Basic Authentication

Emissary can authenticate incoming requests before routing them to a backing service. In this tutorial, we’ll configure Emissary to use an external third party authentication service. We’re assuming also that you are running the quote application in your cluster as described in the Emissary tutorial.

Before you get started

This tutorial assumes you have already followed the Emissary Installation guide. If you haven’t done that already, you should do so now.

Once complete, you’ll have a Kubernetes cluster running Emissary. Let’s walk through adding authentication to this setup.

1. Deploy the authentication service

Emissary delegates the actual authentication logic to a third party authentication service. We’ve written a simple authentication service that:

• listens for requests on port 3000;
• expects all URLs to begin with /extauth/;
• performs HTTP Basic Auth for all URLs starting with /backend/get-quote/ (other URLs are always permitted);
• accepts only user username, password password; and
• makes sure that the x-qotm-session header is present, generating a new one if needed.

Emissary routes all requests through the authentication service: it relies on the auth service to distinguish between requests that need authentication and those that do not. If Emissary cannot contact the auth service, it will return a 503 for the request; as such, it is very important to have the auth service running before configuring Emissary to use it.

Here’s the YAML we’ll start with:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: example-auth
spec:
  type: ClusterIP
  selector:
    app: example-auth
  ports:
  - port: 3000
    name: http-example-auth
    targetPort: http-api
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: example-auth
spec:
  replicas: 1
  strategy:
    type: RollingUpdate
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: example-auth
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: example-auth
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: example-auth
        image: docker.io/datawire/ambassador-auth-service:2.0.0
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        ports:
        - name: http-api
          containerPort: 3000
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: "0.1"
            memory: 100Mi

Note that the cluster does not yet contain any Emissary AuthService definition. This is intentional: we want the service running before we tell Emissary about it.

The YAML above is published at getambassador.io, so if you like, you can just do

kubectl apply -f https://app.getambassador.io/yaml/v2-docs/$ossVersion$/demo/demo-auth.yaml

to spin everything up. (Of course, you can also use a local file, if you prefer.)

Wait for the pod to be running before continuing. The output of kubectl get pods should look something like

$ kubectl get pods
NAME                            READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
example-auth-6c5855b98d-24clp   1/1       Running   0          4m

Note that the READY field says 1/1 which means the pod is up and running.

2. Configure Emissary authentication

Once the auth service is running, we need to tell Emissary about it. The easiest way to do that is point it to the example-auth service with the following:

---
apiVersion: getambassador.io/v3alpha1
kind: AuthService
metadata:
  name: authentication
spec:
  auth_service: "example-auth:3000"
  path_prefix: "/extauth"
  allowed_request_headers:
  - "x-qotm-session"
  allowed_authorization_headers:
  - "x-qotm-session"

This configuration tells Emissary about the auth service, notably that it needs the /extauth prefix, and that it’s OK for it to pass back the x-qotm-session header. Note that path_prefix and allowed_*_headers are optional.

If the auth service uses a framework like Gorilla Toolkit which enforces strict slashes as HTTP path separators, it is possible to end up with an infinite redirect where the auth service’s framework redirects any request with non-conformant slashing. This would arise if the above example had path_prefix: "/extauth/", the auth service would see a request for /extauth//backend/get-quote/ which would then be redirected to /extauth/backend/get-quote/ rather than actually be handled by the authentication handler. For this reason, remember that the full path of the incoming request including the leading slash, will be appended to path_prefix regardless of non-conformant slashing.

You can apply this file from getambassador.io with

kubectl apply -f https://app.getambassador.io/yaml/v2-docs/$ossVersion$/demo/demo-auth-enable.yaml

or, again, apply it from a local file if you prefer.

Note that the cluster does not yet contain any Emissary AuthService definition.

3. Test authentication

If we curl to a protected URL:

$ curl -Lv $AMBASSADORURL/backend/get-quote/

We get a 401 since we haven’t authenticated.

* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to 54.165.128.189 (54.165.128.189) port 32281 (#0)
> GET /backend/get-quote/ HTTP/1.1
> Host: 54.165.128.189:32281
> User-Agent: curl/7.63.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
< www-authenticate: Basic realm="Ambassador Realm"
< content-length: 0
< date: Thu, 23 May 2019 15:24:55 GMT
< server: envoy
<
* Connection #0 to host 54.165.128.189 left intact

If we authenticate to the service, we will get a quote successfully:

$ curl -Lv -u username:password $AMBASSADORURL/backend/get-quote/

* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to 54.165.128.189 (54.165.128.189) port 32281 (#0)
* Server auth using Basic with user 'username'
> GET /backend/get-quote/ HTTP/1.1
> Host: 54.165.128.189:32281
> Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=
> User-Agent: curl/7.63.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< content-type: application/json
< date: Thu, 23 May 2019 15:25:06 GMT
< content-length: 172
< x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 0
< server: envoy
<
{
    "server": "humble-blueberry-o2v493st",
    "quote": "Nihilism gambles with lives, happiness, and even destiny itself!",
    "time": "2019-05-23T15:25:06.544417902Z"
* Connection #0 to host 54.165.128.189 left intact
}

More

For more details about configuring authentication, see the External filter documentation.