be more than happy to elaborate.
It seems a solution using SAML is a valid solution for when users potentially/do require to access a third party service on an ESB but don't want the third party service to be aware of the security specifics of the ESB and the credentials information of the user. This way the ESB may provide a SAML token provider where the user can get the ticket and transport it to different services for authentication, the services then check back with the token for authentication and possible authorisation information (with SAML2 only). In addition to this SAML could be used like open ID where users are managed externally and users go to the external token provider to get SAML tickets.
This was a valid solution for us as the the client wanted to be very aware of the users accessing the ESB and there was to be no plan to access third party services as it was a completely closed system.
We subsequently implemented a more custom SAAS (security as a service) mechanism for internal authentication and authorisation inside the ESB (I know it sounds bad but with iWay there are limited options) using spring security libraries and the remember me functionality which in our case met the requirements.
Low and behold our clients then changed their requirements and asked for integration with share point. This did however simplify the security model in our system because we then designed of the following:
iWay's primary security model is based around SSL certificates, it is possible to implement an SSL Provider which will manage certificates, you should therefore be able to supply share point with your SSL certificate and iWay with the public certificate and secure up the channels between the 2 servers, you can then manage users within iWay who can access the ESB on a system level and specify a share point user even specifying it's ip, this information is sent in plain text but over SSL and in our case sent between servers in the same network.
We are then leaving it to share point to authenticate users on a finer level so access to applications is managed at the share point 'portal' level and the only thing the ESB is vaguely aware of is the authorisation information which is passed with the client SOAP message and defines to what level the services can be accessed (this information is used on a service level).
Downsides to this solution are:
For each new client application developed to access the ESB interfaces a new ESB user must be configured so it is not possible for clients to be developed which can freely consume certain services on the ESB.
New clients have to implement the authorisation logic so the correctly formated authorisation string can be sent and understood by services.
Other points:
I am aware that the newer version of iWay provides a LDAP adaptor which should be able to communicate with AD so you can have your LDAP server attached to the ESB through this way so it could possibly be consumed by another client or services in the ESB but you would have to customise share point to access the information through the iWay business provider.
I also believe iWay 6 provides a SAML token provider which you could utilize (going back to what I said previous about the use of SAML) but I don't believe this fits in with a share point solution.
I would like to share more ideas seen as we are both doing the same thing, can you find me through my twitter account which is specified in my blog?
We are currently working with iWay Server Manager 6.0.1 and are also having difficulties identifying HOW to handle security for web services within this tool.
We want to build web services with it that have AD security in them like if we were using .NET Web Services and haven't found a solution. Even discussing this with the iWay staff did not clear it in our minds.
Now we have to connect to SharePoint web services and the issue will definitely be there.
Have you progressed with your situation? We would like some feedback from people using the tool on how they actually implement security with iWay.
Sorry for the delay... been quite busy over here...
Basically we've done many tests between iWay and SharePoint and we are not able to set it up to sent the NTLM credentials required by SharePoint. We've tried setting up channels, proxies and various other solutions within the tool...
We've placed a call to them to hopefully get some help...
Pascal
I have a need to implement a STS-IP server for our web applications and services. The server will need to issue SAML tokens for the following scenarios:
Business partner submits their SAML token which is converted to a SAML token with the claims required for our applications. This token is used to access our Web Applications and Services.
Our public facing applications need to have a user sign in (via forms authentication) and then access our web applications and services with a SAML token.
Our clients (without a STS trust) needs to authenticate with our STS-IP server, get a SAML token, and use that token to access our WCF services.
In all 3 scenarios, we need to have custom claims on the SAML token that our applications and services use. The thought is once we identify the user, we would look up their authorization in our back-end systems and attach claims.
In these scenarios, you can assume the back-end authentication store is a custom implementation with authentication stored in Active Directory and authorization stored in a database.
So my thought has been, we need to create a custom STS-IP server using something like Windows Identity Framework. But I have also been reading that you should not do this because it can take some time.
Can I use an off-the-shelf STS-IP server? Everything I've seen is a mapping between one system to another (SAML to SAML or AD to SAML).
Why will it "take a long time" to build a production ready STS-IP ? I built one using WIF very easily, but I guess I don't understand the risks in doing this.
In terms of "It will take a long time", the documentation showing how to do this is very poor. See here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/Geneva/thread/257d93be-165e-45a6-a277-fc7ed2286e7d/
Anyhow, you'll simply need to look over the code samples that Microsoft provides: Google for Identity Developer Training Kit. That should help you get started.
Why are you not considering using ADFS? If the backing store for authentication is AD, then ADFS is probably a good candidate to evaluate.
Before writing you own STS, you may want to check out this blog and closely review the features that you may need in the STS. Just because you can build one yourself, doesn't always mean you should.
extending adfs to multiple identity and attribute stores
They "why not" is relatively simple: Why take weeks to build something that will probably only handle a single use-case when you can put in off-the-shelf STS in a day that will cover all sorts of things your company may come up with? Building it yourself will also require you to become an expert in SAML (which is probably not the best us of your company's time).
Check out --
http://www.pingidentity.com/our-solutions/pingfederate.cfm
Good luck -- Ian
Agree with #eugenio - why not use ADFS?
ADFS can only authenticate against AD as discussed but it can derive authorisation attributes from AD / LDAP / SQL server
The nuts and bolts for an STS are available in VS 2010 plus the identity tool kits. A simple STS can be quickly prototyped.
There are some examples available. StarterSTS is already mentioned plus SelfSTS.
The hard part is getting the security right especially if this will be part of a production system. As per "Steve on Security" Build your own Directory Federation Service:
It may sound like I think it’ll be a
synch to develop this system and have
it work securely, but in reality there
is a lot that will need to go into it
to protect the network, the employees,
and the data this could possibly
interact with. It is tough to develop
applications securely. It is far
harder to develop secure applications
whose sole responsibility is security
related.
That's the reason that all the samples on the Internet have disclaimers in bold:
Do not use in a Production environment