react-native-auth0 VS oauth2-proxy

Welcome, fellow developers! Today I want to present you a step-by-step technique on how to test Auth0’s custom actions and databases in Javascript. For those of you who don’t know Auth0, it’s an identity management platform that you can connect to your existing or new applications, and configure it to easily provide authentication and authorization mechanisms. It’s one of the easiest solutions for IAM nowadays.

For example, you can rely on the powerful OAuth by Okta to handle your Auth services, Flutterwave payment gateway to accept payment, and Google Firebase Messaging to manage notifications.

For the third, examples here might be analytics plugins in specialized databases like Clickhouse, data-transformations in places like your ETL pipeline using Airflow or Fivetran, or special integrations in your authentication workflow with Auth0 hooks and rules.

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.

Ideally, I would recommend not handling and storing passwords yourself. It is preferable to use an identity provider (IdP), such as Azure AD B2C, Auth0, or FusionAuth. These systems are designed to manage your users' identity (including their passwords) so you don't have to. You could also use Single Sign-On with cloud providers.

Authentication, authorization, access control, and any other synonymous name you can think to call it, is not always a walk in the park. Through the evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW) and web applications, there have been various solutions to help make authentication a breeze. There have been, third-party services like Auth0 that you can easily integrate with your apps without having to worry much about authentication and doing it right, or worry about security because these third-party services cover all of that. There have also been standards, and specifications like OAuth and OpenID Connect (OIDC) which have evolved over the years. Some libraries and SDKs enable developers to easily integrate with these services, standards and specifications without worrying much about low-level implementation details. The only need-to-know is a subset of the SDK’s APIs needed to meet the application requirements. NextAuth.js is one of these libraries!

Auth0 is a cloud service that provides a turn-key solution for authentication, authorization and user management. It is a feature-rich service that is highly customizable and can be used in a variety of ways. Auth0 is a great choice for a wide range of applications, from simple web apps to enterprise applications. It provides a great way to add authentication and authorization to your application without having to build it yourself, and has various integrations with services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This along with its passwordless authentication and multi-factor authentication makes it a great choice for a wide range of applications.

When using Auth0 with Next.js, securing all routes except for specific ones, such as the homepage or login page, can be achieved without the need to add extra logic for each route in the middleware. This can be accomplished by using a simple yet powerful regular expression (regex).

Auth0 (provider) Auth0 has been around for some time and is probably the most popular authN provider out there. While authN is their main offering (they give you SDKs for authentication + they store user profiles and let you manage them through their SaaS), they also allow you to define authZ to some degree, via RBAC and policies.

#6 Auth0

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