telescope VS oauth2-proxy

It all starts with an old 400 error that was occurring in Telescope for a while now, first documented here.

Sattelite for the back end

There are a few places to start with this, one is that we have an issue in Telescope that relates to what I think is the session no longer existing in certain situations that results in a 400. This will give me an opportunity to take a look at Telescopes auth flow. I still am kind of unfamiliar with Telescope despite having been in the last OSD course. I know that we use passport SAML in Telescope however and in the new project we will use a different library called SAMLIFY.

The project is currently in the planning phase, and being part of the development team, I have been researching ways to add relevant bits of Satellite in the Remix Blues Stack project, we intend on using for Starchart.

As a good well-established project, Telescope provides a great environment setup guide, which covers most use cases.

It's been a year since I was supposed to work on Telescope for a class. When the war in Ukraine started in February 24th, 2022, I almost fully stopped contributing. Now, this year I am trying to do more, even though it's not my class anymore. Because I wish that I did more back then.

This week, I decided to setup Telescope locally. I had previously contributed to telescope and had set it up already. However, I faced some problems starting it up locally after a shutdown and startup sequence. This was hard to debug since there was no error message, just containers on docker would not start up even after waiting for several minutes. These problems would fix after a restart or just randomly after a few tries. So, I decided to go through the setup again.

Task This week, I try to revisit my setup for running the Telescope project, a single page website that aggregates blog posts.

This week, I finished implementing the feature for filtering out irrelevant feed URLs. Previously, I had added a function for the filtering but had to write the test for it.

The two PRs(1 2) mentioned last time were merged without a hitch. For the one that's about parsing Twitch channel feed URL, the maintainer and I agreed that there should be a follow-up issue opened to expand it to YouTube Channel(s). They also found another bug in the sign-up that should exist as its own issue about the RSS feed URL(s) having incorrect domain. For details about them, please see my last post.

Recently I looked into having a relatively simple SSO setup for my homelab. My main objective is that I could easily login with Google or GitHub auth. At my previous job I used both JetBrains Hub [1] and Keycloak but I found both of them a bit of a PITA to setup.

JetBrains Hub was really, really easy to get going. As was my previous experience with them. The only thing that annoyed me was the lack of a latest tag on their Docker registry. Don't get me wrong, pinned versions are great, but for my personal use I mostly just want to update all my Docker containers in one go.

On the other hand I found Keycloak very cumbersome to get going. It was pretty easy in dev mode, but I stumbled to get it going in production. AFAIK it had something to do with the wildcard Let's Encrypt cert that I tried to use. But after a couple of hours, I just gave up.

I finally went with Dex [2]. I had previously put it off because of the lack of documentation, but in the end it was extremely easy to setup. It just required some basic YAML, a SQLite database and a (sub)domain. I combined Dex with the excellent OAuth2 Proxy and a custom Nginx (Proxy Manager) template for an easy two line SSO configuration on all of my internal services.

In addition to this setup, I also added Cloudflare Access and WAF outside of my home to add some security. I only want to add some CrowdSec to get a little more insights.

1. https://www.jetbrains.com/hub/

2. https://dexidp.io/

3. https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy

3. https://github.com/alex3305/unraid-docker-templates

Authentication providers like Auth0 and Okta have become commonplace in software development. These providers help take this work off of your plate, and this can be made even easier by using a reverse proxy that provides authentication capabilities, like oauth2-proxy.

There's also other problems you might run into when using JWT: - First using scopes for permissions like Slack does can generate a token so large that a server might refuse it (One of many examples: https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy/issues/644, any rational server won't allow unlimited sized header), in my company they did this with the convention of read:team:product:resource but if you're an admin and have every rights by default, then you can't use the generated token by default as it will be too large. I think Quarkus works that way and you might encounter some problems with you don't configure it correctly. - Second is that it will cost a lot of bandwidth to send this header each time you're doing something, and probably won't be the perfect answer for what you want to do (do you really have third parties calling your API ?) - Third is about security concerns, you might say that having your permissions in a token is not as bad as you might think but in case of a Man In The Middle attack, you could leak information about your company, process or business intelligence that could have been prevented. - Fourth and that'll be the last, is that you can't revoke a JWT. And if you say you can, then you don't need a JWT at the first time because it would defeat the principle of a self contained JWT.

That is not how you do Zero Trust. You want to use an Identity Aware Proxy. There are lots of ways you can implement this with Google as your core auth. For example Pomerium or oauth2-proxy.

I use self-hosted Apache Guacamole (RDP) through a reverse proxy with Google SSO (oauth2-proxy[0]). So easy to access my desktop from virtually any browser (mobile isn't the best though). This would be a good solution for gaming, but for other activities RDP is unbeatable imo.

[0] https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy

Meet https://oauth2-proxy.github.io/oauth2-proxy/ It could be deployed in the cluster somewhere and reuse it where needed. We do this to authenticate prometheus,alertmanager ui for useres

At work, I've used oauth2-proxy as a sidecar container (on Kubernetes) for an app that has no authentication mechanism. Pretty straightforward, works well. I think this or Authelia is your best bet.

BTW also keycloak and other similar products offer the oauth-proxy capability, I even used the original oauth2-proxy https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy for a while, but it was getting too difficult to maintain for me. I used for a while https://github.com/thomseddon/traefik-forward-auth that was a smart hack configuring a single upstream provider, but it look abandoned. So I was considering authentik but apparently it's just oauth2-proxy embedded in it, at that point why not use oauth2-proxy directly.

Like auth basic? Mate, its 2023 get that RestAPI endpoint behind an OAuth proxy. github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy is a good one on a budget or use some cloud provider's ApiGateway and IAM services.

I use it in combination with oauth2-proxy, which sits in front of my network and the various services I host. https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy