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General Information

Abstract​

The OpenCloud Auth Bearer service communicates with the configured OpenID Connect identity provider to authenticate requests. OpenID Connect is the default authentication mechanism for all clients: web, desktop and mobile. Basic auth is only used for testing and has to be explicity enabled.

Table of Contents​

The auth Service Family​

OpenCloud uses serveral authentication services for different use cases. All services that start with auth- are part of the authentication service family. Each member authenticates requests with different scopes. As of now, these services exist:

  • auth-app handles authentication of external 3rd party apps
  • auth-basic handles basic authentication
  • auth-bearer handles oidc authentication
  • auth-machine handles interservice authentication when a user is impersonated
  • auth-service handles interservice authentication when using service accounts

Built in OpenID Connect Identity Provider​

A default OpenCloud deployment will start a built in OpenID Connect identity provider but can be configured to use an external one as well.

Scalability​

There is no persistance or caching. The proxy caches verified auth bearer tokens. Requests will be forwarded to the identity provider. Therefore, multiple instances of the auth-bearer service can be started without further configuration. Currently, the auth registry used by the gateway can only use a single instance of the service. To use more than one auth provider per deployment you need to scale the gateway.

This will change when we use the service registry in more places and use micro clients to select an instance of a service.