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Modify User Authentication

As part of the Open AMT Cloud Toolkit reference implementation, MPS and the Kong service issue and authenticate a JSON Web Token (JWT) for user authentication. The default configuration offers authentication functionality, but it does not support many common configuration options, such as user groups. In a production environment, alternative authentication is available in 0Auth 2, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Kerberos, and more.

The instructions below explain how to add an LDAP plugin to Kong.

User Authentication Flow

The following diagrams help illustrate the typical user authentication flow. Learn more about the authorize API call in the REST API Call Tutorial or directly in our API Documentation.

REST API User Authentication Flow

Figure 1: User Authentication Flow for REST APIs

To authenticate for REST APIs:

  1. Call the MPS REST API /api/v1/authorize to receive an authentication token from the User Auth Service.

  2. Perform other desired API calls (e.g. Power Actions, Hardware Info, etc) using the new auth token from Step 1.


Redirection (KVM/SOL) User Authentication Flow

Figure 1: User Authentication Flow for Redirection

To authenticate for Websocket connections:

  1. Call the MPS REST API /api/v1/authorize to receive an authentication token from the User Auth Service.

  2. Call the MPS REST API /api/v1/authorize/redirection/{guid} using the auth token from Step 1 to receive a short-lived token directly from MPS for redirection sessions.

  3. Pass the short-lived token from Step 2 and the device's GUID to the UI Toolkit module implementation to start a redirection (KVM/SOL) session.

Note - Additional Information

When using a 3rd party auth service (e.g. Cognito, LDAP, etc), the token issued by the auth service is used to make calls to the MPS. For non-HTTP calls like redirection, a call must be made to the /api/v1/authorize/redirection/{guid} API to get a separate MPS-specific token required to be passed into the KVM/SOL UI-Toolkit module.

API Gateways are only able to verify tokens on HTTP requests. Open AMT's redirection implementation uses WebSockets for KVM and SOL. Therefore, the API Gateway cannot verify tokens passed in over the WebSocket connections. Because of this, MPS must perform the verification of the token and it can only do that with tokens that it issues.


Prerequisites

Install and start a local LDAP server on the development system. For this tutorial, Go-lang LDAP Authentication* (GLAuth) is referenced. Find more info in the GLAuth Readme.

  1. To install, see steps 1 - 3 of the Quickstart section of the GLAuth Readme. We do not need to alter the sample-simple.cfg file.

  2. Allow the Terminal or Powershell to remain open to see LDAP activity as you proceed with the tutorial below.

  3. Optionally, download curl for testing the authentication with APIs at the end of this tutorial.

Edit the kong.yaml File

Reconfigure the Kong* API Gateway to use a different user authentication service:

  1. Open the kong.yaml file and comment out the plugins and consumer sections of the code by adding a # character at the beginning of each line. This disables the JWT authentication.

  2. Paste the new plugins section into the file.

  3. Modify the ldap_host to that of your development system or cloud instance. 

    plugins:
- name: cors
- name: ldap-auth
  route: mps-route
  config: 
    hide_credentials: true
    ldap_host: <Server IP-Address or FQDN> # Replace
    ldap_port: 3893
    start_tls: false
    ldaps: false
    base_dn: dc=glauth,dc=com
    verify_ldap_host: false
    attribute: cn
    cache_ttl: 60
    header_type: ldap
- name: ldap-auth
  route: rps-route
  config: 
    hide_credentials: true
    ldap_host: <Server IP-Address or FQDN> # Replace
    ldap_port: 3893
    start_tls: false
    ldaps: false
    base_dn: dc=glauth,dc=com
    verify_ldap_host: false
    attribute: cn
    cache_ttl: 60
    header_type: ldap

    Note

    The following code was adapted for the toolkit. For the default configuration details, see Enable the plugin on a route, on the tab Declarative YAML, in Kong documentation

Restart the Kong Gateway Container

  1. Open a Terminal or Powershell/Command Prompt and run the command to list the containers:
docker ps
  1. Restart the Kong container:
docker restart <container ID>

Test the Configuration

Authenticate a user to test the configuration by using an API of your choice. You will need to set the Authorization header to ldap base64encode(user:pass).

Test the configuration with curl:

In the following examples, we use the base64 encoding of johndoe:TestAppPw1 as our encoded user:pass. This value is am9obmRvZTpUZXN0QXBwUHcx. These credentials are one of the default credentials in the sample-simple.cfg file provided by GLAuth*.

curl --insecure https://[IP-Address or FQDN]/mps/api/v1/devices \
    -H "Authorization: ldap am9obmRvZTpUZXN0QXBwUHcx"
See Devices API Docs for more information and expected responses.

curl --insecure https://[IP-Address or FQDN]/rps/api/v1/admin/profiles \
    -H "Authorization: ldap am9obmRvZTpUZXN0QXBwUHcx"
See Get Profiles API Docs for more information and expected responses.

Other APIs to test can be found in the MPS API Documentation and RPS API Documentation.