fusionauth-issues VS oauth2-proxy

Gotcha. We definitely don't have fine granularity around when MFA is required (open issue here: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/2285 ).

Other than that I'd suggest putting a page in front of our login pages with the domain logic, and modeling each set of emails as either an application, organization or tenant, depending on the specific features you need.

Either way, hope you find the right solution for your needs!

Great question. Appreciate the interest.

I can only speak from my perspective as an employee, not the whole company. It is something I've thought about. I will also ask the CEO/founder or other leaders to weigh in.

Many devs care about open source when they are evaluating a solution, but many really want "free as in beer". They want to try a product without getting out the credit card or engaging with sales. We cater to the latter category, which wants to understand the product quality without talking to any sales people.

Some of these folks use our community product for their production needs, which is perfectly fine. We have people running FusionAuth in production with 1000s of tenants or 10000+ applications. (I always say they "pay" us by filing bug reports, giving feedback and voting on feature requests.)

But some decide they want to pay us for hosting, support or advanced features. Those choices help us build a business.

Devs, and especially buyers, are interested in sustainability of a product they are going to integrate into their system. An auth provider isn't a javascript widget that you can easily drop in or remove from your system. It embeds in your system, even if you stick to a standard like OIDC, and is difficult to switch from, especially at scale. You want to be sure the company and product is going to stick around. (If you want to make sure you can run the product even if everyone at FusionAuth wins the lottery, we do offer source code escrow for a price, but haven't had anyone take us up on it.)

FusionAuth is a profitable company (we did recently raise a round to accelerate growth, you can read more about that here [0]). Open source companies often have a hard time meeting the profit goals of the market or investors. This is a known issue and often results in relicensing or changing the rules, as we've seen with Hashicorp[1] and Elastic[2]. This switcheroo can cause issues, confusion, and ill-will; FusionAuth's licensing avoids that.

FusionAuth also develops in the open[3]. This open development process gives us another common benefit people get from OSS--community feedback.

Also, I don't want to throw shade at Ory and Zitadel, since I have no idea about their finances (apart from a brief look at Crunchbase, which shows they've raised 22.5M[4] and 2.5M[5] respectively). I hope they're building sustainable businesses, but selling closed source software is a sure route to a profitable business that has built many big companies (including in the auth space, such as Okta or Auth0). Again, this is not FUD (or at least I don't intend it to be!), just an honest assessment at the difficulties of making money in open source dev tools [6].

We also compete on features, support and documentation. Again, I can't speak to Ory or Zitadel; they look nice, but I haven't built anything with them, so it is hard for me to know how good they are. I do know that we have had many clients appreciate of those aspects of our product.

To sum up:

* FusionAuth has a free option, which helps reduce friction and gives some of the benefits of OSS. The open process and escrow also give some of the benefits of OSS.

* Some devs and buyers care about business sustainability, especially when integrating a tool deeply into their application. FusionAuth will never have to worry about relicensing a version because AWS is eating our SaaS revenue stream, for example.

* We offer great support, documentation and intricate auth features at a reasonable price.

Hope this helps.

0: https://fusionauth.io/blog/fusionauth-and-updata

1: https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq

2: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing

3: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/

4: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ory/company_overview...

5: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zitadel

6: I wrote about this a few years ago on my personal blog: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3438

Disclosure, I work for FusionAuth.

> Multi-tenant (each of my customers gets a fully separate directory, with access to all tenants for our admins)

Yup.

> SAML and OAuth (customers can set up SAML themselves via the SaaS interface, or we set the SP up for them)

You'd have to build an interface using our APIs for this. Not available out of the box, but we do have it in the general roadmap (https://github.com/fusionauth/fusionauth-issues/issues/91 is the tracking issue).

> Rule based group assignment based on SAML attribute evaluation (e.g. assign users to this group if the attribute X = Y)

You could do this with Lambda HTTP Connect (a paid feature) or webhooks (a free feature. https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/lambdas/#using-lambda-htt... has more

> APIs to manage users, groups, organisations (tenants)

Yup.

My employer (FusionAuth) has the same feature in our community edition and it's quite popular: https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/passwordless/magic-links

It is glorious from the user perspective, but there are actually some subtleties from the implementation perspective that caused us some grief.

First of all, you have email configuration and deliverability. The answer is to outsource it to a provider like Sendgrid, SES, or Mailgun.

Then, there's anti phishing email software which can expire one time tokens as it probes to prevent phishing attacks. More on how we built around that here: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/629

> just invalidate them after use

I can't speak for Stytch, but I know at $CURJOB, we have run into issues with this where corporate phishing protection software invalidates one time use codes. I believe it does that because it retrieves links in emails before the user clicks on them. This was an issue several of our customers have raised. So it isn't as straightforward as you might think.

There's more details, including the workaround we ended up using, on the GH issue: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/629

PS I agree they should absolutely have guidance around link lifetime as well as safe defaults. Converting the links to one-time use seems like a good start.

Such a great idea! I filed a feature request on our GH issues list to implement this: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1888

Another issue that I don't see covered here is that some email clients (looking at you, Outlook) pre-fetch links to see if they are security risks. If you build a magic link system which handles plain old GETs, the one time code gets used up before the user can actually log in.

We ran into this at FusionAuth and had to do implement some workarounds, documented here: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/629#i...

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081192 mentions some other issues.

We do, extensively, both internally and externally. In fact, we don't have any other explicit way to order engineering work. (There's always the "inside the CTO's head" priority list, but we strive to get that into GH issues.)

https://github.com/fusionauth/fusionauth-issues/issues is our main external facing repo. We use it:

* to track issues. Every code change should tie back to an issue in this repo.

* to get feedback from the community. People can upvote issues that are important to them.

* to take input from the community. If someone wants a feature added or a bug fixed, we ask them to file an issue. This is a desired bit of friction (if you can't be bothered to file an issue, then you probably don't care that much).

* to expose the near term roadmap to customers and community members (we do this using milestones)

* to expose our decision making and prioritization process. We've had customers say they loved that about our product. The product is not open source, but the development process is as transparent as we can make it (see https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1577 for example).

It's great for all those things. On to your concerns:

* bug reporting: yes, but make sure you use templates

* sprint/epic management: okay for that. Not easy to tie bugs together in any structured way (we use a 'related bugs' section of the issue description, but that depends on frail humans to keep it up to date)

* release management (from development, to code review, to QE verification, to release): less familiar with this, I know there is a kanban view that we've used. Milestones are useful here.

* integration with non-engineering teams (ie, letting customer support/customer success tag issues that customers have brought up): as long as they are GH knowledgeable, it'll work.

From my limited jira experience, it's much more powerful when you have teams of teams and need reporting and customization. But for a team our size (<10 engineers), GH issues has been great.

This is our major need right now:

https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1393

Basically, providing a static IP to some EC2 instance traffic so that folks can add an IP to their firewall.

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